After Trump, boys at her daughter's school Nazi-salute in the hall. Here's how a mom responded

Or a watching of Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog.

Or even Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, but that one is a bit long (over nine hours).

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After Trump, boys at her daughter’s school Nazi-salute in the hall. Here’s how a mom responded

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No, not really. You’re saying that the Nazi party and the government that they put into place actually was based on Marxist principles?

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It wasn’t because it was focused upon militarism, the authoritarian state, and a mixed economy. Fascists disliked Marxism and liberalism.

You really need to read more.

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My father also served in WWII. He actually liberated one of the death camps. He was an avid amateur photographer and as a kid I saw albums of death camp photos. My father was unable to communicate any information about the camps other than that the photos represented where the ovens were. He simply was not able to say anything other than that. He also brought home many souvenirs of Nazi Germany. One of the trinkets was a Nazi flag.

He had a trunk full of his WWII items. He never opened it. I would sort through it though. It was a lot of confusion for me when I was young, but those photo albums fascinated/horrified me.

I had a friend. His father had served in the Korean War. WWII entranced him. If we played with toy soldiers, he always took the German soldiers (there were plenty of Nazi toys available, including German WWII G.I. Joes). He liked to draw swastikas on books and in notebooks.

When I showed him the trunk, he was ecstatic. He had to have the Nazi flag. I gave it to him. My father never knew, as he never looked into his trunk of nightmare memories. It didn’t mean much to me that he had to have the flag. I wasn’t interested in it. What I did know of WWII and those photo albums made me feel ill and dizzy. My friend remained passionate and obsessed about Nazi memorabilia and WWII fiction well into his late 30’s.

We are now in our early fifties. He grew up to be a truck mechanic. He never pursued any sort of Fascist ideology. In fact, If I related any of this to him, He probably would only recall it as a vague memory.

Kids fixate on all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. In Nazi Germany, there was a complete social/politcal structure in place to entrench the “norms” of Fascism. In the current U.S.A., I find it impossible to believe that the majority of the population would ever tolerate this. There is a noisy minority, but they seem to be shouted down pretty damn well, and I bet the future will find them slinking back into their holes. We are truly not a Fascist nation.

That said, kids Nazi saluting and thrilled by Hitler’s Germany seemed to be a phase when I was a kid. None of them ever sought it out as adults.

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I am so tired of this being brought up.

I grew up mainly in the 70’s. This sort of statement would never have been ignored.

We learned about National Socialism. It had nothing to do with anything other than right-wing extremism. Hitler’s Nazi regime was aligned with Big…BIG. business, was pro-military and pro-empire. The Nazi ideal was extremely anti-liberal. They openly fought socialists and communists in the streets in the 20’s, and they looked at mainstream liberals as disgustingly weak. There was also the scapegoating the Jews thing (as I’m sure you know, 6+million dead), and the gays, and certain liberal Catholics, and just about any other fringe group.

They had ZERO tolerance for anything other than hard right/militaristic/corporatist policy, and any other interpretation is a pure lie.

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I didn’t win all of them, but every once in a while it worked out for me.

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WWII had such an impact on society it’ll be awhile until it gets balanced out in society

It created such a disconnect with the veteran parents & their kids that Beatlemania only helped to contribute to the disconnection, and the newly gain Superpower status sent the US to Vietnam and further split society into the well now defined con-lib camps, and now this trump character is almost as if he’s bringing this Frankenstein monster back from the early 20th century back along with the rest of the bad qualities of nativism (which makes no sense on a blood line bases)

It’ll take another century i believe before society has been quelled, but that’s just me being optimistic

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No, no no!! This is precisely the sort of valueless, free-floating pseudo-tolerance that has been justly pilloried by the thugs as “Politically Correct”.

Hate speech, bullying, intimidation are not using language as reasoned debate. Even passionate discourse can lead to a better understanding of just society.

Burning a cross on my front yard – or on your own – is not the exercise of Free Speech. It is the limited use of violence to demonstrate willingness to employ far worse, usually against an individual or group perecived to be a threat to thug supremacy.

Usually the perps act without fear of reprisal. I can articulate a few reasons for this. Strict social hierarchies can lend advantage to an ass-kisser who knows how to interact with superiors. Or during chaotic, less-structured times of social disruption, appeal to tribal identity can be used to manufacture solidarity by inventing a terrifying enemy. Or a debased, evil enemy. I’m sure that bullies have other means, that social polities have other failure modes. Those are just a couple of ways.

Any speech that frames another human being as less than human is dangerous. Is violence. Is not to be “tolerated” by some vacuous appeal to freedom. My inalienable righs as a human being do not grant me the freedom to strip you of your own.

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Hate’s not all right.

No one needs the alt-right.

No slight.

We’ll be alright.

You’re Night

We’re light!

Hate speech never should be protected.

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The trouble is that “hate speech” doesn’t mean precisely what it says on the tin, and most people aren’t aware of that. You are allowed to say “I hate Jews,” but if you say it while beating a Jew it’s an enhancement to the assault & battery charges. Similarly, if you write it on a postcard and pin it to a synagogue door, it becomes assault (and possibly terroristic) because of the implicit threat of violence. Context is crucial.

Hate speech does not mean simply voicing “un-PC” opinions, but that’s how it’s framed by absolutists and bigots trying to hide behind the First Amendment.

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You’re confusing National Socialism (a right wing doctrine based on race) with Socialism (a left wing doctrine based on class). You should probably do a little more reading around the subject to clear up any confusion you might have.

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I dunno’, wet Nazis, dry Nazis, what’s the difference?

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Worse than I could ever have imagined.

Sorry, very off topic. The current administration is so crushingly, depressingly bad.
With Breitbart, Alex Jones and other far right ‘organs’ spewing unfiltered directly from the WH.
I had to interject.

This, it’s… it’s just so bad.

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Unless the other parents are ignorant, hate-filled, despairing people who want to blame someone for the way the world is, and the household is one where casual abuse is normalized, and their kids are taught nothing by their parents, only trained to be quiet around the abuser and take out their anger on smaller, weaker things.
This happens more than I like to think about. I ran into it a dozen times or so with my daughter in the 80s and 90s, and hear about it happening with my grandson.
Human nature. So much good, so much evil.

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From my parenting experience, there’s two basic types - the parent(s) or parent-substitute(s) that are just awful, and the kids are just doing what the adults in their lives do, and the clueless type, who may actually utter the cliche “Not my baby, she’s an angel!” when confronted with evidence of the kid’s extreme bad behavior.

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Yoinked from a friend’s blog:

Fascist: “I believe in a little something called FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. You know from the Constitution?”

Trans woman: “So I can dress and live how I want?”

Muslim: “So I can worship however I choose?”

Communist: “So I’m allowed to discuss revolutionary activity without police interference?”

Jewish person: “So I’m allowed to exist?”

Fascist: “No not like that. I mean I should be allowed to call for your murder if you try to do any of that.”

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Don’t forget that Hitchcock did quite a bit of filming too, as presented on Frontline as Memory of the Camps. Apparently they did a more recent version of putting the footage together into a documentary in 2014 under the same title.

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