I’m not excusing German citizens by any means, but it must be mentioned that putting up with absolutely crippling economic conditions made every single German pretty fucking miserable, and liable to jump at literally anything different. As in - and this is not hyperbole - inflation so bad that price hikes were often performed every day, throughout the day, and people brought literal wheelbarrows of cash to buy basic supplies. They minted reichmark notes in denominations of billions. Everyone’s savings was wiped out. People walked away from the Weimar Republic for a reason; it’s just absolutely fucking tragic that they walked towards the populist scapegoating of fascism, because it gives that good dopamine hit from the daily hour of hate.

And there are a hell of a lot of echoes of that tale in the circumstances we find ourselves in now.

[–] K4Z2FVH1@feddit.org 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I think I do that too rarely, so: thanks for putting work into writing a thoughtful answer.

The similarities were why I wrote. From what you wrote, I suspect that you are either a product of the German education system, or someone who is way more historically literate in that domain than the average non-German.

Demonizing/dehumanizing the German citizens did not help, and committed the same crime of racism and stereotyping that they had committed. With a very generous helping of post-war propaganda, and genius level ideas like the Marshall plan, they cemented the legend/cult of the clean and untouchable English and American super-man, who is everyone's friend, and who fights for freedom and brings it to everyone, while they happily exploited, butchered and destabilized pretty much the entire world for almost exclusively revolting or questionable reasons.

Amazingly, that worked on the vast majority of the people in the western world. And I admit that it worked on me, until started informing myself when the PATRIOT act and WMDs in Iraq were daily newspaper headlines.

I believe it is now - once again - too late to prevent the descent into chaos and horror, and once again, the masses are cheering for the devil, until their feet have already turned to charcoal.

We face a similar scenario in Germany right now, and I bet the story sounds very similar everywhere where these elements are gaining power. The "centrist" parties - along with their buddies in the EU - are pushing police state legislation, and the far right wingers already have about the same slice of the vote-cake that the NSDAP had in 1930.

Austria already had their first period of (luckily incompetent, and too corrupt even for Austria!) Nazi rule, and the Brits... well they sure hate it when they don't know everything about their peasants, do they? Resistance in France is a little stiffer, but the Le Pen story also echoes the whole Hitler prison sentence in some ways. There are too many examples of this shit.

I am afraid we humans - as is human tradition - once again failed to act upon what we should have learned from history, and if I am lucky, the old ticker in my chest hurries up a bit and decides to retire before too long, so that I don't have to watch the REALLY bad parts play out.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

Thanks for the nuanced reply - I agree that, despite the clear and sweeping benefits of the Marshall plan, it did tend to give us Anglos (I’m unitedstatesian, but I appreciate the compliment regarding my interest in history <3) a bit too much of the carte blanche assumption that “we are doing the right thing” - the final form of which can be seen in both countries: the UK, with the whole Brexit idiocy and assumption that it’d be super easy to reclaim some of their former imperial glory; and the US, with the final form of our hubristic-devolving-to-toxically-narcissistic concept of “American Exceptionalism” (a sentiment, I should add, that was to a large degree based on the convenient fact of “not having large sections of our country and industrial base bombed to shit during WW2”).

Also, I do tend to accidentally write comically long and structurally baroque sentences sometimes :D