Seems appropos
One important lesson of the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust is that Nazis characterized their enemies as disgusting rather than scary.
Disgust is a different feeling than fear, and it leads to different responses. Hitler used imagery of infection and disease to describe not only problems in society but eventually groups as well. This talk of filth and infestation laid the emotional groundwork for the “purge” solution.
If we want to avoid another Holocaust, we need to be wary of analogies like rot, cancer, infection for describing people and points of view.
Curious if the word “deplorables” count.
I see such disgust coming from both major parties. Feels like either one can easily fall into this.
I don’t know honestly. Isn’t that one of the castes in India? No that’s “untouchables”.
Where is that word used?
It was used by Hilary Clinton to describe Trump supporters. A “basket of deplorables” I think was her term.
And then conservatives embraced the term and now proudly use it to describe themselves. They know they are toxic, oppressive and cruel and they celebrate it.
Hitler was big on fire too
Things that changed here in Germany (which I can think of off the top of my head):
- No presidential role. We don’t have a single person with that much power anymore. The most powerful is the chancellor now.
- No emergency laws. Many nations have laws that when something goes wrong, their president gets superpowers to do whatever they want. This is regularly abused, not just by Hitler. To my knowledge, we don’t currently have any such law.
- Secret voting. It is now illegal to make it public who you voted for. When Hitler rose to power, Nazis would sit in voting places and pressure people to vote for Hitler. And they would heckle people who didn’t want to show their ballot card.
Having said all that, it should also be said that we do still currently have a very real Nazi problem. It’s a few steps in the right direction, but no silver bullet.
The US has had “secret voting” laws for a while, and although it’s not illegal to say you voted for X, it is illegal for anyone to pressure you into voting a certain way.
The emergency laws seems like an interesting one because whatever its plausible justification, in practice, it seems like the only downside it would curb would be moreso any governmental liabillity for lawsuits and judicial review.
If the government wants to do something, it will do it and the courts will maybe take it up later. Any measure they say the needed to do they would probably just do anyway regardless of the true necessity or for whom it was evaluated in that light, the only benefit to an emergency law in that context seems to be dissolution of regular liabillity and having a talking point about being justified after the fact.
Seems like it incentivizes an opening for bad behavior
Create a state that cared for and protected the majority, things like insured retirement, paid vacations, universal health insurance, In Europe we have all that, in the USA it was thought that they were rich enough not to need it and it may have been like that for decades, but it seems that not anymore.
If the system takes care of you, you are not going to sign up to destroy it, If the system doesn’t give you anything, you won’t care if it is destroyed or you will even sign up to do it.
The Nazis are only the yardstick of evil by convention. Their crimes exist in an enormous set of savage acts including genocides and invasions that suffuses history.
The lesson “of the Nazis” needs to be that the Nazis are not unique in history, nor are they the only sort of people who commit such acts.
Just replying to my own shit to add here:
I think the Nazis were the first instance of this kind of behavior that got caught on video. Just like the Vietnam war was the first war US citizenry saw on TV, I think the Third Reich and whatever the term is for the whole campaign of land grab invasions, and the Holocaust, is a pattern that’s been going on for thousands of years, and it’s the first time the whole world was witness to it.
For the majority of history a king or emperor or whoever could march out armies, destroy, use a ton of his own internal political enemies as slaves and work them to death, then just murder the rest of them … and cover it up almost effortlessly by telling the town criers to announce whatever horseshit they want the farmers to believe.
We know historically this happens. But the Holocaust is the first of the pogroms that everybody around the world saw, and in the greater set of genocides. It was the first time (I think?) that absolute mass atrocity on civilians was televised.
But it’s not a unique event is the key thing. It’s the most well-known example of the eruption of evil into the world, but it’s a recurring part of humanity to do this kind of thing.
moderates need to stop only punching left.
hitler got into power because their moderates refused to appeal to their leftist voters and supported facism and so hitler’s side won the election and, later, the country after they disenfranchised the moderates and executed the leftists; right now it’s looking like americans are going to follow suit.
Idk I feel like moderates punch both left and right lol. The extremists on both sides are annoying.
If you’re talking about the US, they certainly aren’t punching hard enough then. Trump is an extremist and basically leading right wing politics.
i can only speak for the western world since that’s what i learned about as an american and there’s a recorded history of punching left significantly harder than punching right.
Democracy dies with half the country cheering
It’s already too late, America. Even if he loses the election, he’s already rigged the supreme Court.
That the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
Every single one of them should have been executed. Might not have prevented the return entirely, but it would have made it harder, and perhaps made the newer ones less certain of their reception.
Unchecked conservatism naturally develops into fascism. Genocidal oppression is the natural tendency of conservatives. It always has been.
I don’t know that authoritarian/fascist regimes can be stopped once they’re in motion. They seem to be more the default rather than stable democracies. Even countries that you’d think would have sufficient legal barriers and processes for citizens to keep political extremists out of office seem to be failing and moving to the right.
I’d warn against the idea that Hitler was somehow indispensable to the movement.
I think MAGA is instructive here. Do you think Trump is an evil genus, or just a lucky blow-hard carried by the worst impulses of the right? Fascism is popular, and we need to stop acquitting the societies that nurture it.
To answer your question, I’d ignore the fascist leader and the rabid followers. I’d find a scheme to impose social and financial costs on those who don’t support fascism, but are wiling to tolerate it for their own interests.
It’s always a good day to punch a Nazi
Well dont have Great Depressions is a major one.
Imo, a big part of what I am seeing now stems from a lack of proper history and or civics education. I went to school in Texas, my whole education up to college we were taught that the U.S. was this beacon of good and positive things, there was an intentional effort to misrepresent Texas and U.S. history in a way that minimized slavery, racisim, and the genocide of the native population of the U.S. In short, it was a bullshit whitewashed fantasy novel. We should be saying:
“The United States did some really horrifying shit in the distant past, the recent past, and is still doing it today, those are the facts. We should try to do better than we are doing, and part of that is recognizing where we as a country came from, good and bad, so we can do better. You students are not bad people by default for living or being born here but you need to realize that fetishizing this country as the greatest country in the world and intrinsically linking YOUR identity to that of a false vision of a flawed nation, is hugely problimatic, especially when you base that identiy on the ideals of manifest destiny or other weird and/or rascist ideals.”
When you separate the current individual from the history, and say this was/is the U.S. but it doesn’t have to be YOU or the U.S. of the future, people are more receptive of hearing the bad. That is not to say we should minimize the awful things in our past and current, just that if a young kid is shamed, intentionally or unintentionally, they are more likely to fall into fringe and radical ideas and seek validation for them.
That doesn’t help the brainwashed/backwards people who want to revert the country to the good ole days though.
The other thing that was really fundamental for me from good history teachers and professors was the way that they linked historical events with current events. That has been explicitly outlawed in Florida iirc and likely Texas too, this state does so much backwards shit though, I can’t keep up with all of it.
We probably also need to remind people that facts don’t care about their feelings, there isn’t a such thing as alternative history, and that’s just the end of it, there is no room for denying the horrors of slavery, the Holocaust, or any of the other numerous fucked up things in history. They happened, we have to remember that to prevent it from happening again.
