this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One other problem is how history is taught.

At one point, fascism was taught as "evil people marching with evil symbols, to do evil things, for the sake of evil". Essentially the nazis were reduced to Saturday morning cartoon villains, erasing the memories of how they manipulated the minds of the common people.

This gives an opportunity for modern nazis. And since most people don't know what kind of manipulation tactics they use, they can still use the same ones in new costume (see "great replacement", the "groomer" panic, etc.).

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At one point, fascism was taught as “evil people marching with evil symbols, to do evil things, for the sake of evil”. Essentially the nazis were reduced to Saturday morning cartoon villains, erasing the memories of how they manipulated the minds of the common people.

That really wasn't my experience when I went to school in Germany. Nazi Germany was a major topic for many years and across different subjects and included a visit to a former concentration camp. At some point it got a little tiring but it was definitely not simplified in any way.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Same in Czechia. Though I guess we were taught from a slightly different angle than you guys.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Maybe it was better taught in Germany, but in the UK I don't recall any discussion of how Nazis were ordinary people, both educated and uneducated, rich and poor, people like ourselves. Perhaps that was obvious to the generations that lived through the war, but for later generations, and especially since the people who were adults during the war have died off, it needs emphasizing. I think for a few decades younger people were able to think of fascism as a strange, historically specific aberration from the norm of liberal democracy, something relegated to the past, and to think of Nazis as almost a different species. To see fascism resurging all around the world in recent years has come as a surprise, even though neoliberal governments have spent decades creating the conditions that produce it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is absolutely not how it is taught in Germany. If anything, our education concerning the WW2 era is what is making germany lag so far behind the other EU states when it comes to far right votes.

We are taught at length the underlying issues that were plaguing germany after WW1; social, economical, political, and how all of them contributed together to the rise of the third reich.

That’s why Germans are also very very wary when we spot developments in our country (or other countries, for that matter) that mirror the conditions in that time.