• Hubi@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      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.