4 ms·
I think the most dangerous thing to do is to rewrite history to appeal to a point of view that it does not substantiate. The Nazi party was officially formed i
by rjf72 8y ago
I think the most dangerous thing to do is to rewrite history to appeal to a point of view that it does not substantiate.
The Nazi party was officially formed in 1920 and it was still an extremely fringe group. It was a renaming of the German Workers' Party, a group which had 55 members in 1919 when Hitler joined. That same year they announced that only males of "pure Aryan descent" could become members, and Hitler would give some 31 speeches constantly overtly targeting Jews. By 1921, when the party still just had some 3000 members, the "brownshirts" were officially founded and began to be used to physically attack, disrupt, and otherwise intimidate other parties. By 1923 Hitler literally began an attempted coup which resulted in the death of several police officers along with 16 Nazi members. That failed coup would result in his trial and imprisonment during which time he wrote Mein Kampf.
This is why the appeals to fears of x is the next Hitler are generally unreasonable. Hitler wasn't some devious trickster who suddenly just gradually started 'dog whistling' or hinting at things. He was extremely extreme from his earliest days. He made no secret of it. He literally wrote, and published, a book about it before he started his next rise to power! And the book, again emphasizing written while he was literally in prison, had extremely subtle passages in it such as, "... the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.. If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."
The primary thing I fear is that in our lust to oust the villain from behind his mask, that we ourselves become that which we seek to find.