this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.

The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.

So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.

In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.

But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (2 children)

That 1935 piece surely seems prophetic. For example this part:

Development of the anti-scientific and anti-cultural campaign, cutting down of education

For the last five or so years, I've been noticing a surge of anti-intellectualism. People are not any longer ashamed to publicly dismiss "smart alecks" and "know-it-alls".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Those types of people used to be exceptions and now they feel like the norm.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

It really is an incredible read, but to be fair, it was already the case back in the day, and even earlier, off the top of my head:

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/ye-olde-anti-vaxxers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Francisco

Difference is we now have instant global mass media, so it all spreads much further, much faster.

But anti-intellectualism has always been a core feature of fascism