@DeliaChristina ok so the other disturbing thing is that my German friends have been like, well they taught us all at school how to spot a Nazi and watch out for the rise of fascism again. But THEY DIDN’T TELL US WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.
And it's that lack of imagination that stuns me.
Because I would think it's obvious:
We make public life inhospitable for them.
We extract a COST for being a NeoNazi fuckhead.
Example: I knew someone who would help organize left-wing conferences and convenings. He noticed that, at one, there was a panel featuring a speaker who had a long, documented (but quiet) history of being a Nazi sympathizer. This speaker was welcomed by academics and writers on the Left. My friend made it his mission to get this speaker removed from the conference and make it widely known that this person was a Nazi sympathizer.
We extract a COST.
Oct 4, 2026, 7:13 PM@DeliaChristina @irene Deadening the imagination has been a goal of education for decades.
@DeliaChristina @irene and that's how one creates safe spaces, by making it unfeasibe to be unsafe!
The US (I mean White people) are too comfortable with racism, like if racism were a problem of POC, not their problem. They benefit from this passive attitude, but will never admit it. So racism creates a fertile ground for fascism. Carelessness. Since people are used to avoid caring about how racism affects POC, they avoid caring about how fascism affects other people, first of all immigrants and LGBTIQ people. In carelessness, fascism grows.
Oct 4, 2026, 7:13 PM@irene @DeliaChristina Wait, they taught it in school?
Like, actually talked about World War 2 in class?
@drwho @DeliaChristina oh yeah I believe that was a requirement of the peace agreement at the end of WW2 but even friends my age that were born in the 80s got this education that it is the responsibility of everyone to keep it from happening again. That is the sense that I got from talking to them but maybe it’s different depending on where in Germany you are from.
Oct 4, 2026, 8:02 PM@irene @DeliaChristina Where I grew up in the US, it was never taught. History stopped at 1890.ev at the very latest. We didn't hit WWI until I got to college.
@drwho @DeliaChristina yikes. I thought it was bad that my AP US history class never made it to Vietnam
Oct 4, 2026, 9:18 PM@irene @DeliaChristina In the sci.tech track at my high school, European history was required. US history was for the manufacturing.tech/votech track. We cleared the entire textbook that year but it stopped at 1890.ev.
What I know about everything after WW1 I know from my grandparents and reading books on my own time.
Edit: 1890, not 1850.
@drwho the US was involved in WWII, it’s not just European history? I learned about WWII extensively in 10th grade, also went to a Sci & Tech school.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:32 PM@tweetsjen @irene @DeliaChristina I know...
I didn't go to a sci.tech school, I went to a public school. Pennsylvania had this thing called Project RIGOR, where we took a bunch of tests in eighth grade and were sorted into different career tracks. I was in the "going to college, sci.tech track," which set the classes I could take in high school
Also, edited the post you replied to because of a typo. 1890.ev, not 1850.ev.
@drwho @irene @DeliaChristina seriously? wow. I had WWII covered at length in multiple history classes in california public schools, plus required reading pertaining to the holocaust in english classes. I was in school in the 90s and 00's
@gwenverbsnouns @drwho @DeliaChristina yeah we were taught in elementary school about the holocaust because we read the diaries of Anne Frank.
Oct 4, 2026, 9:19 PM@irene @gwenverbsnouns @DeliaChristina We read it in eighth grade (after one or two families tried to get the book banned and got their hands slapped soundly), but that was pretty much it. Nothing in the way of actual history talked about it.
@drwho Those families were probably nazis then, if you try to prevent people from learning about something bad that happened you probably want it to happen again @irene @gwenverbsnouns @DeliaChristina
Oct 5, 2026, 3:33 PM@sackofbones @irene @gwenverbsnouns @DeliaChristina With all the stuff that's happened since then? It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:25 PM@gwenverbsnouns @irene @DeliaChristina Seriously. I am not kidding.
I bring this up because it explains a great deal, vis a vis, some of how the US got into the fix it's in right now. When folks don't know what happened, they don't know it can happen again. And they don't know how to recognize when it starts all over again.
I suspect that for many, Nazis and World War II were this sort of backdrop thing in popular culture (i.e., Indiana Jones movies) and not Big History.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:26 PM@gwenverbsnouns @irene @DeliaChristina I was class of '96 in southwestern PA. _The Diary of Anne Frank_ was eighth grade English class for us in 1992, followed by _Johnny Tremaine_.
Oct 9, 2026, 10:40 PM@irene @drwho @DeliaChristina @gwenverbsnouns sorry to break it to you but I have not found that any grade school curriculum in the USA covers the geography, let alone the history of any other country in any depth. The inward focus of their education system is an abomination imho.
@Rickd6 @irene @drwho @DeliaChristina that's pretty true. there's some in world history for the part of the Western world which predates the US, but other than that we really only cover international events and places when the US is directly involved (and even that is through a heavily nationalistic lense)
probably the closest we get is in language classes, but it's still pretty shallow. like memorizing national capitols in south america for a spanish class
@gwenverbsnouns @Rickd6 @drwho @DeliaChristina in fourth grade, we memorized all the provinces/states and capitals of Canada and Mexico and all the countries and capitals of the other continents. Not sure how that was useful though ..
Oct 12, 2026, 3:15 PM@DeliaChristina @irene @gwenverbsnouns @drwho it wasn’t really but was easy to test. Knowing the people, the life circumstances or anything relatable is more difficult to test, but much more useful to life. Education as a business is simplistic rhetoric and memorizing.
Oct 12, 2026, 5:03 PM@Rickd6 @DeliaChristina @irene @gwenverbsnouns Especially if you're being educated to fulfill a specific role in a specific kind of environment.
Oct 13, 2026, 1:33 PM@drwho @DeliaChristina @irene @gwenverbsnouns that’s called job training not education- and should be fully funded by corporations not government.
@drwho
That's because you won honey. Victors don't generally have to interegate their past.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:38 PM@econads @irene @DeliaChristina This isn't "integrating the past," this is "not knowing there even is a past."
If you don't know what happened, you can't keep it from happening again.
@drwho
Yes but my point is that Germany was forced to confront and deal with it's crimes, hence setting up the education system and remembrance culture. US and UK never had to do that, so our crimes remain largely ignored.
Oct 5, 2026, 5:17 AM@irene @drwho @DeliaChristina It's the same across Germany, but it differs between school types. We got a very thorough history education in gymnasium (which is the pathway for university, and which your friends probably also went to). But the basic "Hauptschule" track which is four years shorter doesn't do a lot of history, for example.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:39 PM@irene @DeliaChristina I am not German. I'm USian and went to public school in southwestern Pennsylvania (graduated in 1996.ev).
@drwho @irene @DeliaChristina Yes. A considerable portion of our history classes were about WW2 and the rise of fascism. At least 15 years ago when I went to school.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:29 PM@PattaFeuFeu @irene @DeliaChristina In the sci.tech track I got sorted into, it was all European history (all the way up to AP level), and that ended at 1890.
@drwho
Are you joking? Atonement and remembrance has been a large part of German culture since then. Nie Wieder!
Why would you think it wasn't?
Edit sorry for the shouty ':)
Oct 5, 2026, 3:36 PM@econads @irene @DeliaChristina Note: I'm not German, I'm USian.
And I have no idea.The history textbooks we had never made it to World War I (that was college), let alone II. US history was also outside of the RIGOR track I was in (which was suspicious back then, to say the least).
The only thing that comes to mind is how much influence the Texas Board of Education has over textbook publishing (which is a whole and separate thing).
@drwho
It's a whole thing with the far right here arguing that the remembrance culture makes Germans feel guilty for something nearly no one now living had any influence over, which while technically correct of course deliberately misses the point that just because you didn't do it doesn't mean you don't have an obligation to make sure it doesn't happen again. Which I have to say a large part of Germany is absolutely failing at right now :(
They want to push it out because they want to repeat it.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:47 PM@econads @irene @DeliaChristina That explains a distressing number of things.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:37 PM@econads @irene @DeliaChristina tl;dr - No, I am absolutely not joking.
I talk about this because I suspect that it has a great deal to do with how things are turning out in the US. Those lessons were never learned by people my age, possibly younger than me. Which means that they don't recognize the signs, don't realize what they mean, and don't necessarily know that this is a bad thing.
@drwho
That's 100% the case with my native land, UK, as well right now. While I'm absolutely not advocating for authoritarian government I sometimes feel that Brits tends to be blasé about authoritarianism because we haven't really had any overt authoritarianism (I'm talking about jackboots disappearing people in the night, of course there's been repression of various movements) for about 500 years. There's a lot of "well that could never happen here". Which is naive beyond belief.
That said, the Germany that I thought was so awake to the dangers seems to be pretty laid back these days as well, so.
@drwho @econads @DeliaChristina yeah the US school system is so piecemeal because every state gets to decide what to teach. Now, we have Trump and his secretary of education explicitly trying to ban any history that makes the US look bad or they don’t like so it’s definitely getting worse. And yeah, if people aren’t educated, how can they vote?
@irene @DeliaChristina Really isn't helpful when you have some people going "that's not a Nazi/fascist" because they're not doing the whole heil thing with the armband. That's a fucking Nazi, don't know what to tell you and you're making excuses for them to be a Nazi.
@irene The reason they didn't tell you how to stop it is because they want fascism again, as fascism is what happens to capitalism when communism is introduced. The way you stop it is you drive out fascists from communities, punch them if you see them, throw rocks at them, that kind of thing. If all else fails you should have ye good ole gunz if your government hasn't taken them away from you, which is a bad thing to do btw. (Not american & my gov took them away from us mostly) @DeliaChristina
@irene Take some inspo from forebears, the black army did pretty well driving out invaders(which fascies are) until the red army decided to kill them all, though they did it a hundred years ago so maybe don't use a Maxim machine gun on the back of a horse and instead use, idk, an ak-47 or two on a motorbike.
@DeliaChristina
@irene @DeliaChristina I think pop culture trained us to see Hollywood-style Nazis: impeccably uniformed Aryan supermen. They failed to communicate the reality of fascism.
@irene
Didn't that dude get banned from that show for the song explaining in detail what to do?
@irene @DeliaChristina that's because #Germany criminalizes amy effective means to combat them!