> fascism appeals to the stupidest, most brutish, hierarchy-oriented people in society
> Give young teens a taste
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2026
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Wow, that does not wrap in thunder.
Hooray Voyager
Nevermind code block aren't supposed to wrap you can scroll them by swiping. I am the idiot.
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The problem is that it didn't carry on further. The beginnings of most ideologies sound fine but it's the reality and the shunning of "the other" where you start to see the horrors.
Yeah, the whole thing is that most of this sounds good until you have to be part of it as it plays out. It just gets worse, and worse, and the people become more, and more, polarized about the situation. The problems with the ideas, which should have been obvious from the beginning, start to take effect in ways that finally start to hurt the people it was proposed to support. Then the system goes into collapse.
See, and even this could lead into a fantastic lesson about how fascism is really seductive in these vague terms, especially to help clean up a lot of the questions of "well why didn't people fight back" that teens have when learning about Italy and Germany pre-WWII.
hindsight is easy.
i can look back on every thing that happened to me in the past and it's clear what was wrong. but when you are living through it, you can't see that. it was not obvious and clear, it was confusing and I did the best that I could with the limited information I had, nobody is omniscient. but when we look back on the past it seems 'so obvious' because we have... way more information and experience and context than when have in the moment, especially the time to take all that info and process it.
and it's stupidly arrogant to assume some average person of limited means and intelligence could see how 'evil' things around them were. only a minority of the population is looking at some big picture of what their government is doing, most folks just care about food on their table and are totally consumed by day to day life.
admitting we are limited beings that make mistakes or just are totally blind to horrible things... is painful and scary.
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people are more than happy to commit horrors on others.
that's the whole point, you want a well-defined group to be able to blame, torture, and kill. because this groups existence is the 'problem' that is holding back your ideal society from existing.
and every ideology has this. they all need an amorphous boogeyman and as a label to condemn their non-believers.
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It's easier to think of Nazis as just evil and incompetent. The uncomfortable truth is that a significant part of their platform was popular, especially in the beginning of their rule. They were also extremely competent early on, it wasn't until Hitler was in full on drug psychosis that things started going down hill. Expecting something the Nazis did, especially early on to be unpopular and a massive red flag is just foolish on the teacher.
It would be better if we focused more on the uncomfortable parts of Nazi Germany. Their militarization efforts pulled them out of global recession faster than everyone else. Jewish segregation was inspired by the US treatment of African Americans. Jesse Owens was treated better in Nazi Germany than in the US despite being a national hero. The eugenics movement was also massively popular in the US and elsewhere. There was a lot of luck involved in the war in Europe going as well as it did, Germany winning wasn't ever really realistic unless the US aided them, but things could have been much worse.
They were also extremely competent early on, it wasn’t until Hitler was in full on drug psychosis that things started going down hill.
In a lot of ways, it's not that they were competent, it's that the more popular parts of their policies (e.g. public spending, job creation programs) were running on borrowed time - the government kind of strong-armed the banks into funding them, and if they were ever going to pay them back, it was through spoils of war. I guess it takes some kind of competency to put that plan into action...
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Then they all stood up, looked to the flag and pledged allegiance under god.
And everyone clapped
Jesus Christ. This comment made me remember that American schools actually do that daily. It was like a repressed memory. I had to actually look it up to make sure it wasn't a fever dream or something. I never participated because even as a kid it just seemed so fucking weird to me. Nobody ever gave me shit about it. We weren't forced to do it or anything. But it was still a daily occurrence before the morning announcements.
When I learned that we didn't have to do it I stopped. But my home room teacher was a veteran and he did not take it well. Sent me the principal's office (they just sent me back). A few other kids then stopped too.
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It may be time to watch that one again
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I think the experiment worked pretty well.
It showed that nazi ideals are juvenile.
My kids idolize the garbage men and construction workers. Nothing wrong with that, but those are jobs whose purpose and value children immediately recognize. That is unlike, say, a virologist or insurance adjuster.
Gotta be honest I don't think that's why kids idolize them. I think that's just the heavy machinery
You don't see many kids idolizing roofers or brick layers... So I think you're on to something.
The history teacher should have read up on blue eyes/brown eyes experiment and copied that one instead: https://appliedhuman.com/social-experiments,/sociology,/1968/2023/11/07/jane-elliott-blue-brown-eyes.html
I know I'm scarred from that roleplaying scenario. We did in middle school too
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I wonder if Brandon Sanderson had read this when he was writing the Stormlight Archives. The main society seen in it has a caste system based on eye color.
hitler's policies were wildly popular. and that's the problem. people are dumb and like doing things that are actually bad for them. it's like the chimpanzee that likes eating salty food, even though it kills him.
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The true horror is asking the same questions again to the same people 8 years later... and getting the same answers again.
fake: anon goes to school
gay: separated from girls
I doubt kids at the peak horny stage of their lives would be happy to be separated like that.
Producing lots of children was also part of Nazi ideology
The problem is that actually running such an experiment properly and bringing home the conclusion of the horrors of fascism would be grossly unethical and impossible to do. (Some university psychology/sociology courses did similar things in the 1960s, though experimental ethics rules back then were flimsy.)
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The Nazis didn't introduce separate schools for boys and girls, in contrary they started to teach boys and girls together. The separation existed already before the Nazis.
Didn‘t really complete the experiment. None of the horrors of such a system. Wait until one of them didn‘t want the job and wanted to do something else. Straight to a work camp. Or executed. Women forced to stay at home an bang out kids. Etc.
The sad truth is, that even a percentage of the class could have it really good under the system. Just an arbitrary group would disappear (let's say all names starting with L). If one overlooked the horror the system can still be popular.
The lesson would be that popular is not moral.
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I mean, I can imagine kids feeling a sense of purpose and belonging. That education is very palpable - girls that age fawn over babies and family life, and boys would rather work the fields as long as they get recognition for it. The open choice of what to do with your life is daunting, so the promise of actual skills instead of algebra is appealing. It's basically the return to "learn a trade" we're going through now.
All in all, a suboptimal hangup for a negative Nazi image. Hitlerjugend etc. were popular programs. Like boy scouts but with (realistically probably "more") indoctrination.
Popular? They were also compulsory.
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Wake up at 5am and do your bed and Iron your clothes before some dickhead screams you up a hill and then teaches you a class of shit you still don't care about? Then you get to shovel some pig shit?
Wow. Sign me up.
/S
To be fair learning to farm and do military shit sounds way funner than the actual crap you're doing throughout most of school.
Learning to do military shit was way less fun than school. A not inconsiderable amount of time is spent doing domestic chores. The rest of the time is spent sitting in class.
But a 14 year old isn't going to know that. They'd be thinking about shooting guns and doing obstacles and driving tanks around and shit like that.
Yah but kids are to dumb to know that yet
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This was the premise of the TV movie The Wave that came out in the early 80s.
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