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It was a cool evening this spring in Berlin, nearly eighty years after the end of the Second World War, and I was wandering near Tempelhofer Feld<\/a> with a friend. We slowed down as we approached what he had told me was the former site of a small camp for Eastern European forced laborers during the Third Reich.<\/p>\n On the main road in the distance, cars sped over Leinestra\u00dfe metro station, which had been used as an air raid shelter<\/a> as the Allies closed in on the capital city in the spring of 1945. We stopped to look at the monument which now stands on the site of the labor camp. It is sparse, modern, and sterile, so unlike the type of hell people must have suffered there. We were quiet until my friend asked me if I knew anyone who was in the war. The answer to that question, we agreed, has become something of a generational divide, one that is deeply reflected in each generation\u2019s political attitudes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Most older Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers are the children and grandchildren of the generation that watched fascism\u2019s first major moment on the global stage. But they didn\u2019t just live through the war. That same generation witnessed so many of the events that forged our modern world\u2014from the Nakba in Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel, to the end of colonialism in Syria and Vietnam, to early rumblings of independence across Africa, or, in the case of the family of my friend in Berlin, the British partition of India. To have a tangible connection to that era is, for many people, especially in the so-called West, their only connection to the struggles against fascism and colonialism, to a notion of solidarity and unity in the face of a great evil. But for many younger people, that period is, as columnist James Marriott wrote<\/a> in The Times<\/em> in late 2023, \u201cmore like history than current affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n In September 2020, a study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found<\/a> that 23 percent of young adults in the United States believed the Holocaust was \u201ca myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren\u2019t sure.\u201d About half of respondents reported seeing Nazi symbols and statements denying the Holocaust on social media. A July 2024 survey found evidence<\/a> that younger generations may be less concerned about anti-Jewish hatred when compared to older people, although there is no way to determine how their views may have been affected by Israel\u2019s genocide<\/a> in Gaza and its media campaign<\/a> to justify the current war using antisemitism to delegitimize pro-Palestine activists.<\/p>\n That reality aligns with a slight but important shift towards conservatism in Gen Z. A Gallup poll last year found<\/a> that \u201cGen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents than millennials were twenty years ago,\u201d with the biggest spikes among men and self-identified Republicans. Put differently, the more conservative members of Gen Z are trending further right.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A generational ignorance about the Holocaust\u2014arguably the most discussed<\/a> aspect of World War II\u2014raises the question of what else young people aren\u2019t being taught in school.\u00a0<\/p>\n Aaron Retish is a history professor at Wayne State University, as well as the chairperson of the board of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives<\/a> (ALBA), a nonprofit that offers lesson plans and other resources for educators to teach about the Spanish Civil War. Retish tells The Progressive<\/em> that while many younger people feel connected to the antifascist struggles of the 1930s and 1940s and \u201csee clear parallels to growing authoritarianism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia today to the fascist takeovers in Spain, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere,\u201d it is of course not the case for everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMany Americans do not have a clear understanding of why the United States joined the Allies to fight fascism in Europe,\u201d Retish explains. \u201cAs more people who fought fascism, either on the front lines in Europe or who supported the war on the home front, have died, their personal stories of why they fought have faded.\u201d And as schools devote less time to teaching the history of the World War II years, important context is being lost. \u201cMost students are not taught about the Spanish Civil War or that volunteers from across the world, including nearly 3,000 Americans, went to Spain to fight fascism.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I was born in the United States in 1988. Like many of my peers, I learned about the war from a patriotic perspective, with some lessons about the Holocaust and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But we never really learned the rest of the picture.\u00a0<\/p>\n And in answer to my dear friend\u2019s question, I did know someone who fought in the war. My paternal grandparents took care of my brother and me most days after school. My grandfather had been in the Polish army and spent the length of the conflict as a Nazi prisoner of war, working as a forced laborer. My grandmother witnessed World War II as a civilian in Ukraine and, later, in Poland and Germany. Our afternoons were steeped in wartime stories of whizzing bullets, lost siblings, and small acts of defiance. My grandparents\u2019 stories were a living part of my childhood. And they helped shed light on the true breadth of Nazi crimes in pursuit of a fascistic, white supremacist world\u2014crimes in addition to the horrors of the Holocaust and the mass murder of six million Jewish people.\u00a0<\/p>\n Among the earliest victims<\/a> of Nazi terror were communists, socialists, and other antifascists. Concentration camps were established<\/a> to detain the political opponents of the Nazis, as well as \u201calleged \u2018anti-socials\u2019 and \u2018criminals,\u2019 \u201d which, under Nazi laws, included gay men. Even their efforts to get ordinary Germans to accept the persecution of their Jewish neighbors hinged on portraying<\/a> Jewish people as criminals who required removal from society in the name of public safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s part of what makes World War II unique, according to Derborshi Chakraborty, a doctoral candidate in history who studies fascism and nationalism at the Free University of Berlin.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Second World War was unparalleled in human history,\u201d Chakraborty explains. \u201cIt was a battle of different ideologies, and these different ideologies had different interpretations of history and visions for the future,\u201d which in the case of fascism, meant that it \u201ccategorized and subcategorized human beings in different strata,\u201d with white Germans at the top. He cites British historian Roger Griffin\u2019s definition of fascism<\/a> as any nationalist ideology that leans on the idea of a \u201cglorified, golden past,\u201d as well as the creation of a \u201cgeneric enemy\u201d that must be eliminated so \u201cthat glory of the past can be restored.\u201d And that generic enemy shifts depending on the movement: Antisemitism, for example, does not play the same role in contemporary European far-right movements as it did in the 1930s, and many international fascist movements are rooted in other forms of hate.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf we look at the fascists in South Asia, their generic enemy is very different from the Nazis; their generic enemy are the Muslims, and they believe that they have hindered the Indian or the Hindu nationalist past from regaining its glory in the present,\u201d Chakraborty explains. In order to truly understand and address fascism today, he continues, <\/strong>\u201cWe have to liberate the history of fascism from the history of the Second World War.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The Nazis saw Jews, Poles, other Slavs, Roma and Sinti, the disabled, the mentally ill, Black people, so-called Aryans of mixed heritage, homosexuals, and dissidents all as part of the Untermenschen<\/em>, or the subhuman classes. Just as the Nazis did not begin their regime with the \u201cfinal solution\u201d against the Jewish peoples of Europe\u2014their earliest policies included encouraging<\/a> \u201cvoluntary\u201d self-deportation to Palestine and elsewhere\u2014they were not able to realize the full extent of their ethnic cleansing campaigns against other Untermenschen<\/em>, although millions of them were murdered<\/a> between 1933 and 1945. Many of us in the United States today would have found ourselves, or at least a loved one, on the long list of \u201cundesirables.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I loved my grandfather immensely. With his blue eyes and blonde hair, most U.S. Americans would have been pressed to distinguish him from a German. Fewer still would have placed him or any other Polish person outside the bounds of whiteness. Yet even the typically \u201cAryan\u201d phenotypes of Poles like him were not enough to protect them from Nazi persecution. Take, for example,\u00a0 a 1939 pamphlet, \u201cPOLEN ODER POLLACKEN? (Poles or Polacks?)\u201d that accused Polish people of trying to erase German culture and values, while the cover of an\u00a0 anti-race-mixing propaganda book read<\/a>: \u201cPolish blood terror. An eternal warning.\u201d The Nazis carried out their first attempts to use gas as a tool of mass murder in Pozna\u0144<\/a>, Poland, on patients from nearby psychiatric hospitals. The camp in Pozna\u0144 was also used early in the war to imprison and torture members of the region\u2019s anti-Nazi resistance<\/a>, from clergy to middle school teachers.\u00a0<\/p>\n The defining factor of fascism, though, is its anti-democratic character. \u201cEveryday democracy, and democratic and fundamental rights, for example, freedom of expression, press freedom . . . all of these things are very much violated in all fascist regimes,\u201d Chakraborty tells The Progressive<\/em>. \u201cIf you look at Nazi Germany or Mussolini\u2019s Italy, one of the casualties was the free press and the journalists and intellectuals who were trying to crop up some kind of resistance through their writings, through publishing. They were imprisoned and executed by these regimes.\u201d<\/p>\n The Second World War, Chakraborty says, \u201cwas actually an anti-fascist war. And that is why a spectrum of very different ideologies,\u201d which were often at odds with one another before the war, \u201cactually came together to fight the fascists by bringing up a united front.\u201d That\u2019s why it\u2019s critical, he says, to identify the \u201cfascists of today\u201d and build alliances that \u201ccan actually fight these ideologies.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A growing number of political analysts argue the United States<\/a> and the world<\/a> are witnessing a boom in far-right<\/a> and fascist politics. Their adherents are forging global alliances in their struggle for political influence, as University of Oslo professor sociology Katrine Fangen told Deutsche Welle<\/em><\/a> in February: \u201cThese networks are not only fighting for . . . cultural hegemony. Their ultimate goal is to reshape the global ideological landscape in favor of nationalism, social conservatism, and opposition to liberal democracy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For his part, Retish agrees on the importance of unity as the best strategy to defeat any fascist surge: \u201cThe political and economic moment is renewing popular interest in the 1930s and what it took to stop fascism. It took coalitions . . . standing up to a violent state and its supporters and fighting for what is right.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was a cool evening this spring in Berlin, nearly eighty years after the end of the Second World War, and I was wandering near Tempelhofer Feld with a friend. We slowed down as we approached what he had told me was the former site of a small camp for Eastern European forced laborers during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":231723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[37809,16930,23524,59167,58126,46470,3739],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-231722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-antifascist","tag-dispatches","tag-fascism","tag-neo-nazis","tag-nyki-duda","tag-progressive-org","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\n