I’m sure many think Nazis are evil, but don’t feel it viscerally. Which is a big difference.
I do recall when our father would not let us watch Hogan’s Heroes on TV. He said there is nothing funny about Nazis.
We should remember Communist crimes, but one of the whole points of genuine dispute is whether Communism, or the particularly worst Communist regimes, were any less evil than Fascism or the worst Fascist regime, the Nazi’s. The Nazi’s were evil in a special way as in unique obsessions, goals, means, but not everyone agrees ‘special’ as in worse.
Nazi’s v Communist tends to have a left v right aspect to it in the West, but a recent thread on this basically left forum seemed to predominantly feel the Japanese militarists were worse or at least no better than the Nazi’s. And that’s the heavily prevailing view in parts of Asia. The US/Western emphasis on the Nazi’s is partly culture-specific.
Yeah, but I think it was almost inevitable for that to happen.
Because they were so evil, they became everyone’s go-to example for Evil; and because of this, they became overexposed and a cliche.
Kind of like how even the vilest curse word can lose its ability to shock if you hear people use it every day in casual conversation.
I don’t know what metrics y’all are using in thread.
It is possible for society to consider Nazis evil and bad, but still embrace “grammar Nazi” and the like jokingly. Nazi is simply another, more accessible way of calling someone fascist. This doesn’t mean the connotation has diminished in severity; it means it has expanded to include more than white supremacy, antisemitism, and, xenophobia.
Before treating it as a given that the visceral impact has been lost, it first needs to be supported that it was ever there. What is the OP envisioning existed in the past, exactly? That it was almost verboten to say the word Nazi without speaking in hushed, fearful tones? That calling someone a Nazi was like calling a black person an n-word? I ask myself whether anyone could walk into a Starbucks with a t-shirt covered with unironic Nazi imagery and it NOT generate outrage in public and/or social media, and I think it’s highly unlikely. That’s my metric for “visceral impact”, and I’m pretty sure our society still has it.
That said, I do think a growing subset of the country has softened to the idea that Nazism is just a political belief system that should be tolerated just like any other. This subset would be apt to be more critical of those critical of the T-shirt wearer than the Nazi wearing the shirt.
I don’t know if it’s moving in one direction monotonically over time. ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ was mentioned. That wasn’t tolerating a belief system, but rather just not taking the whole thing seriously. But that show aired a lot closer in years to WWII than to now. Some people objected to the show at the time, but there’s no way you could get away with that as a premise for a comedy show now.
I think, even without passing judgement on the good or bad of it, it’s fairly obvious that today’s US society is a lot of more concerned with appearing at least to be ‘sensitive’ to a lot of things, and particularly to be seen loudly condemning socio-political evils (including things almost everyone agrees were evil, like the Nazi’s, though also things where a lot of people don’t agree it’s ‘evil’ rather than a legitimate difference of opinion) than it was 50 yrs ago. So distance in time from the WWII era is not the only factor.
I’m not including people so clueless they really don’t know what the Nazi’s (or Stalin or WWII) were in any real sense, even though that’s not a negligible % of people and is surely larger now than decades ago wrt WWII-era events. If people have just never learned about something, it’s a bit different situation.
If you mean the word, yes. Or people wouldn’t get upset at comparing people to them. It still definitely feels like a bad thing.
But people do seem to be becoming more accepting of the underlying beliefs, largely due to the effort of the alt-right to normalize it. They’ve successfully moved “freedom of speech” to the point where people will argue that actual Nazism is an acceptable position, and that any attempts to say it is wrong is attacking their freedom.
Thus the existence of cryptofascism. You promote fascist ideas, but you avoid anything that makes it clear you are a Nazi. Humor is a common technique to cover it up, pretending that you’re just being edgy. You can find real Nazis talking about these techniques. (The term for it, “Hide your power level,” is deliberately silly sounding to diffuse it.)
And the fact that people supported the President’s “both sides” comments shows how it’s actually working.
Also a cryptofascist technique that they have copped to when talking to people they think are on their side. They have been flat out told to hammer on the immigration thing. Their underlying purpose is to stop the outside increase of non-whites, as a first step towards creating a white nationalist state.
It is human nature to do this. It’s why so many Republicans who previously have stated views that are against those of Trump are now on his side. Because they are on his side about one thing. Hell, it’s why the abortion issue was able to turn so many Evangelicals into faithful Republicans.
I’ve said this about other atrocities of war. There are some groups and action that must never been forgotten or downplayed. We’re reaching the end of the generations that witnessed what the Nazi party did and endorsed.
One of the ironies of Hogan’s Heroes is that Robert Clary (LeBeau) was a holocaust survivor and was never shown wearing short sleeves because of his tattoo. Also Jon Banner (Sgt. Schultz) was Jewish (and enlisted in the U.S. Army) and “Both were Jews who had fled the Nazis before the outbreak of the war. “But John lost a lot of his family,” said Clary.” http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/24/entertainment/la-et-mn-classic-hollywood-robert-clary20130325
One of the reason the show was allowed to air was because they never showed the Nazis in a positive light. They were always the bumbling fools.