The election of the first head of a county administration by the far-right Alternative of Germany in a rural eastern region recently has led to concern among opponents of the party.
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 in recent years has come as a surprise, even though neoliberal governments have spent decades creating the conditions that produce it.
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 in recent years has come as a surprise, even though neoliberal governments have spent decades creating the conditions that produce it.