In high school, I thought that this stuff couldn’t happen here, not anymore, at least not at such a scale, and I was amazed that it had happened at all in the first place.
This common attitude of “we’re better than that” towards historical fascism is one of the reasons countries like the USA became so ready to succumb to it. If you assume it can’t happen to you, you’ll miss all the signs when it starts. We all need to recognize that Nazism is how ordinary people like ourselves can get when the conditions are conducive to it. Germans in the 1930s and 1940s were not uniquely evil; they were like us. No person or society is immune, and resisting Nazism starts with resisting it in yourself and your community.
In high school, I thought that this stuff couldn’t happen here, not anymore, at least not at such a scale, and I was amazed that it had happened at all in the first place.
Now I know better.
This common attitude of “we’re better than that” towards historical fascism is one of the reasons countries like the USA became so ready to succumb to it. If you assume it can’t happen to you, you’ll miss all the signs when it starts. We all need to recognize that Nazism is how ordinary people like ourselves can get when the conditions are conducive to it. Germans in the 1930s and 1940s were not uniquely evil; they were like us. No person or society is immune, and resisting Nazism starts with resisting it in yourself and your community.