There are definitely people out there who espouse the same beliefs as the Nazi Party and use the same strategies to weasel their way into popular discourse. Even as far back and as mildly as the US election with Obama, I was struck walking through the German History Museum in Berlin by how similar Nazi propaganda posters were to the kinds of rhetoric seen on Fox News and spoken by Republican politicians. Calling everything they don’t like Socialism, or Globalism, for example, when the targets are hardly aligned with those ideologies, is literally copy and paste what the Nazi Party did. Not just “everything I don’t like is Nazism,” but like the specific phrasing and strategies they use against specific targets like Black, Jewish, LGBT+ people, and foreigners are nearly identical. When the mainstream dismisses it as “economic anxiety” or “ignorance” or “right wing populism” we’re failing an open book test, because it’s all been written down for 80 years and you can tell that these neo-Nazis have read it.
People have crippled the power of many words by overuse.
Nazi, racist, bigot, -phobe, and so on.
There are definitely people out there who espouse the same beliefs as the Nazi Party and use the same strategies to weasel their way into popular discourse. Even as far back and as mildly as the US election with Obama, I was struck walking through the German History Museum in Berlin by how similar Nazi propaganda posters were to the kinds of rhetoric seen on Fox News and spoken by Republican politicians. Calling everything they don’t like Socialism, or Globalism, for example, when the targets are hardly aligned with those ideologies, is literally copy and paste what the Nazi Party did. Not just “everything I don’t like is Nazism,” but like the specific phrasing and strategies they use against specific targets like Black, Jewish, LGBT+ people, and foreigners are nearly identical. When the mainstream dismisses it as “economic anxiety” or “ignorance” or “right wing populism” we’re failing an open book test, because it’s all been written down for 80 years and you can tell that these neo-Nazis have read it.