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by bloopernova
698 days ago
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It's astonishing to me that there are people defending nazis as "just another political ideology", or "just a normal reaction to leftwing people". The very ideology that the free world spent 5 years at total war to defeat. The people who defeated fascism in WW2 are literally called The Greatest Generation but nowadays we have people thinking "oh I bet we can make fascism work for us. It's never backfired on its adherents!" I wonder if that's due to WW2 veterans dying, or just plain time passing. And will we see another Axis? |
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This is a historical anachronism. "Nazi ideology" (by which we typically mean things in particular like eugenics, racism and antisemitism, but perhaps also things like "strong nationalism" or "leader-centralized authoritatianism") was not the reason the US or other Allies went into the war, nor was it the reason why most people volunteered to fight, assuming they were not drafted. (Of course, there were exceptions.) The mythologization of the war in modern times has led to a much, much greater modern hatred of Nazi ideology than what existed in the 1940s, even in the postwar period. If you read newspaper articles and private letters from the period, it's really quite shocking the sentiments the average American, Frenchman, or Englishman had.
It is also of course always worth mentioning the enormous Soviet contribution to the war effort against Germany, without which Allied victory would have almost certainly been impossible - and the Soviet Union under Stalin was not exactly "the free world", to put it mildly.