How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler

nevernewyear:

kmnml:

annetdonahue:

youngblackfeminist:

valeria2067:

glorious-spoon:

giandujakiss:

So the Smithsonian posted this an hour ago.  Just because.

The Smithsonian is pulling no punches.

“But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed The Washington Post.

Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.”

We are literally. Repeating history.

WE ARE ACTUALLY REPEATING HISTORY. The parallels are terrifying and they are very, very real. 

Read “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson. It’s a good 101-course in this complete and total clusterfuck.

Sigh.

Our entire lives we have normalized Nazi ideals and leadership, turning them into a joke and relic of the past. Now that we are seeing these parallels, so many people choose to ignore them, and see this movement just as ridiculous and comical as we have portrayed them in the media for the past 70 or so years. So many people say never forget the holocaust, but so many others have never stopped to think about what that means.