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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.