I mean this guy is aware of like that basic facts, right? I’m not asking for any deep historical analysis and extrapolation to its relevance to current events, I talking elementary school level basic knowledge.
Like , "Hey, kids! Let me tell you a story about our country America. One day a long time ago there was this German man named Hitler. He was really mean and used a lot of bad ideas to bully his way into becoming a leader. He took over his country’s government and called him and his buddies Nazis. Americans, over here in America, saw what he was doing and decided it was really bad. So bad, in fact that we, the Americans, here in America, wanted to do something to stop Evil Hitler and the bad Nazis. And America wanted to help their best friends, England and France because that really evil guy Hitler and his buddies, the bad guys, Nazis were so mean they were beating up the French and the English. So we teamed up together and got some more friends and we called our team the Allies. With the Allies, including us, the Americans, we went over there and kicked those evil bastards, the Nazis and their leader Hitler, into the dirt and we killed the all so they were never heard from again! We Won! Yeah our team, the Allies! And the Americans! (Boo Hitler and the Nazis, the bad guys and losers.)
The end.
Don’t ya just hate those evil bad guys? You remember evil Hitler and the Nazis? They’re all dead now.
Yeah, but see, that’s all fake news… Hitler just wanted to give his people a little elbow room, that’s all… and all those “gas” chambers… fake news!!! /s
All dark humor aside, we live in a postmodern world, where expertise, especially on matters historical or social, are shunned in favor on feels about matters historical and social. There is a serious propaganda machine set up around things like holocaust denial and both siding the historical reality of world war 2. And since many conservative leaning people who watch Fox News religiously already believe that “government” schools indoctrinate their children into a “liberal” world view that is anti-white and anti-christian, it’s not a huge leap for them to get on board with the holocaust denial ideas about that time period. And some legitimate scholarship on the subject seems to back them up - such as the mass rape of German women by the Red Army that’s come to light in recent years and the modern day argument that rape is a weapon of war. It’s quiet easy to spin that historical fact into a total victimhood claim on the side of the Germans (and ignore the decade long anti-Slavic rhetoric of the nazi regime or the authoritarian nature of the Stalin regime that helped make the violent reprisals a viable reaction to nazi propaganda). For some people, Hitler, even if you believe the truth of the holocaust, was STILL a guy who managed to pull the German economy out of the shitter and bring pride back to Germany… for some people national pride trumps all other considerations, even if it comes at the expense of millions of lives…
TLDR; I wish that the historical facts were enough, but they are not in our postmodern world.
I was once coming back from the park in my neighborhood (often referred to as a “West Indian neighborhood”) and a teenage girl was going into the building, a young guy nearby shouted out to her, “Hey, you Haitian?” “What?, No! I’m Jamaican.” A small and obvious thing that country of origin and culture are important to everyone, but I appreciate the occasional knock to the head as a voice against the constant tide of overgeneralization.
I agree with you but if we give up all hope in the face of what we believe to be superior knowledge, then we give into malaise and acquiescence in the face of evil.
Evil and bigotry should be confronted and questioned into oblivion at every opportunity or it spreads, much like measles is now, to morons too resistant to rational thought.
If that happens enough much like now again with measles, while we may not be infected with their stupidity ourselves- innocents will suffer collective consequences. In this case the casualty is humanity and empathy, along with decency. The stakes are just as high.
I agree, I just don’t know how to give them insight. We can only hope for more the people who realise they have made a mistake and turn their backs on the far right.
Which, incidentally, is why it does work in describing the impact of laws and policies. Same with other lump-sum identifiers: exact name match policies (in the context of recent US¹ policies) don’t just target people from Mexico, but they do disproportionately affect those with Spanish or Spanish derived names, regardless of that person’s origin.
¹ Canada’s one, major protection against this is the fact that running the risk pissing off Quebec by disenfanchising francophones is not something most people aiming at federal power are willing to do. Yet.
The medium and long term solution to nazism is to end capitalism. It’s really hard to keep fascism at bay when the bourgeoisie keeps turning towards it to preserve their private ownership of the means of production. Ask yourself how much of our current political moment is the product of decades of austerity, privatization, and the systematic disempowerment and disintegration of the working class.
Yes, it happens all the time, but it never shows up as a news story. When I’ve been involved in project planning you would occasionally here an idea shot down because it matched some terrible idea in the past. In the medical field all of the informed consent laws come out of other terrible history. Knowledge of history stopping a terrible thing isn’t a highly visible process. It looks like a bad idea being shot down in a meeting because we’ve made that mistake.
They tend to not point it out as often, but rather praise someone for being an exception or doing it right. It is the same dynamic you see for a lot of women in the lives of deeply misogynist dudes. You’re not like those other *
