Look out for anyone dehumanizing and demonizing whole groups of people, especially when it is people with political power doing that. That is the common thread,

Look out for anyone dehumanizing and demonizing whole groups of people, especially when it is people with political power doing that. That is the common thread, the one that allows entire populations to be conditioned to accept violence against groups of other people just because of ethnic or political differences. Could it have been prevented at the time? I highly doubt it, what the nazis did was push to the extreme and industrialize what many European nations had been doing already for centuries. Socially the concept of universal human rights was still very recent and not widely accepted. Yes we can tell, and it is happening right now, the warning signs are in plain sight. Look at the rise of right wing extremism in the United States, resulting in increasing numbers of terrorist attacks. It has been directly enabled by the language used in political discourse and what it has rendered permissible. Can it be prevented now from getting worse? Time will tell, but at least the election results from yesterday show that there is yet some hope. One should not be complacent though, the Nazis never achieved more than 30 some percent in open elections before they completely took over.