Ask Lemmy

Not an expert but it seems to me the most important thing is education. In the U.S. they've been chipping away at that since at least the eighties. I'm not "handing it to them" but the right has put in the long term work to get us where we are today, with only feeble liberal centrist pushback.

That we should never have allowed the nazis to get painted as this existential, somehow outerworldly pure evil. They understandably got that reputation after the holocaust and losing the war, but it obscures why so many people were so attracted to them in the first place.

It has made it impossible for most people to see what is truly the resurrection of fascism: many people don’t see it as such because they’re not (yet) having people shot or books burned. They think ‘if I’m not pure evil, surely I can’t be nazi’. And there’s the real danger.

One important lesson of the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust is that Nazis characterized their enemies as disgusting rather than scary.

Disgust is a different feeling than fear, and it leads to different responses. Hitler used imagery of infection and disease to describe not only problems in society but eventually groups as well. This talk of filth and infestation laid the emotional groundwork for the “purge” solution.

If we want to avoid another Holocaust, we need to be wary of analogies like rot, cancer, infection for describing people and points of view.

Erich Kästner wikipedia.org, a german writer and satirist of the time, had this to say:

The events from 1933 to 1945 should have been battled in 1928 at the latest. Later was already too late. One must not wait until liberty is called treason. One must not wait till the snowball has become an avalanche. One must squelch the rolling snowball. The avalanche can't be stopped anymore...

Things that changed here in Germany (which I can think of off the top of my head):

• No presidential role. We don't have a single person with that much power anymore. The most powerful is the chancellor now.
• No emergency laws. Many nations have laws that when something goes wrong, their president gets superpowers to do whatever they want. This is regularly abused, not just by Hitler. To my knowledge, we don't currently have any such law.
• Secret voting. It is now illegal to make it public who you voted for. When Hitler rose to power, Nazis would sit in voting places and pressure people to vote for Hitler. And they would heckle people who didn't want to show their ballot card.

Having said all that, it should also be said that we do still currently have a very real Nazi problem. It's a few steps in the right direction, but no silver bullet.

The Nazis are only the yardstick of evil by convention. Their crimes exist in an enormous set of savage acts including genocides and invasions that suffuses history.

The lesson “of the Nazis” needs to be that the Nazis are not unique in history, nor are they the only sort of people who commit such acts.

Create a state that cared for and protected the majority, things like insured retirement, paid vacations, universal health insurance, In Europe we have all that, in the USA it was thought that they were rich enough not to need it and it may have been like that for decades, but it seems that not anymore.

If the system takes care of you, you are not going to sign up to destroy it, If the system doesn't give you anything, you won't care if it is destroyed or you will even sign up to do it.

Democracy dies with half the country cheering

I'd warn against the idea that Hitler was somehow indispensable to the movement.

I think MAGA is instructive here. Do you think Trump is an evil genus, or just a lucky blow-hard carried by the worst impulses of the right? Fascism is popular, and we need to stop acquitting the societies that nurture it.

To answer your question, I'd ignore the fascist leader and the rabid followers. I'd find a scheme to impose social and financial costs on those who don't support fascism, but are wiling to tolerate it for their own interests.

Unchecked conservatism naturally develops into fascism. Genocidal oppression is the natural tendency of conservatives. It always has been.

moderates need to stop only punching left.

hitler got into power because their moderates refused to appeal to their leftist voters and supported facism and so hitler's side won the election and, later, the country after they disenfranchised the moderates and executed the leftists; right now it's looking like americans are going to follow suit.

Trying to appease fascists by avoiding confrontation or acting when they start chipping away at our insitutions willl just lead to more fascism. The nazis didn't spring forth overnight, they consolidated their power through legal means and appealed to the population's bigotry and hatred of 'others' without enough of a response to stop their ascension.

Basically the same thing that is happening in the west right now.

There comes a point where "marginalized white men" fight back and can become dangerous. There is then a false narrative that we are under attack, and bringing back the Old Ways will fix everything. And who doesn't like safety? Easy selling point.

That's why Trump won in 2016 and why he can win again. He knows that's what gets him the votes. And the media plays into it too.

I don’t know that authoritarian/fascist regimes can be stopped once they’re in motion. They seem to be more the default rather than stable democracies. Even countries that you’d think would have sufficient legal barriers and processes for citizens to keep political extremists out of office seem to be failing and moving to the right.

It's already too late, America. Even if he loses the election, he's already rigged the supreme Court.

It’s always a good day to punch a Nazi

That the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

Every single one of them should have been executed. Might not have prevented the return entirely, but it would have made it harder, and perhaps made the newer ones less certain of their reception.

AI answer in the style of a riled up eighth grader:

Alright, so here's the deal. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis taught us some super important lessons that we absolutely cannot forget. Like, seriously, it's crucial.

First off, always question leaders who promise simple solutions to complex problems. Hitler fed on the economic chaos and social unrest, offering easy fixes and blaming specific groups. Don’t fall for that garbage. Critical thinking, people!

Second, don't let hate speech and discrimination slide. The Nazis started with anti-Semitic rhetoric and it escalated into the Holocaust. If someone is spreading hate, call it out and stop it in its tracks. Silence equals acceptance.

Third, protect democratic institutions. Hitler got power partly because the Weimar Republic was weak. Strong checks and balances, a free press, and active civic engagement are vital. Don't let anyone mess with that stuff.

Fourth, education matters. The Nazis indoctrinated youth with their ideology. We need to teach history accurately, promote critical thinking, and encourage empathy. An educated, aware population is harder to manipulate.

Lastly, stand up against injustice, no matter how small. If people had stood up to the Nazis early on, things might have been different. Don’t wait for someone else to act. Be brave, take a stand.

So, yeah, these lessons are super important. We can't let history repeat itself. Stay woke!

The location of the first book burning was at the Berlin Institute of Sex Research.

Make the left worth voting for again. And no, social democracy does not make the cut in any way, shape or form.

Well dont have Great Depressions is a major one.

Preventing the victims of the Nazis to do something similar to another group of people.

Imo, a big part of what I am seeing now stems from a lack of proper history and or civics education. I went to school in Texas, my whole education up to college we were taught that the U.S. was this beacon of good and positive things, there was an intentional effort to misrepresent Texas and U.S. history in a way that minimized slavery, racisim, and the genocide of the native population of the U.S. In short, it was a bullshit whitewashed fantasy novel. We should be saying:

"The United States did some really horrifying shit in the distant past, the recent past, and is still doing it today, those are the facts. We should try to do better than we are doing, and part of that is recognizing where we as a country came from, good and bad, so we can do better. You students are not bad people by default for living or being born here but you need to realize that fetishizing this country as the greatest country in the world and intrinsically linking YOUR identity to that of a false vision of a flawed nation, is hugely problimatic, especially when you base that identiy on the ideals of manifest destiny or other weird and/or rascist ideals."

When you separate the current individual from the history, and say this was/is the U.S. but it doesn't have to be YOU or the U.S. of the future, people are more receptive of hearing the bad. That is not to say we should minimize the awful things in our past and current, just that if a young kid is shamed, intentionally or unintentionally, they are more likely to fall into fringe and radical ideas and seek validation for them.

That doesn't help the brainwashed/backwards people who want to revert the country to the good ole days though.

The other thing that was really fundamental for me from good history teachers and professors was the way that they linked historical events with current events. That has been explicitly outlawed in Florida iirc and likely Texas too, this state does so much backwards shit though, I can't keep up with all of it.

We probably also need to remind people that facts don't care about their feelings, there isn't a such thing as alternative history, and that's just the end of it, there is no room for denying the horrors of slavery, the Holocaust, or any of the other numerous fucked up things in history. They happened, we have to remember that to prevent it from happening again.