Comment on Substack prompted a Nazi blog again
Maroon@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoNote that the largest Nazi groups today are in the “allied” nations that “won” WW2.
I read a piece (can’t find the source now, sorry) that blamed this squarely on the lack of education and remorse given the colonial backdrop in which WW2 was fought.
Most parts of the world view WW2 as very much a European war that was imposed on unwilling participants. The axis powers lost and Germany has since tried its best to reinvent itself while acknowledging its chequered past (check out: Vergangenheitsbewältigung), but the allied powers failed to recognise their colonial atrocities. For example, British history textbooks will loosely allude to the British empire saying that they were once a dominating global entity, but will make absolutely no mention of the numerous massacres and genocides for which they were responsible.
When wars are framed as competitions rather than tragedies, you will see the emergence of false victors instead of acknowledging lost generations.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Over the decades since WW2, the popular culture of the allied countries has typically portrayed Nazis as caricatured crazy monsters. They are treated as strange, other, and non-human. This seems to have thoroughly undermined people’s ability to recognize Nazism as a destructive force that lurks in people, whether they’re German or American or any other nationality. Any society has the potential to fall into this. But the unreflective complacency of the WW2 victors after defeating Nazis once has led to a complete lack of awareness that it’s an ongoing job to keep your society from falling prey to fascists.