General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Yes DU trends to an older audience. [View all]wnylib
(21,906 posts)today's RW extremists are going down a path that leads in the same direction, with similar consequences, as the Nazis of the 20th century.
Schindler's List is not where the Nazi horrors started. It is where Nazi power led to. After the Nazi defeat, people asked how a nation could have become so hideous in its politics and actions. They asked why the German people did not stop it from happening. The answer is that too many people did not foresee where it was headed. But they could have foreseen it if they had paid heed to Europe's history of pogroms against Jews and executions of "heretic" Christians.
We have the benefit today of knowing where fascist politics lead. It is our obligation to resist it NOW by calling it out BEFORE it becomes a modern Schindler's List.
There are documentary films on the gradual process, over a decade, of how Nazis gained power and gaslighted the nation into supporting them. That is the stage of Nazism that you should compare today's politics with because we are paralleling the same process today. You are comparing the wrong time periods with each other. A more accurate and eye opening comparison is the period when Nazis began to rise in power with what is happening in the US today with RW extremism.
You can find many of those documentaries online at You Tube and elsewhere. Some of them focus on German history and society in the period following the First World War. Others are biographies of Hitler. To understand the beginnings of Nazism in Germany, I recommend two excellent films. One is Judgment at Nuremberg. The other is actually a series based on two very historically comprehensive fiction books by Herman Wouk - Winds of War, and the sequel, War and Remembrance. The films were a TV series so they consist of several DVDs that take many hours to watch, but are well worth it for learning about the time period. The complete two sets are expensive, but many libraries carry them.
If you prefer reading over films, there are several books, including the books by Wouk that the TV series was based on. I recommend John Toland's Biography of Hitler. I read it in the 1970s when it was published. It remains the best comprehensive book on how the rise of Nazism was possible.
Today's RW politics in the US are a warning sign of what is to come if not defeated now. When you know how fascism rose to power in the past, you can see how it is happening today.