I’m just curious what people like Marco Rubio and Mark Zuckerberg, who are passively supportive of the installation of authoritarianism, would have learned at school about that period in Germany.
I’m asking this as that question and not as a leading question into a discussion on today’s politics.
What is the level of awareness the average American person in their 40s and 50s on how the Third Reich started?
We learned about Anne Frank and read Night in middle school. In high school we had separate classes for US, world, and European history. We covered the beer hall putsch, kristalnacht, Reichstag fire, that Hitler was given emergency powers, etc. WWI reparations and hyperinflation. Propaganda and Josef Goebbels “if you repeat a lie long enough, people will start to believe it”. Watched some of Triumph of the Will. We also had separate classes covering western philosophy which included Nitzche and how Nazis appropriated the will to power. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of the details. However I suspect this is more education than the average American receives.
I went to a school in the middle of nowhere Texas and learned only about half of what you did and it still was impressed upon us how terrible the nazis were. There’s no reason any American shouldn’t know that this is heading right back in that direction.
I received approximately the same education. Except without the last bit about philosophy. But I went to a decent school - I can’t speak for all Americans.