I’m just curious what people like Marco Rubio and Mark Zuckerberg, who are passively supportive of the installation of authoritarianism, would have learned at school about that period in Germany.
I’m asking this as that question and not as a leading question into a discussion on today’s politics.
What is the level of awareness the average American person in their 40s and 50s on how the Third Reich started?
School teaching of history has changed a lot since I was in K-12 … but at that time, I never had a history class that got so far as WW1. Yep. We spent months on the history of Europe from the Holy Roman Empire up to (barely) von Bismarck. That was it.
I suspect that was because teachers were staying away from any history that might be known to anyone who was actually alive. My daughter, on the other hand, had a teacher who spent months on the Vietnam War. I was glad to hear that.
OTOH, when TV was black and white, there was a whole series on WW2 created by the US army called The Big Picture, broadcast on hundreds of stations. Each of over 800 half-hour episodes were available to any TV station that would air them. So there was a time when ADULTS -could- learn that stuff … and no doubt many of those who lived through that era were curious what their relatives and friends died for.
I’m fairly sure that a lot of today’s elected politicians would have paid no attention to that stuff. Many of them move in a different mental culture than people who’ve lost relatives to the whims of dictators. And of course they’re sure they’re smarter than people were back then. Like the Prime Example.