We would often have long political & philosophical conversation, as I was studying International Relations, with an emphasis on Soviet Studies, both language & political history. This was c. 1993, JUST after the fall of the iron curtain.
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She would often talk about how, when her family left bombed out war torn Germany in 1949, she was dismayed at how despised she was for being German. She didn’t understand why Americans would be so rude to her family.
She said she was spit on by fellow elementary school students, that parents would tell their children not to play with her & her siblings. She said it was difficult for her father to find work right away, & that they were denied apartments more than once.
She said that her family knew what the Nazi’s had done, as there was a lot of news after the war, laying plain & clear the long list of atrocities. But what confounded her & her family was the idea that people were upset about it bc what else were they supposed to do?
It wasn’t until much later that they had the realization that the media, the Nazi propaganda, was what was false. The stories they had been told that made them support what happened was what was so confounding to outsiders. They didn’t realize they had been duped. They believed their news.
All of this to say, THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS. It’s not that there are a bunch of anti-semites, homophobes, & racists - there are - but that otherwise tolerant & open minded people are being fed a constant diet of lies by their media. This is why they hold the beliefs they hold.
This is not to dismiss the horrors. This is not to justify the support for truly disgusting, completely anti-democratic & often anti-human policies. But the source is the media. The source is social media. They have an entire generation & more under their spell.
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