• GarbageShoot [he/him]
    hexbear
    30
    6 months ago

    This is offtopic, but the way that people whitewash the Weimar Republic by talking about Hitler like he was a wizard who cast a spell on Germany doesn't just have the effect of obscuring the political-economic conditions of fascism and its connection to long-standing European society, but further feeds into a fetishistic reverence for Hitler that encourages modern readers to hang off his every word to try to understand how the magic works, effectively working to spread his speeches even further than they would otherwise spread and lending a gravity to everything he says because, as far as many liberal histories were concerned, what he said was literally magic. It seems like a choice of characterization deliberately made so that the sins of the past can happen all the more easily for having already happened once, rather than protecting society from it using our past experience with it.

    • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
      hexbear
      16
      6 months ago

      the way that people whitewash the Weimar Republic by talking about Hitler like he was a wizard who cast a spell on Germany

      Literally the plot of that flopped Harry Potter movie lol. This way of thinking obviously predates that, I think a lot of the bad WW2 pop-history is to blame.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
      hexagon
      hexbear
      13
      6 months ago

      cast a spell on Germany... literally magic

      In early 2017 I realized liberals and liberalism itself wasn't ever going to deal with the anger and frustration that gave rise to Trump. I knew in my bones that they were never going to consider why people like an out-of-work autoworker in a dying Rust Belt town would vote for Trump. The dems were just going to give speech after speech on themes like "This isn't who we are!" I have to admit I expected they would at least make passionate pleas and strident, forceful comments.

      I wasn't clever enough to realize they'd be Schumer's level of bloodless and feckless before every election that this is the most important election of our lifetime. It's been almost seven years and there's been zero introspection by the dem machine. They're waiting and waiting and waiting for the public to snap out of their Trump spell and vote for democracy.