[piva00]

That's been my impression too, seems like people (even more Americans) are extremely uneducated about the whole process of fascism. Instead they end up with this cartoonesque picture of what it looks like: SS officers standing guard over concentration camps, Hitler's speeches to huge crowds wearing swastika armbands, war.

No, that's the fucking end point of it, after all is done and the wheels have been far gone from the wagon, the process itself is much more nuanced and step-wise but the uneducated ones never ever heard of it. Feels like they live in a world where someone turned on a switch and everything changed at once...

Worst: it's coming from people who have lived through a pandemic, watched the social strife and divisions unfolding right in front of their faces, how can those same people not see that massive social movements aren't ever clear-cut? It's all just so stupid and ignorant.

[kelnos]

As an American, I'm not surprised, unfortunately. When we learn about history in grade school, we don't really learn about the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s. If we do, little time is spent on it. Most of the time is spent on WWII itself, with of course a bunch of self-congratulatory stuff about how the world would have burned if the US hadn't joined in (conveniently ignoring how long it took for the US to join in).

Most Americans couldn't tell you much about how Hitler came into power. (Or Mussolini? Forget it.) The majority of what Americans know about it all are exactly what you said: black-and-white scenes of SS officers, Hilter giving speeches, and swastika armbands.

There's no lingering WWII war damage in the US. We don't have monuments dedicating places where major battles were fought. The war wasn't fought here. We don't see reminders of what all that was like.

When I was born, WWII was only 35 years behind us. Many of the people who were involved in it at the time (politicians, soldiers, etc.) were not only alive, but still active in public discourse in major ways. But today, WWII ended 80 years ago. Most everyone who experienced it is dead. Awareness of all of it is still present in Europe because it was all literally close to home. Not so in the US.

This honestly shouldn't be all that surprising. History repeats and rhymes, over and over throughout the decades and centuries. All it takes is a couple generations to forget its lessons.

I see comments in these threads from people who lived through the forming of dictatorships in their countries. I wish more people would listen to them.