7 ms·

Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?

55 points by diodorus 12y ago

tokenadult 12y ago
The three-book series on the Third Reich by historian Richard Evans[1] (the author of the essay kindly submitted here) was recommended to Hacker News readers in a comment in August 2014. I am glad I saw that recommendation. Three volumes of thoroughly footnoted history covering a lifetime (Bismarck's era to the end of World War II) in a large country was a lot of reading, but I'm glad I plunged in. The Allied war effort against the Nazi regime was a big part of the young experience of several of my uncles, and undoubtedly shaped the childhoods of both of my parents. And of course the result of World War II redrew the map of Europe. I think it's useful to be aware of the facts (and Evans's book series digs deeply into the facts) and not just the legends about the Nazis. Anyway, the Nazis still have followers today. I have been doing research on a younger generation (that is, people with birth years like my parents, in the 1930s) of neo-Nazis[2] in the postwar era, and there are even people younger than that (birth years in the 1980s and 1990s) who haven't learned enough about Nazi history to know that the Nazis are no example worth following for anyone. We must never forget. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693 http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01... http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-Evans/dp/0143037900 http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-Evans/dp/014... http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711 http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711 [2] http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Connection-Eugenics-American-Socialism/dp/0195149785 http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Connection-Eugenics-American-Soci... http://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-Pioneer/dp/0252074637 http://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-Pi... http://www.amazon.com/Race-Racism-Science-Interaction-Society/dp/0813537363 http://www.amazon.com/Race-Racism-Science-Interaction-Societ...
rdtsc 12y ago
It was the latest party in Western world that launched a World War & proceeded to coldly, methodically and institutionally to exterminate groups of people based on their race, skin color, belief. Now the reason I mentioned the War is because the War they started was lost by them. Had they won, who knows what the history would have been like. It is also worth mentioning that US population has not necessarily been that terribly outraged by what Germany was doing. There were German communities that celebrated the fall of Paris at their Octoberfest festivals. Also Eugenics was going in full swing in US has well. Sterilizations of "inferior" people was praised as the new way forward. US businesses have not exactly come clean in their dealings with the Nazi germany. Especially, IBM and its Hollerith tabulating machines. Those have alledgely been using in concentration camps. And those were not just buy and forget type deals. They had to have IBM technicians go visit the sites to fix and maintain them. For all I know, IBM hasn't opened their archives yet to be scrutinized for their connection with the Nazi Germany.
- VLM 12y ago
  "For all I know, IBM hasn't opened their archives yet to be scrutinized" In a post photocopier era, if you downsize a quarter of a million citizens (probably more) over several decades and nothing surfaces, that proves nothing exists. Maybe everything was shredded in a big cover up in a pre-photocopier era. Maybe, perhaps most likely, nothing ever existed.
  - pyre 12y ago
    If said information did exist, how many people within IBM would actually have access to it? How would IBM top-brass not see this documentation as a potential liability when the Germans became the enemy or at least when the Germans lost the war? I think that it's highly unlikely that such documentation was allowed to exist if it ever did exist in the first place. If it was allowed to exist past the 1940s, it was probably placed under lock-and-key. I doubt many of the rank-and-file IBMers would have access to it.
- philwelch 12y ago
  Sweden had an active eugenics program until 1975 and practiced compulsory sterilization until 2012. Eugenics was extremely fashionable across the Western world and only ended because of its association with the suddenly-unfashionable Nazis. The U.S. had groups like the German-American Bund because the U.S. was and is a diverse country with freedom of speech. Other Allied countries had similar groups, such as the British Union of Fascists. Actual support for Hitler was a small, fringe minority. On the other side of the scale, individual Americans had been traveling overseas to fight against the Axis powers for years, dating back to the Spanish Civil War when the 2,800 American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought to defend the Spanish Republic. Also, the US supplied the Allies with $50 billion worth of food and supplies (over $650 billion in today's dollars), contributed militarily to the war, and spent another $17 billion ($160 billion in today's dollars) on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe afterwards. So, maybe let's take a look at everything in context and consider that, yes, individual people in a free country will sometimes support the wrong foreign leaders but "the US population" was not behind Hitler and repeatedly reelected governments that went above and beyond to contribute the nation's wealth and manpower to Hitler's defeat.
blfr 12y ago
The ideology that underpinned Stalin’s policies of mass extermination died in 1989 with the fall of communism, but the racism that drove Hitler’s lives on in myriad forms that continue to trouble the world today. The opposite is true. While countries like North Korea and Cuba continue to experience the joys of communism in all its range (from genocidal to merely impoverishing), the west is so obsessed with not being racist that we will let heinous crimes slide, or even actively cover them up, like in the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. I do wonder why communism gets a pass. Is it because they won and had half a century more for propaganda? Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning?
- darkmighty 12y ago
  I think if those countries people started widespread revolt against the regime the willingness of the west to intervene might change, but as-is a) You can't tell people their way of government is "wrong", on the principle that if capitalism was a minority you wouldn't want to be suppressed either; b) Most countries don't care and would find it hard to come up with support for an invasion from population/congress/etc c) They're just two nations, not a growing part of the globe as in cold war. As far as starvation goes, I don't think either of those two have refused external food aid. As crazy as Kim Jong-un is he doesn't want his population to starve.
  - blfr 12y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that anyone should intervene in DPRK, or Cuba, or anywhere else. Just that communism did not disappear in '89 and that our social norms around those ideologies are weirdly incongruent.
- pidg 12y ago
  Arguably, the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter, while the USSR, North Korea et al have created a highly bastardised version of communism.
  - pyre 12y ago
    I think that it's arguable that the Khmer Rouge carried out the closest attempt at pure Communism, but it's not like that turned out all that well. That said, plenty of people associated things like the Stazi/KGB with Communism. I haven't actually read Marx's manifesto, but I highly doubt that his "worker's paradise" involved disappearing masses of people and a "report your neighbour, Comrade" mentality[1]. [1] Though I do know that he thought that there would be a progression like "Democracy => Socialism => Communism" and that each transition would involve bloody revolution.
mattmaroon 12y ago
I used to wonder why people hated on Nickelback so much. I mean yeah, they suck. But there are lots of bands that are worse. Go to your local metal bar and you'll find two of them tonight. Or listen to the full albums of most one hit wonders. And there are bands that are more successful than Nickelback too. They're not even on Wikipedia's list of the best selling music acts, though they're not too far off. They've never won a single Grammy. But it's virtually impossible to find a band that is both. If you multiply suckiness by popularity, you get a number in Nickelback's case that's astronomical. And I think that's what makes them so fascinating to people. It's not that they suck, and it's not that they're so successful. It's that they suck AND they're successful. The Nazis are similar in that they were quite evil and quite "successful" (for a very evil definition of the word success, at least). They were really the Nickelback of genocide.
- dylandempsey 12y ago
  Ha. For me it's because Nickelback was so overplayed in Canada, so if you didn't like them anymore you couldn't get away from them. Canada has regulations that radio etc has to play a certain amount of Canadian content so they were heavily used to fill that quota.
  - philwelch 12y ago
    Ah yes, the same infamous Can-con regulations that foisted Celine Dion on an unwilling world.
MCRed 12y ago
Part of the obsession with the Nazis is because so many people don't understand what they were about and why. For instance, this article implies that they were just racists. Racism is a consequence of their ideology, not the reason for it. Worse, we even have used them to short circuit discussion and close off self criticism with the "Godwins Law" trope. (godwin never said that those who use nazis as an example are wrong, he merely said eventually they would come up.) We've (the USA) become a nation of holocaust denying racists because we believe that only germans (genetically) can be fascist and thus what happened in germany could never happen here, and anyone who brings up parallels automatically loses the argument. Just because some people do so poorly, does not mean there are not parallels. Many of the propaganda pieces you see against muslims in the USA are similar to the ones against the jews in Nazi germany. The ideology of "you tell people they are being attacked and then you get your war" rings true here as it did in Nazi Germany. Even the precursors to the rise of fascism in german have existed here and had some similar consequences - high monetary inflation, economic problems with a lack of jobs, a lack of self esteem combined with a "we're the best country' form of nationalism. etc. The nazis were never really properly studied in my schooling and my understanding is that history teaching has gotten only more superficial since. A lot of understanding of what's happening in the USA and the world at large came out of an initial early interest in german history (because I lived there) and the consequent study of economics (Ludwig von Mises, a jew, prominent among them, who was scoffed at when he told other jews that they would have to leave austria because the nazis were going to invade.) Anyway, the superficial understanding of the nazis and nazi era germany expressed in this very article is why we need to actually study the subject, obsessed or not.
- closetnerd 12y ago
  This is exactly it. It's as if Hitler was uniquely vile. There is no other person's name so well known, while the person himself so unknown. I think historians are scared that if he was better known, that he might have sympathizers. But this is ridiculous. Even in the biblical narrative, Lucifer was once God's favorite. Yet that doesn't take anything away from him being the Devil. It's important to know about the atrocities committed. But even more so to understand that he was not the only, and furthermore will not be the only. There are people like him hellbent on similar outcomes. We can't avoid repeating history if we examine them at the superficial level, rather than on an abstract, psychological, human level.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
Because they lost, and it is free to criticize them. Also there were survivors. Stalin killed millions of their own people too and how many films you see about it? Few films about China revolution too. It was not politically correct. Part of my family comes from a communist country. If the party came to acknowledge that you stored pictures or any other document or proof of "past errors" you will have lots of problems, so most people destroyed them. Delation was normal even between family members. When you kill them all, there is very few people that could write the History. Most of what we know of the native Americans genocide comes from the very few Americans that opposed that. But most Americans were certainly ok with killing the people there if they and their families could profit from it.
- larrys 12y ago
  "Stalin killed millions of their own people too and how many films you see about it? Few films about China revolution too. It was not politically correct." To oversimplify things a bit a large reason for the obsessions has to be the availability of a large trove of images (movies, pictures) describing the event. In a somewhat similar way people are obsessed with the Kennedy Assassination (and Kennedy and "The Kennedys" for that matter) no doubt driven in part by a large amount of images of a youthful Kennedy as well as obviously the zapruder film. Plus much of that unrolled on TV (the funeral I remember sitting in front of a TV watching as a youngster).
- byoogle 12y ago
  [Slightly OT] Amazon just put out a pilot of The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history about the Axis powers having won WWII based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSGFRY8 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSGFRY8 (watch! since popularity and feedback determine which shows get picked up and I’m hoping this one does).
  - freshhawk 12y ago
    For those who read the book, one of the changes might be very disappointing. They really seem to be taking out the best theme of the book, I would say the entire point of the book in favour of an alternate history that lets them have a resistance movement that gets to chant "USA USA USA". This Atlantic article explains it better than I: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/man-in-the-high-castle-when-a-nazi-ruled-world-isnt-so-dystopian/384708/ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/man...
philwelch 12y ago
The Nazis are the only real villains left. People will laugh at you and probably call you a McCarthyist or Nazi if you are anticommunist.
- ghobs91 12y ago
  Islamic terrorists?
  - mcantelon 12y ago
    It's much safer to pontificate on the evils of the past than challenge present evil, especially given the sponsors of Islamism, such as Saudi Arabia, are very wealthy and influential. There is also the association, in the West, of Muslim terrorists with immigration (as Islamist terror attacks in the West have largely been committed by immigrants). Many in the media sympathize with the ideal of open borders and focusing on Islamism is seen as potentially undermining this idea.
scythe 12y ago
Because "if it could happen in Germany, it could happen here". 22:35 <&scythe> Do you understand why the Americans all had a problem with democracy? 22:35 <&scythe> And the Australians and Canadians were on board? 22:36 <&KinGAleX> Because you're mostly Germans? A belief in American idealism -- up to about 1933 or so -- was that democracy was naturally, thermodynamically, the end-game stable state of human civilization. Sure, other democracies had failed in the past, but there was always an excuse. It was easy to believe until 1930 that the replacement of a democratic system with a despot could never happen in a modern democracy. After all, Italy had always been poor, and France had become a stable republic post-1871. Weimar Germany, at the time, was the world's second-largest economy, and had a largely fair and free electoral system. Imagine tomorrow that Japan, modern Japan, becomes a Nazi-like dictatorship, and you start to see some of what the appearance of the Nazis in Germany looked like to Americans in the 1930s. We're obsessed with the Nazis because Naziism is an idea we can be afraid of; we don't have to worry about Americans trying to form a caliphate or having a Marxist revolution. We're totally unafraid of, say, Japanese-style imperialism, because Americans could never adopt a early-20th-century Japan-like imperial culture, obviously.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Same thing happens in Russia. People in power, who were brought under Soviet regime, now soft-suppress research and education about Soviet wrongdoings. Honestly can't wait for them to retire / die out.
jqm 12y ago
"We" aren't.
peterashford 12y ago
Because the people who have the biggest reach in telling stories about history (Hollywood) are American and the Nazis made an impact of the US via their impact on the Jewish people. If the US or US citizens has suffered the Rape of Nanking I imagine that we'd have more films about evil Japanese or films about Stalin or Pol Pot if your population of film makers were related to people who suffered under those despots. It may be somewhat myopic, but it's understandable. At worst, it ignores other people's pain and elevates one people's suffering as the only suffering. But it is still understandable (if lazy).

55 points by diodorus 12y ago

The three-book series on the Third Reich by historian Richard Evans[1] (the author of the essay kindly submitted here) was recommended to Hacker News readers in a comment in August 2014. I am glad I saw that recommendation. Three volumes of thoroughly footnoted history covering a lifetime (Bismarck's era to the end of World War II) in a large country was a lot of reading, but I'm glad I plunged in. The Allied war effort against the Nazi regime was a big part of the young experience of several of my uncles, and undoubtedly shaped the childhoods of both of my parents. And of course the result of World War II redrew the map of Europe. I think it's useful to be aware of the facts (and Evans's book series digs deeply into the facts) and not just the legends about the Nazis. Anyway, the Nazis still have followers today. I have been doing research on a younger generation (that is, people with birth years like my parents, in the 1930s) of neo-Nazis[2] in the postwar era, and there are even people younger than that (birth years in the 1980s and 1990s) who haven't learned enough about Nazi history to know that the Nazis are no example worth following for anyone. We must never forget. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693 http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01... http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-Evans/dp/0143037900 http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-Evans/dp/014... http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711 http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711 [2] http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Connection-Eugenics-American-Socialism/dp/0195149785 http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Connection-Eugenics-American-Soci... http://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-Pioneer/dp/0252074637 http://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-Pi... http://www.amazon.com/Race-Racism-Science-Interaction-Society/dp/0813537363 http://www.amazon.com/Race-Racism-Science-Interaction-Societ...

rdtsc 12y ago

It was the latest party in Western world that launched a World War & proceeded to coldly, methodically and institutionally to exterminate groups of people based on their race, skin color, belief. Now the reason I mentioned the War is because the War they started was lost by them. Had they won, who knows what the history would have been like. It is also worth mentioning that US population has not necessarily been that terribly outraged by what Germany was doing. There were German communities that celebrated the fall of Paris at their Octoberfest festivals. Also Eugenics was going in full swing in US has well. Sterilizations of "inferior" people was praised as the new way forward. US businesses have not exactly come clean in their dealings with the Nazi germany. Especially, IBM and its Hollerith tabulating machines. Those have alledgely been using in concentration camps. And those were not just buy and forget type deals. They had to have IBM technicians go visit the sites to fix and maintain them. For all I know, IBM hasn't opened their archives yet to be scrutinized for their connection with the Nazi Germany.

VLM 12y ago
"For all I know, IBM hasn't opened their archives yet to be scrutinized" In a post photocopier era, if you downsize a quarter of a million citizens (probably more) over several decades and nothing surfaces, that proves nothing exists. Maybe everything was shredded in a big cover up in a pre-photocopier era. Maybe, perhaps most likely, nothing ever existed.
- pyre 12y ago
  If said information did exist, how many people within IBM would actually have access to it? How would IBM top-brass not see this documentation as a potential liability when the Germans became the enemy or at least when the Germans lost the war? I think that it's highly unlikely that such documentation was allowed to exist if it ever did exist in the first place. If it was allowed to exist past the 1940s, it was probably placed under lock-and-key. I doubt many of the rank-and-file IBMers would have access to it.
philwelch 12y ago
Sweden had an active eugenics program until 1975 and practiced compulsory sterilization until 2012. Eugenics was extremely fashionable across the Western world and only ended because of its association with the suddenly-unfashionable Nazis. The U.S. had groups like the German-American Bund because the U.S. was and is a diverse country with freedom of speech. Other Allied countries had similar groups, such as the British Union of Fascists. Actual support for Hitler was a small, fringe minority. On the other side of the scale, individual Americans had been traveling overseas to fight against the Axis powers for years, dating back to the Spanish Civil War when the 2,800 American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought to defend the Spanish Republic. Also, the US supplied the Allies with $50 billion worth of food and supplies (over $650 billion in today's dollars), contributed militarily to the war, and spent another $17 billion ($160 billion in today's dollars) on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe afterwards. So, maybe let's take a look at everything in context and consider that, yes, individual people in a free country will sometimes support the wrong foreign leaders but "the US population" was not behind Hitler and repeatedly reelected governments that went above and beyond to contribute the nation's wealth and manpower to Hitler's defeat.

blfr 12y ago

The ideology that underpinned Stalin’s policies of mass extermination died in 1989 with the fall of communism, but the racism that drove Hitler’s lives on in myriad forms that continue to trouble the world today. The opposite is true. While countries like North Korea and Cuba continue to experience the joys of communism in all its range (from genocidal to merely impoverishing), the west is so obsessed with not being racist that we will let heinous crimes slide, or even actively cover them up, like in the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. I do wonder why communism gets a pass. Is it because they won and had half a century more for propaganda? Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning?

darkmighty 12y ago
I think if those countries people started widespread revolt against the regime the willingness of the west to intervene might change, but as-is a) You can't tell people their way of government is "wrong", on the principle that if capitalism was a minority you wouldn't want to be suppressed either; b) Most countries don't care and would find it hard to come up with support for an invasion from population/congress/etc c) They're just two nations, not a growing part of the globe as in cold war. As far as starvation goes, I don't think either of those two have refused external food aid. As crazy as Kim Jong-un is he doesn't want his population to starve.
- blfr 12y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that anyone should intervene in DPRK, or Cuba, or anywhere else. Just that communism did not disappear in '89 and that our social norms around those ideologies are weirdly incongruent.
pidg 12y ago
Arguably, the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter, while the USSR, North Korea et al have created a highly bastardised version of communism.
- pyre 12y ago
  I think that it's arguable that the Khmer Rouge carried out the closest attempt at pure Communism, but it's not like that turned out all that well. That said, plenty of people associated things like the Stazi/KGB with Communism. I haven't actually read Marx's manifesto, but I highly doubt that his "worker's paradise" involved disappearing masses of people and a "report your neighbour, Comrade" mentality[1]. [1] Though I do know that he thought that there would be a progression like "Democracy => Socialism => Communism" and that each transition would involve bloody revolution.

mattmaroon 12y ago

I used to wonder why people hated on Nickelback so much. I mean yeah, they suck. But there are lots of bands that are worse. Go to your local metal bar and you'll find two of them tonight. Or listen to the full albums of most one hit wonders. And there are bands that are more successful than Nickelback too. They're not even on Wikipedia's list of the best selling music acts, though they're not too far off. They've never won a single Grammy. But it's virtually impossible to find a band that is both. If you multiply suckiness by popularity, you get a number in Nickelback's case that's astronomical. And I think that's what makes them so fascinating to people. It's not that they suck, and it's not that they're so successful. It's that they suck AND they're successful. The Nazis are similar in that they were quite evil and quite "successful" (for a very evil definition of the word success, at least). They were really the Nickelback of genocide.

dylandempsey 12y ago
Ha. For me it's because Nickelback was so overplayed in Canada, so if you didn't like them anymore you couldn't get away from them. Canada has regulations that radio etc has to play a certain amount of Canadian content so they were heavily used to fill that quota.
- philwelch 12y ago
  Ah yes, the same infamous Can-con regulations that foisted Celine Dion on an unwilling world.

MCRed 12y ago

Part of the obsession with the Nazis is because so many people don't understand what they were about and why. For instance, this article implies that they were just racists. Racism is a consequence of their ideology, not the reason for it. Worse, we even have used them to short circuit discussion and close off self criticism with the "Godwins Law" trope. (godwin never said that those who use nazis as an example are wrong, he merely said eventually they would come up.) We've (the USA) become a nation of holocaust denying racists because we believe that only germans (genetically) can be fascist and thus what happened in germany could never happen here, and anyone who brings up parallels automatically loses the argument. Just because some people do so poorly, does not mean there are not parallels. Many of the propaganda pieces you see against muslims in the USA are similar to the ones against the jews in Nazi germany. The ideology of "you tell people they are being attacked and then you get your war" rings true here as it did in Nazi Germany. Even the precursors to the rise of fascism in german have existed here and had some similar consequences - high monetary inflation, economic problems with a lack of jobs, a lack of self esteem combined with a "we're the best country' form of nationalism. etc. The nazis were never really properly studied in my schooling and my understanding is that history teaching has gotten only more superficial since. A lot of understanding of what's happening in the USA and the world at large came out of an initial early interest in german history (because I lived there) and the consequent study of economics (Ludwig von Mises, a jew, prominent among them, who was scoffed at when he told other jews that they would have to leave austria because the nazis were going to invade.) Anyway, the superficial understanding of the nazis and nazi era germany expressed in this very article is why we need to actually study the subject, obsessed or not.

closetnerd 12y ago
This is exactly it. It's as if Hitler was uniquely vile. There is no other person's name so well known, while the person himself so unknown. I think historians are scared that if he was better known, that he might have sympathizers. But this is ridiculous. Even in the biblical narrative, Lucifer was once God's favorite. Yet that doesn't take anything away from him being the Devil. It's important to know about the atrocities committed. But even more so to understand that he was not the only, and furthermore will not be the only. There are people like him hellbent on similar outcomes. We can't avoid repeating history if we examine them at the superficial level, rather than on an abstract, psychological, human level.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

Because they lost, and it is free to criticize them. Also there were survivors. Stalin killed millions of their own people too and how many films you see about it? Few films about China revolution too. It was not politically correct. Part of my family comes from a communist country. If the party came to acknowledge that you stored pictures or any other document or proof of "past errors" you will have lots of problems, so most people destroyed them. Delation was normal even between family members. When you kill them all, there is very few people that could write the History. Most of what we know of the native Americans genocide comes from the very few Americans that opposed that. But most Americans were certainly ok with killing the people there if they and their families could profit from it.

larrys 12y ago
"Stalin killed millions of their own people too and how many films you see about it? Few films about China revolution too. It was not politically correct." To oversimplify things a bit a large reason for the obsessions has to be the availability of a large trove of images (movies, pictures) describing the event. In a somewhat similar way people are obsessed with the Kennedy Assassination (and Kennedy and "The Kennedys" for that matter) no doubt driven in part by a large amount of images of a youthful Kennedy as well as obviously the zapruder film. Plus much of that unrolled on TV (the funeral I remember sitting in front of a TV watching as a youngster).
byoogle 12y ago
[Slightly OT] Amazon just put out a pilot of The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history about the Axis powers having won WWII based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSGFRY8 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSGFRY8 (watch! since popularity and feedback determine which shows get picked up and I’m hoping this one does).
- freshhawk 12y ago
  For those who read the book, one of the changes might be very disappointing. They really seem to be taking out the best theme of the book, I would say the entire point of the book in favour of an alternate history that lets them have a resistance movement that gets to chant "USA USA USA". This Atlantic article explains it better than I: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/man-in-the-high-castle-when-a-nazi-ruled-world-isnt-so-dystopian/384708/ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/man...

philwelch 12y ago

The Nazis are the only real villains left. People will laugh at you and probably call you a McCarthyist or Nazi if you are anticommunist.

ghobs91 12y ago
Islamic terrorists?
- mcantelon 12y ago
  It's much safer to pontificate on the evils of the past than challenge present evil, especially given the sponsors of Islamism, such as Saudi Arabia, are very wealthy and influential. There is also the association, in the West, of Muslim terrorists with immigration (as Islamist terror attacks in the West have largely been committed by immigrants). Many in the media sympathize with the ideal of open borders and focusing on Islamism is seen as potentially undermining this idea.

scythe 12y ago

Because "if it could happen in Germany, it could happen here". 22:35 <&scythe> Do you understand why the Americans all had a problem with democracy? 22:35 <&scythe> And the Australians and Canadians were on board? 22:36 <&KinGAleX> Because you're mostly Germans? A belief in American idealism -- up to about 1933 or so -- was that democracy was naturally, thermodynamically, the end-game stable state of human civilization. Sure, other democracies had failed in the past, but there was always an excuse. It was easy to believe until 1930 that the replacement of a democratic system with a despot could never happen in a modern democracy. After all, Italy had always been poor, and France had become a stable republic post-1871. Weimar Germany, at the time, was the world's second-largest economy, and had a largely fair and free electoral system. Imagine tomorrow that Japan, modern Japan, becomes a Nazi-like dictatorship, and you start to see some of what the appearance of the Nazis in Germany looked like to Americans in the 1930s. We're obsessed with the Nazis because Naziism is an idea we can be afraid of; we don't have to worry about Americans trying to form a caliphate or having a Marxist revolution. We're totally unafraid of, say, Japanese-style imperialism, because Americans could never adopt a early-20th-century Japan-like imperial culture, obviously.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Same thing happens in Russia. People in power, who were brought under Soviet regime, now soft-suppress research and education about Soviet wrongdoings. Honestly can't wait for them to retire / die out.

jqm 12y ago

"We" aren't.

peterashford 12y ago

Because the people who have the biggest reach in telling stories about history (Hollywood) are American and the Nazis made an impact of the US via their impact on the Jewish people. If the US or US citizens has suffered the Rape of Nanking I imagine that we'd have more films about evil Japanese or films about Stalin or Pol Pot if your population of film makers were related to people who suffered under those despots. It may be somewhat myopic, but it's understandable. At worst, it ignores other people's pain and elevates one people's suffering as the only suffering. But it is still understandable (if lazy).