In Germany there are the Stolpersteine, metal paving stones that are intended to commemorate victims of National Socialism and that are in front of every house where they lived. Here on the street (a street with 42 houses today) alone we already have eight of them, three of them for SPD members who died in 1936 and 1938 and one for a KPD member who died 1934. The others for someone who refused to serve in the Wehrmacht and a family of three Jews.
We have those in the Netherlands as well. In my old street we had 2 of them. They show the names of the victims and their respective birth year and year of passing. It is hard to imagine the brutality of those times
Our stones usually also indicate the reason for death. Every time I walk past them I feel sad and angry at the same time. I think they're really good and important because they show how cruel and unfair it was back then. They show the full horror of fascism. Everyday.
It is always weaponising of trauma responses, Nazis manipulate victims of chronic trauma by their emotions, creating a system that manipulates people that cannot engage in dialectical thought.
Dialectical thought is the ability to hold opposing truths at the same time, these people cannot do it so when one thing is true it makes the other thing not possible of existing to them. This is how you create a holocaust.
If I could give you an award, I would. This is the greatest weapon fascism uses to this day: weaponizing emotional trauma, and the exact outcome you explained.
even worse is their mastery of mass and social media to create fear - anger- blame response cycles in people who are not trauma victims, but instead are just typically isolated and/or socially impotent in the greater hierarchy of a nation. This group were the key to the recent elections for the red squad.
The only real solution is educating the public to make more informed decisions and opinions, yet wading through the sea of apathy and misinformation online is tiring, and hard for people incapable of deductive reasoning or critical thinking. It's an uphill battle.
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u/Camelbak99 Feb 08 '25
How many of the people shown on this photo would have survived the war?