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"The extensive overlap between the aims of the anti-democratic elites, including business leaders and the military, and those of the Nazis, ensured that however the great the distaste of elites for the violence of the Nazis, they were willing to go along with their destruction of democracy.”

#Hitler #EconomicElites #disinformation #propaganda #violence #democracy
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~ Ibid.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653631/hitlers-people-by-richard-j-evans/

“The Third Reich was one of the most male-supremacist regimes in history, valorizing a concept of hypermasculinity expressed through ‘toughness’ and ‘hardness.'”

~ Ibid., p. 356

#Hitler #ThirdReich #patriarchy #heterosexism #MaleEntitlement #masculinity #men #BroCulture
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“Yet although an extreme and frequently internalized understanding of masculinity lay at the heart of Nazism, the spectrum of perpetrators ranged far beyond the power-crazed, the authoritarian and the brutal. Most Germans who belonged to the educated middle classes, the so-called Bildungsbürgertum, comprising people with university degrees and professional status, welcomed the coming of the Third Reich and collaborated with the Nazi regime to the end."

~ Ibid., p. 358

#Hitler #MiddleClass
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“The Nazi regime created a framework that encouraged its followers, especially during the war, to commit acts that would have been unimaginable in other circumstances. The regime first dehumanized whole categories of people, including the mentally ill and handicapped, Slavs, Gypsies, petty criminals, the ‘asocial’ and the ‘work-shy,’ and above all, of course, Jews, then placed at the disposal of its followers means of violence normally beyond the reach of most people."

~ Ibid., p. 469

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@wdlindsy

Uhhh... the 'asocial'? As a weird introverted loner with very few friends this concerns me.

I got a Zyklon allergy.

@wdlindsy Please accept my apology for not treating the topic with sufficient gravity. I have a record of using inappropriate humor in the face of anxiety.

I gathered the quote referenced Nazi propaganda. I was reacting to how unspecific the categories became.

My takeaway was that the Nazi's cooked up categories to justify dehumanizing and exterminating anyone they arbitrarily decided they didn't like.

This suggested to me that all of us are threatened by the current batch of fascists.

@ThirteenthWorrier Those are good points. They were not clear to me in what you said previously. Thanks for clarifying and expanding on them.

@Npars01 Yes. Defining people as subhuman was absolutely indispensable to and necessary as a preliminary for what the Nazis did. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, they laid the foundations by voiding everyday language of its meaning and injecting sinister new meaning into words.

@mastodonmigration Thank you. I will listen with interest. I very much agree with your conclusion: "This is a sociological crisis that deserves much more recognition and attention."

@wdlindsy

Likewise very informative:

How men get trapped in the manosphere | Laura Bates at #AllAboutWomen

https://youtu.be/MZFkKDB5GkQ?si=cPw0RWJ03exlOl-1

FD Signifier

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4y0nR0E8pk4

@mastodonmigration Thank you — great, helpful links!

@wdlindsy

As someone who grew up during the 70s, and witnessed the destructive influence of cults on young people this is all very familiar.

@mastodonmigration Yes, definitely. I was a young adult then, and saw it happening from that perspective. The hard-right Catholic charismatic group in which Amy Coney Barrett grew up in New Orleans: I saw it at close hand, since I was a student there when it got started and got sucked into that movement for a few years before the scales fell from my eyes. It was — and there were other groups like this — an out-and-out cult, and it laid the foundation for so much that's happening now.

@cryptadamist Dorothy Thompson's essay is a gem. I'm glad it's getting renewed attention today.

@wdlindsy she literally profiled #JDVance 40 years before he was born

@cryptadamist Yes — prescient.