• Shezzagrad@lemmy.ml
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    8 days ago

    I get you’re joking, tho personally, I find the whole nazi thing stupid personally (tho in Scotland you wouldn’t be calling people Nazis unless to be funny). Also as I learn more about history, I see as simplifying the fact Nazis werent the only bad guys. The only technical good guy with the allies was kind of America (at least initially) all the European ally nations (specially, UK, France, Belgium and Netherlands) were all evil nations that did “nazi like things for longer and then more brutally” Bad enough, Britain had “operation legacy” to essentially burn or destory all colonial documentations of crimes. Are Nazis the bad guys because they uniquely awful and despicable? Or is because they killed white Europeans and wanted to create a new empire that opposed the hegemonic power of UK and France. The whole “we did it for the Jews” I don’t buy, the same Europe that persecuted them for years and had been banned or in ghettos in most nations. Do you really think they’d have such a war over a people they despise so much?

    • mhague@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Nazis were always like “normal people” in my mind. You might say any single one was nice, loved their family and pets and neighbors, made funny jokes and beautiful art, they’d give you the shirt off their back, invite you to a BBQ, stubbed their toes in pain like us, etc. They just had these certain traits where when stressed, they felt relieved by populist, xenophobic, masculine/warlike rhetoric, which snowballed.

      With that I’m probably more lenient towards people being called Nazis because I’m not looking for a literal 1:1 match anyways.

      I agree that we’re simplifying that era, feels like we’re taking a snapshot of a continuous process. Nazis (or other groups from other eras) are like the extremes or model specimen of how we perceive the period. Nazis were green as fuck in a green era, America was emerald, UK was lime, Japan was chartreuse, it just blends out to a spectrum.