I wish teachers went this hard today. In Germany, the Nazi regime is covered extensively in school and definitely not shown in a good light, but evidently Germany didn’t learn its lesson as well as it should have, especially in the “this couldn’t happen today” and “I’m not a nazi, I’m just really fucking racist and authoritarian and that’s fine” ways. Though I guess you probably can’t school your way out of relentless far-right propaganda.
Germany was never denazified so there were always nazis in politics, army, police, secret agencies and all other parts of government which heavily influenced their way of thinking and decision making in the crucial early parts of democractic development. The Bundeswehr with their old Wehrmacht officers even had plans to coup the government straight after its founding.
Britain, France and US quickly realised that if they locked up the guilty, there would be no-one left to use as cannon fodder if the Soviets got frisky.
It was more “we won’t have anyone to run the arms of government/teach/administer various agencies, and we don’t want to import talent from our nations to fill the gap while we find and train people as administrators etc”.
They should have just dissolved Germany. A country that started one world war, was mainly responsible for another one to start and also committed two genocides has no right to exist.
Looking at the response to the gaza invasion, it seems rather than learning to recognize fascism, people learned only to recognize the specific ww2 era german version of it and use that as criteria to recognize fascism as a whole.
You agree hitler was a piece of shit, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel should exist, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel’s actions are horrific, you must be a nazi. Etc.
Don’t forget the indignity about comparing anything to the Nazi era! We’re basically taught to put the Nazis on this pedestral of evil, and anytime someone recognizes that some current-day far righter is doing something that’s just like the Nazis, some influential asshole comes out and complains that no one did evil better than the Nazis did and how DARE you even compare anything to it! It’s not like we’re supposed to learn from history or anything like that.
I’ve long said that the German response has been not that fascism is bad from the root to the fruit, but that Jews are good and maybe queer people as well.
Germans (and other Europeans) have displayed some appalling levels of racism towards Roma and Turkish people just casually. They sound just like elderly white people in the American south when talking about these groups. Many still also believe that Germany is for Germans.
To inocculate people against fascism you have to teach them about the disparate ideologies and the long running ideological undercurrents that coalesced into the NSDAP regime. Like, Germans and Americans alike largely just see it as big totalitarian antisemitism that wants to kill everyone. But otherwise reasonable people weren’t attracted to it for that, they were pulled into things like the volkish movement (similar to modern homesteading movement) out of a fear of the costs of modernity, or they had concerns about changing morals and mores with regards to gender and sexuality (similar to the modern anti feminist and transphobia communities), or they got into conspiracism after unexpected and uncomfortable world events like the Soviet revolution, the 1918 flu, and the shattering of the German front in the first world war, all of which led to blaming others. Hell even “tough on crime”, anti drug, and health concern attitudes were some people’s inroads.
We see so much of this again today because we’ve created an image of 1930s fascist Germany and for many people their interpretation of that image has become the whole of the real thing in their eyes. They don’t understand that these ideas can be tempting and that a Jewish nation is capable of fascism because they think fascism requires hating Jewish people rather than just that diasporic people with a different religion and a history of persecution are really easy targets for it
I wish teachers went this hard today. In Germany, the Nazi regime is covered extensively in school and definitely not shown in a good light, but evidently Germany didn’t learn its lesson as well as it should have, especially in the “this couldn’t happen today” and “I’m not a nazi, I’m just really fucking racist and authoritarian and that’s fine” ways. Though I guess you probably can’t school your way out of relentless far-right propaganda.
Germany was never denazified so there were always nazis in politics, army, police, secret agencies and all other parts of government which heavily influenced their way of thinking and decision making in the crucial early parts of democractic development. The Bundeswehr with their old Wehrmacht officers even had plans to coup the government straight after its founding.
Britain, France and US quickly realised that if they locked up the guilty, there would be no-one left to use as cannon fodder if the Soviets got frisky.
It was more “we won’t have anyone to run the arms of government/teach/administer various agencies, and we don’t want to import talent from our nations to fill the gap while we find and train people as administrators etc”.
But… we do need more builders, so let’s get a bunch of Turks to come do it
You’re not wrong. Many German generals were retained to advise NATO during the 1950s and 1960s because of their experience with the Soviets.
They should have just dissolved Germany. A country that started one world war, was mainly responsible for another one to start and also committed two genocides has no right to exist.
Splitting Germany up doesn’t solve the lack of denazification. And it’s not like Germany is any worse than most other european countries nowadays.
With a past like that, that’s not enough.
Sure. How would splitting up Germany have changed the outcome?
There wouldn’t have been a government, police and army full of old nazis which is already enough.
If you split the same population into more countries, you get more desperate for staff, not less.
Yeah there’d be like 8, one of which was a major European power before Germany was founded.
I mean, they did that too.
Looking at the response to the gaza invasion, it seems rather than learning to recognize fascism, people learned only to recognize the specific ww2 era german version of it and use that as criteria to recognize fascism as a whole.
You agree hitler was a piece of shit, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel should exist, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel’s actions are horrific, you must be a nazi. Etc.
Don’t forget the indignity about comparing anything to the Nazi era! We’re basically taught to put the Nazis on this pedestral of evil, and anytime someone recognizes that some current-day far righter is doing something that’s just like the Nazis, some influential asshole comes out and complains that no one did evil better than the Nazis did and how DARE you even compare anything to it! It’s not like we’re supposed to learn from history or anything like that.
I’ve long said that the German response has been not that fascism is bad from the root to the fruit, but that Jews are good and maybe queer people as well.
Germans (and other Europeans) have displayed some appalling levels of racism towards Roma and Turkish people just casually. They sound just like elderly white people in the American south when talking about these groups. Many still also believe that Germany is for Germans.
To inocculate people against fascism you have to teach them about the disparate ideologies and the long running ideological undercurrents that coalesced into the NSDAP regime. Like, Germans and Americans alike largely just see it as big totalitarian antisemitism that wants to kill everyone. But otherwise reasonable people weren’t attracted to it for that, they were pulled into things like the volkish movement (similar to modern homesteading movement) out of a fear of the costs of modernity, or they had concerns about changing morals and mores with regards to gender and sexuality (similar to the modern anti feminist and transphobia communities), or they got into conspiracism after unexpected and uncomfortable world events like the Soviet revolution, the 1918 flu, and the shattering of the German front in the first world war, all of which led to blaming others. Hell even “tough on crime”, anti drug, and health concern attitudes were some people’s inroads.
We see so much of this again today because we’ve created an image of 1930s fascist Germany and for many people their interpretation of that image has become the whole of the real thing in their eyes. They don’t understand that these ideas can be tempting and that a Jewish nation is capable of fascism because they think fascism requires hating Jewish people rather than just that diasporic people with a different religion and a history of persecution are really easy targets for it