One of the things that struck me hardest living in the United States was how blatantly Amerocentric their history lessons were. Suddenly I was learning about events that I had grown up hearing about from teachers and family in a new way. One of those things was WWII, a war both of my grandfathers, my step-grandfather, and most of my great uncles had fought in, stationed overseas in French and British bases. My grandfather came back having lost a brother and a best friend, so traumatized that it took him 70 years to come to a point where he could talk about what he witnessed – when he was 93 and suffering from dementia.
When I moved down south, I learned that while Canadians were taught that they and all of the Allied countries had important roles to play in the defeat of the Nazi regime, a common phrase in the US was, “if it wasn’t for us, [insert country here] would be ruled by Nazis.” How ironic, now, that the current president is almost apologetic for the Nazi movement underway in the US. But what’s most important here, is that Americans are four generations deep into anti-Nazi and pro-American democracy propaganda. The generations since WWII have had it drilled into their heads that they must fight Nazism and fascism at all costs; it’s what their fathers and grandfathers fought and died for. WWII soldiers are glorified to the highest degree in American mainstream culture for their defeat of a group that called for the extermination of all those who didn’t fit their Aryan and nationalist ideal. But when the new generation of Americans stands up against this exact ideology in 2017, instead of being called heroes by the president (and many, many other regular members of the US public – the same people who would probably tell me if it wasn’t for the US, Canada would be run by Nazis), they are called instigators, extremists and “Alt-Left.” This generation of anti-fascists is just doing what they’ve been told by their own history books is the right thing to do, while the fascist groups demonstrating for “white pride” and racist ideologies are being let off the hook for their blatant hate speech and promotion of ideals that literally run contrary to everything America says it’s about. They are standing up against fascism and Nazism, when maybe some people would prefer that they would just go shopping and have a BBQ to commemorate their forbears’ struggle.
Nazism/fascism/institutionalized racism were supposed to have been defeated in the mid-20th century. Clearly they were not, and clearly we need to stand united to oppose this cancer from spreading further. Here’s a post that stands as a reminder of how things ended for the neo-Nazi’s, KKK’s and Alt-Right’s heroes. Below you’ll find a gallery of rare photos of the corpses of the highest-ranking officials in the Nazi party. Some of these men were executed as traitors, some committed suicide as cowards – but they all died painfully, and the world celebrated. Whomever thinks their dream will live again should take a close look at these photos.
