upworthy

fascism

History (Education)

1981 Afterschool Special, 'The Wave', still holds up with its lessons about fascism

The chilling story was based on a real high school experiment.

Image by Elias from Pixabay

"The Wave" demonstrates how easy it is to pull people into fascism.

"What are you watching?" my 13-year-old son asked.

"An old Afterschool Special," I responded.

"What's an 'Afterschool Special'?" he asked.

Hoo boy. Kids these days have no idea how different television was for those of us who grew up in the '80s or how many core memories we have wrapped up in the ABC Afterschool Special.

I briefly explained and then he sat down to watch with me. It was 2022. A discussion about fascism on X had led me to look up "The Wave," a 1981 ABC Afterschool Special based on a real-life high school experiment in Palo Alto, California, in 1967.

In the real experiment, first-year history teacher Ron Jones had students at Cubberley High School engage in a simulation of how fascism spreads as part of a lesson on World War II, with him playing the role of the dictator. His intent was to show skeptical students how the Nazis came to power by creating a social movement he dubbed the Third Wave.

afterschool special, family, kids, specials, afterschool programmingFamily watching television. Image via Canva.

"It started out as a fun game with the most popular teacher at school," Mark Hancock, one of the students in Jones' history homeroom class, told Palo Alto Online in 2017. "He told us, 'If you're an active participant, I'll give you an A; if you just go along with it, I'll give you a C; if you try a revolution, I'll give you an F, but if your revolution succeeds, I'll give you an A.'"

Hancock said he started off planning to get that revolution A, but it quickly grew beyond grades and turned into something real. "At the end, I was scared to death," he shared.

It began with Jones rallying the students around the idea of "strength through discipline" and "strength through community." He had them engage in regimented behaviors and handed out membership cards. At first, it was just fun, but students began to enjoy feeling like part of a special community. Jones pushed the importance of following the rules. The students even formed a "secret police" to monitor other students, and if someone broke a Third Wave rule, they'd be reported and publicly "tried" by the class.

The students got wrapped up in it to a frightening degree and even Jones found himself enjoying the way the students responded to him. "It was pretty intoxicating," he told Palo Alto Online.

But according to Verde Magazine, Jones felt like he'd lost control of it by the fourth day.

The experiment ended at the end of the week with a rally. Jones told the students they were actually part of a real national Third Wave movement and that the national leader was going to speak to them at the rally. Jones turned on the televisions to white static and watched the students eagerly wait for their leader to speak. That's when he broke the news to them that they'd fallen for a totalitarian regime. Instead of a Third Wave leader speech, he played them a video of a Nazi rally.

Nazi rally, history, fascism, nazi germany, nazism Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, September 8, 1938.Image via Canva.

According to a school newspaper at the time, most students were disillusioned. But one student said, "It was probably the most interesting unit I've had. It was successful in its goal to achieve the emotions of the Germans under the Nazi regime."

"The Wave" follows the true story quite closely and still holds valuable lessons. One chilling scene shows a kid who had been sort of an outcast prior to the "movement" saying, "For the first time, I feel like I'm a part of something great." He was particularly crushed to find out it was all a fascist facade.

As is the cyclical nature of history, "The Wave" and what it can teach us is especially relevant today. According to NPR, "a survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism." The benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, had "U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy from zero (dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy)," noted NPR. "After President Trump's election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump's second term, that figure plummeted to 55."

John Carey, co-director of Bright Line Watch and a professor of government at Dartmouth, summed up the matter by saying, "We're moving in the wrong direction."

Since President Trump's election in November, various publications worldwide have suggested that much of Trump's rhetoric echoes that of Nazi Germany, with some pointing out parallels between each administration's first 100 days in office. Other publications have criticized the comparison.

At any rate, this afterschool special is incredibly timely. If you can get past the '80s aesthetic, it's worth watching. Even my teen kids got into it, once they stopped making fun of the hair and film quality.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

This article originally appeared three years ago. It has been updated.

From Your Site Articles
fascism
Badge
Lawyers' Committee
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights
Most Shared

Here's what one Holocaust survivor has to say about the rise of the Antifa movement.

At a recent anti-hate rally in Berkeley, Joey Gibson, leader of the extreme right-wing, white supremacist group, Patriot Prayer, strolled directly in front of me, his three burly bodyguards in tow.

A few people nearby pointed him out, shouting his name.

I had an immediate visceral reaction to the sight of this man, whom I consider to be a neo-Nazi. To my eyes, Gibson and his men were angling for conflict; their swagger left no doubt.

And I stood there shaking, my homemade sign in hand. "Hate speech leads to Holocaust," it read.

I am an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor.

We learned that the young men and women around us, dressed in all black, were trained not to engage in confrontations, except to protect demonstrators like us if we were attacked by white supremacists like Gibson.

It was my first encounter with Antifa, the movement comprised of young militant antifascists who have been vilified in some of the media for their tactics.

So even though I was afraid of Gibson and his thugs, I felt comforted — not by the presence of any police officer that day, but by the presence of the Antifa. I feel gratitude to these young people for being our first line of defense, for being willing to stand up to the hateful actions of neo-Nazis and white nationalists like Gibson.

I know from experience what it feels like not to feel protected.

And I've seen firsthand the impact hate speech, under the guise of free speech, can have. As a child in Nazi Germany, I saw young boys and girls being indoctrinated into becoming mass murderers of their neighbors. Later I learned how grown men, destroyed by fear, were rendered incapable of protecting their loved ones. I learned that a crowd could be moved to heinous actions.

From the time I was 5, I was told never to mention that our mother was Jewish. This was about the time my half-sister, my father's oldest daughter from his first marriage, unexpectedly came to live with us. She had seen her mother and stepfather violently removed from their home, never to be seen again.

When I was 8, two sinister-looking Gestapo, the secret Nazi police, knocked on the door of our makeshift bomb shelter, a converted coal cellar. Berlin was under the final heavy bomb attacks of the Allied Forces. And the men had demanded that my mother accompany them, threatening to set their dog on her and shoot her if she tried to escape.

Everybody in the cellar with us that day knew that my mother's only crime in life was being a Jew, defined not by her profession of a given religious preference but by racial law.

Yet no one dared to speak up for this mother of three young children.

Nobody said a word of encouragement as she was torn away from her children. Nobody demanded these men desist from sending one more Jew to her death in a concentration camp.

The time without our mother seemed endless. We were scared and hungry in that poorly lit, cold, uncomfortable cellar. Some of the neighbors had told us my mother would never return, and they had begun to discuss with which of them each of us children would have to live.

My mother managed to escape and come back to us. But for the rest of my life, I have remembered the fear that crept over me as I faced the possibility of never seeing her again.

Soon, the bombing ceased and the Soviet Army liberated our neighborhood. But I saw the photos in the newspapers of some of the millions who had not been as lucky as we had, those who had had no one to protect them.

I could not trust that such an experience would not repeat itself.

In 1947, my mother, my younger brother and I immigrated to Venezuela and learned there what life was like under a long military Latin American-style dictatorship. Once again, I saw how some people were scared and read how some were detained, deported, and even killed. Again, I was not sure who would defend us if something happened to our family.

And when I came to study in the U.S. in 1955, in what I had erroneously believed was the cradle of freedom, I had a real-life crash course in the lack of civil rights for people of color, the murderous laws still prevalent in many Southern states, and the education, employment, and housing discrimination in the North.

I later learned a startling truth: that the racial laws of the Nazis, which categorized me as a "Jew of the Second Degree" (due to my Jewish mother and Gentile father), were based on U.S. race laws. I had fallen for some of the powerful propaganda this country disseminates abroad through its mass media.

But I woke up and got involved. I learned to speak up and organize for civil rights, against the war in Vietnam and, later, against the many invasions of other countries and ongoing discrimination.

And now here I am, more than 70 years after walking out of that dank cellar in a Berlin neighborhood, faced once again with neo-Nazis spewing and spreading their hate and beliefs about white supremacy.

Far too many people in this country are still excluded and even killed for reasons that were used during World War II to send populations to the gas chambers. We don't have official concentration camps as such in the U.S. (anymore), but the prison-industrial complex is thriving and ever-expanding immigrant detention centers are crowded and inhumane.

So, yes, I am scared of what fascists can do. I have little confidence that local police — ever more heavily armed with military weaponry and unskilled in dealing with the vulnerable in our societies — will protect those confronted by neo-Nazis.

Make no mistake, these neo-Nazis and white supremacists are serious.

The 2017 murders in Portland and Charlottesville demonstrate that.

In Europe, different generations of young antifascists committed to preventing acts of violence to vulnerable populations, resurface from time to time.

I feel comforted by the fact that these young antifascists exist here in the U.S., too.

This story originally appeared in YES! Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.

From Your Site Articles
More

20 badass, hilarious, and surprising ways people have fought Nazis.

For as long as there have been Nazis, people have been fighting Nazis.

Kicking Nazi ass is not only American as apple pie, it is the basis of our greatest foreign policy triumph, the subject of our most satisfying movies, and the reason the History Channel still exists.

From 1939 until 1945, the United States, British, and Soviet militaries tried to solve the Nazi problem by dropping bombs on them from various airplanes.

[rebelmouse-image 19530681 dam="1" original_size="700x441" caption="The OG Antifa. Photo by U.S. Air Force/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]The OG Antifa. Photo by U.S. Air Force/Wikimedia Commons.

Sending explosives plummeting from way high up directly onto Nazis down below worked pretty well for a while. Nearly 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany and German-occupied territories during World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of Nazis.

Unfortunately, this method also wound up killing a lot of civilians, prisoners of war, resistance fighters, house cats, and random guys named Gerhard who happened to be standing near Nazis at the time. It also turns out to be super inappropriate for peacetime. Not to mention, it didn't totally work because here we are in 2017: There are still Nazis. And we're still arguing about how to fight them.

When tiki torch-wielding fascists come to town, are "many sides" to blame when fists start to fly? How free is free speech when one side is calling for the extermination of the other? Should violence be answered with more violence? Nazis aren't known to respond to reason, but vigilantism icks most of us out. And who gets to define who is and is not a Nazi anyway? Is there some kind of Google form?

If history teaches us anything, it's that Nazis don't go away unless someone fights back. And violence isn't the only way (although, reviewing the record, it turns out to be one of the main ways) to resist them.

Here are 20 alternate, yet no less effective, ways people have fought against, and mostly defeated, Nazis throughout history:

1. A town in Germany refused to let neo-Nazis win by turning their marches into involuntary walkathons.

Every year for decades, neo-Nazis marched through the German town of Wunsiedel. Every year, residents tried to ignore them or counter-march, neither of which worked. In 2014, however, the town's anti-fascist majority finally got to the Nazis by raising some serious money off their parade. For every kilometer the Nazis walked, business owners and donors in the town pledged cash to the EXIT Germany Initiative, an NGO that de-Nazifies Nazis.

Hundreds turned out to cheer the Nazis on as they subverted their own agenda step by step. The approach was so successful that it spread to other be-Nazi'd communities around the world. More importantly, it made about 200 Nazis feel really (and appropriately) dumb.

Of course, when it comes to confronting fascists, not everyone has the wit of a poet and the patience of a saint. Which is why...

2. An unknown activist straight-up punched prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face.

Perhaps the most famous of all the methods of anti-Nazi combat was famously deployed by an anonymous Black Bloc protester against white nationalist icon Richard Spencer on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration. While Spencer denies being a Nazi, he has been known to throw off a suspiciously Nuremberg Rally-esque speech every now and again, complete with shouty paeans to ethnic solidarity and athletic audience heils.

The masked anarchist in question decided to punch him just to be safe.

It is important to note that, as repellant as modern-day Nazis (whether full-on or pseudo-) may be, this writer in no way endorses violence, which is Not The Answer and Never Funny. Indeed, no part of Richard Bertrand Spencer getting decked in the temple is remotely amusing. Not the fact that the punch lands just as Spencer is about to launch into a serious analysis of the symbolism of his cartoon frog lapel pin. Not one of the dozens of remixes showing the protester's fist connecting with Spencer's face at the exact moment the beat drops in a popular song. Not Spencer whining about being humiliated online forever.

Not one bit.

3. In 2015, a guy in South Carolina made KKK marchers look silly by playing a jaunty tuba song while they marched down the street.

When it comes to giving Nazism that down-home spin, no one beats the Ku Klux Klan, a group that takes fascism, smothers it in white gravy, and serves it with a side of cheesy grits and a red-white-and-blue garnish. Back when South Carolina was debating removing the Confederate flag from its state capitol grounds in 2015, a group of klansmen tried to dissuade them by spending the morning of July 18 marching menacingly down the streets of Columbia.

Menacingly, that is, until a man named Matt Buck decided to follow them with a tuba and make them look ridiculous.

"I didn't really know how to show my opposition," Buck told Charleston City Paper following his savage sousaphone-ing of the group. "So that was my way of doing it."

4. A Jewish partisan in the Polish backcountry inconvenienced a group of Nazis by burning down a bridge they were using during WWII.

For many of the brutalized, pissed-off civilians trapped behind German lines during World War II, nothing beat skulking around the woods making life difficult for as many Nazis as possible. One such skulker, Gertrude Boyarski, recalled in a 2013 interview with the Jewish Partisan Education Fund how she gleefully set a bridge — used heavily by the local Nazis — on fire as a holiday present to the Russian government.

Illustration by Tom Eichacker.

The Nazis shot at her for her trouble, (Nazis basically have two settings: off and shooting) but thankfully missed and proceeded to not have a bridge.

5. A group of Czech musicians drowned out neo-Nazi protesters with an impromptu concert.

At a rally in Brno, Czech Republic, in May 2017, 150 marching neo-Nazis were upstaged by nearly twice the number of counter-protesters holding a spontaneous open-air open mic at the same time.

Posted by BRNO Blokuje on Monday, May 1, 2017

Fun fact: An impromptu anti-Nazi music festival is the one situation where it's OK to root for a guy in a fedora playing acoustic guitar.

6. A band of concentration camp prisoners blew up one of Hitler's death factories.

On Oct. 7, 1944, a group of prisoners at Auschwitz revolted against the camp's guards, killing several by detonating a pile of gunpowder (which they'd been smuggling for months) in one of the camp's crematoria, destroying it.

The Nazis ultimately shot and hanged them all, as Nazis are wont to do, but eternal respect for a group of fighters willing to sacrifice their lives under the most inhuman conditions to inconvenience Nazis, even for a moment.

7. After WWII, Germany fought Nazis with bureaucracy, fining them for their political views.

Here in the land of the free, separated from the most dangerous Nazi stuff by two very large oceans, we mostly let Nazis say what they want. Being a Nazi — so long as you don't round up and kill anyone (hard for Nazis!) — is more or less protected by the First Amendment.  

In other countries, particularly those that have had a more up close and personal relationship with Nazis, things are a little different.

The Reichstag building in Berlin. Photo by Tobias Schwarz/Getty Images.

Take Germany, for instance. Nazis have been a bit of an issue in Germany in the past — so the country up and made saying Nazi things illegal. Penalties can include an arrest and a fine, which two Chinese tourists found out the hard way this summer, after deploying "heil Hitler" salutes in front of the historic Reichstag building in Germany.

It's not very free speech-y. It's also only enforced sometimes. To that end...

8. A gang of German counter-protesters formed a blockade, preventing neo-Nazi marchers from getting where they were trying to go.

In August 2017, a group of about 500 German neo-Nazis attempted to march to the former site of Spandau prison, where former mega-Nazi Rudolph Hess died by suicide 30 years earlier. They got about half a mile in before they were "forced to turn back" by counter-protesters blockading their route.

While it may seem surprising that a group of violence-extollin' Nazis let a few civilians stand between them and the ultimate triumph of the Aryan master race, it does make a certain sense. Historically speaking, other than perpetrating the mass murder of millions, giving up is what Nazis do best.

9. During the war, a secret cadre of German communists sabotaged Nazi warships.

Nazis on land are bad. Put Nazis on the high seas and you're asking for a swift torpedo to the national welfare. That's why, despite incredible risk and over the likely objections of everyone who wanted their heads to remain bullet-free, Bernhard Bästlein and Franz Jacob spent the early years of World War II organizing Hamburg shipyard workers to resist Nazi rule and slow down production.

Most members of the group were arrested and executed before they could accomplish much, but the principle they died for — never letting a Nazi get on a boat with guns — lives on.

10. A Swedish woman became an icon when she hit a group of skinheads with her handbag.

In 1985, a group of skinheads set out to terrorize the Swedish town of Vaxjo. They hoped to cow the locals into silence. Instead, a local woman, Danuta Danielsson, whose mother had survived Auschwitz decades earlier, ran up to one of the demonstrators and smacked him with her purse.

The photo of Danielsson's pocketbook strike became so legendary that, in 2014, a Swedish artist proposed building a monument to the swatting. The town, however, declined, fearing such a statue would glorify violence.  

[rebelmouse-image 19530684 dam="1" original_size="700x441" caption="Thwack. Photo by Hans Runesson/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Thwack. Photo by Hans Runesson/Wikimedia Commons.

Thus, the debate over who is worse, Nazis or the people who hit them with soft household objects continued to infinity.

11. A team of Israeli secret agents tackled Adolf Eichmann when he got off the bus from work and extradited him to face trial for war crimes.

The practical downside to committing a bunch of crimes against humanity means somebody might sneak up on you when you least expect it and make you pay for them. That's what happened to Eichmann one evening in May 1960. The infamous Nazi functionary had facilitated the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, resulting in the murder of up to 400,000 people. Since the war, he'd been living in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement.

Or at least he was until Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel, pulled up in front of his house, stuffed him in a car, tied his hands and feet, and snuck him onto a commercial flight back to Israel, where he was, unsurprisingly, found guilty of crimes against  humanity and eventually hanged.

The world is complicated, however, and most Nazis aren't as notorious as Eichmann. To try to push past that...

12. A relentless Nazi hunter tracked down a most-wanted Nazi war criminal in his retirement community.

Consider the case of Gerhard Sommer. The top man on the Wiesenthal Center's 2015 "Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals" list, the former SS officer allegedly helped murder over 500 men, women, and children in the Italian village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema as the Germans retreated through the area in August 1944. Despite overwhelming evidence placing Sommer at the scene, prosecutors in Germany recently declared the 93-year-old unfit for trial, citing advanced dementia.

Soon after, Nazi hunter Jurgen Kolb decided to track him down in his nursing home.

Thankfully, Kolb took a few reporters from Cracked — a magazine known for its sneakily ambitious journalism — along for the ride. He told them he believes that Sommer is faking his dementia. The group followed a string of clues, ultimately locating the aged accused war criminal in a senior citizens facility.

"All we can do now is update where he is living and that he's still alive," Jurgen told the reporters in an interview. Still, in the grand scheme of making Nazis' lives bad, ensuring one spends the rest of his life looking over his shoulder ain't a terrible consolation prize.

13. A ballet dancer brought to Auschwitz reportedly killed a Nazi officer after distracting him by stripping.

On Oct. 23, 1943, a group of female prisoners, including Polish Jewish dancer Franceska Mann, were brought to a room adjacent to the Auschwitz gas chambers and ordered to disrobe.

What happened next is unclear. Some accounts claim that Mann stripped off her clothes "provocatively," distracting the guards. Most accounts claim that Mann proceeded to grab an officer's gun, shooting him dead and wounding another guard before the Nazis were able to regroup and return fire, killing the prisoners.

Regardless of how it happened, some of the Nazis who were trying to murder them got dead first.

Of course, over the next two years, Nazis continued to try to kill people all over Europe. Which is why it turned out great that...

14. A British spy stole Nazi military secrets, delaying production of dangerous weapons.

Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens had two things going for her when the Nazis invaded France: She spoke fluent German and she was a tiny lady. After leveraging her size and gender to convince a bunch of Nazi officers she couldn't possibly be a threat, she managed to convince them to tell her where they were building their cool new rocket weapon, and she relayed that information to British intelligence. The Brits proceeded to drop bombs on those places, delaying production of the V-1 and V-2 rockets and saving countless lives.

Unlike many of the Nazis she hoodwinked, Rousseau de Clarens lived to the ripe old age of 98, being small and rejoicing in humiliating Nazis till the end.  

15. A 70-year-old German woman denies neo-Nazis a public platform by scratching out and painting over their graffiti.

Since the 1980s, Berlin resident Irmela Schramm has been waging a one-woman battle against swastikas, far-right propaganda, and fascist slogans scrawled on public property.

Her weapons? Nail polish remover, a scraper, and spray paint. The goal? To shut neo-Nazis the hell up.

Photo by John MacDougall/Getty Images.

"People tell me I am intolerant, that I don't respect the far-right's freedom of speech," she told CNN. "But I say: Freedom of speech has limits. It ends where hatred and contempt for humanity begins."

Nazis, however, don't always express their "hatred and contempt for humanity" in passive-aggressive artwork, which is why...

16. Vidal Sassoon and a group of Jewish war veterans engaged post-WWII Nazis in guerilla-style street fights.

Late-1940s England had a problem. Despite suffering through a six-year-long, knock-down drag-out brawl with Hitler and co., the country was somehow, against all odds, still full of Nazis. For obvious reasons, British Nazi leader Oswald Mosley (in Britain, even Nazis are named like third-tier Harry Potter villains) spent the later war years hiding out in Ireland. The year after it wrapped, however, a group of Mosley's followers began begging him to return to London to get the old civilian-threatening, Jew-slandering, immigrant-hating band back together.

In response, a band of British Jewish ex-servicemen, who had fought tooth and nail through Europe only to return to this baby fascist BS, began organizing to disrupt their rallies and shout down their propaganda — but mostly to beat the living crap out of them in the middle of the road.

One of those enthusiastically participating in the crap-beating was the group's most WTF member, Vidal Sassoon. Before he became famous for that bottle of two-in-one conditioner that's been sitting, three-quarters empty, in your mom's shower stall since 1993, the Jewish-British Sassoon was infamous for putting the hurt on British Nazis. The world-renowned hairdresser described the aftermath of one such brawl in a 2008 interview with the BBC.

"I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise — it had been a difficult night the night before — and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?'" Sassoon recalled. "And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.'"

Apparently, "I kicked some Nazis teeth in. Your move, Pert Plus," would have been a tad gauche for the polite stylist. Nonetheless, credit where due.

17. A world-famous comedian literally danced on Hitler's grave.

Illustration by Tom Eichacker.

In 1958, Groucho Marx decided to spend a little bit of that sweet founding-father-of-modern-film-comedy cash to take his friend, daughter, and family babysitter Judith Dwan Hallet to Dornum, Germany, to visit the graves of his grandparents. The group arrived at the cemetery only to discover that the area where they were buried, the Jewish section, had been destroyed.

A few days later, Marx asked his chauffeur to drive the travelers to the ruins of the bunker where Hitler had died.

Hallet described what happened next in a 2012 interview with MentalFloss:

"When they arrived, Hallet said, it was as if the war had happened the day before. Nothing had been cleaned up or repaired; piles of rubble made the landscape look positively post-apocalyptic. The ruins of the Führerbunker were about 20 feet tall, but Groucho climbed to the top and proceeded to perform what Hallet called 'a frenetic Charleston, for at least a minute or two, in a gesture of defiance.' When he was done, the legendary comedian requested that they leave Germany the next morning."

"The fun was gone," Hallet concluded, bafflingly denying the obvious reality that nothing, not bingo, not Yahtzee, not an indoor water slide, not a three week Disney World vacation, not a marathon of every single Marx Brothers movie ever made could be more fun than doing the jaybird step on the smoldering remains of the guy who basically invented Nazis.

18. An American suburb used Nazi rallies to gin up public support for anti-Nazi monuments.

The infamous 1977 neo-Nazi march through the predominately Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, did not only inspire a fierce debate over the scope of the First Amendment. It also inspired an iconic "Blues Brothers" scene.

It also also inspired residents to make sure as many people as possible were as informed as possible about who Nazis really are. Fallout from the march led members of the community to band together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, which helped complete the town's Holocaust Museum and Education Center in 2011.

19. Thousands of Holocaust survivors shame and resist Nazi ideology every day just by continuing to exist.

In the course of a half-decade, Nazis managed to systematically murder 12 million human beings. And yet, thanks to a timely military defeat, helped along by many of the acts listed above, many of the people Nazis tried to kill not only survived, but kept on surviving for decades after the fact. As of 2016, there were only about 100,000 Holocaust survivors left living. Still, that's 100,000 more than Nazis hoped there would be nearly 70 years after their extermination plan failed.

[rebelmouse-image 19530687 dam="1" original_size="700x476" caption="Students participate in the March of the Living in Poland. Photo by Yossi Zeliger/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Students participate in the March of the Living in Poland. Photo by Yossi Zeliger/Wikimedia Commons.

These survivors wound up becoming the key adopters of perhaps the most crucial Nazi fighting method of all:

20. Survivors and their descendants keep telling the truth about who Nazis really are and why it's important to stop them before it's too late.

Being a Nazi in 2017 requires believing, against all evidence, that the Nazis weren't all bad. For modern-day aspiring Goebbles, Hesses, and Goerings to accomplish that, minimizing the Holocaust or pretending it never happened, is plan A, B, and Z. With each passing of a survivor, that becomes easier.

With each person who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust telling their story or person teaching in their memory, it becomes harder to deny.

"It puts the responsibility on us, the next generation, the children of survivors, the grandchildren of survivors, to become as articulate as we can be in maintaining this memory and the mandate that comes with it," Michael Zank, 58, the director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University, told Time in 2016.

Thankfully, you don't have to look very hard to find folks maintaining the memory. There's the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has an extensive, thorough education program on its website. Or the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, which chronicles the activities of the Jewish guerillas who fought Nazis behind enemy lines and teaches tactics for resisting fascism. Or the annual March of the Living or Classrooms Without Borders, which takes educators and students to Poland to meet with survivors and learn about Nazi atrocities firsthand.

It's not as flashy as an outdoor concert, a street brawl, or a handbag slap, but it's necessary. Because, inevitably...

Sooner or later, everyone who witnessed the atrocities the Nazis unleashed on the world will be gone.

Whether their ideology dies first or becomes human history's most ill-conceived reboot, that's up to the rest of us.

When it comes to fighting Nazis, you rarely get to pick the time and place.

For those of us alive in 2017, it's becoming clearer that's here and now.

Who's got a tuba?

Illustration by Tom Eichacker.

From Your Site Articles
More

A viral video from the 1940s is eerily relevant today.

"In this country, we have no ‘other people.’ We are American people."

The internet's latest viral video is actually more than 70 years old — and as relevant as ever.

In 1947, the U.S. War Department (which later became the Department of Defense) released this 17-minute short film, "Don't Be a Sucker," into theaters around the country. Still reeling from the recent end of  World War II, the military put together a video with a strong message about fighting the spread of fascism in America.

The film found a new, modern audience when Michael Oman-Reagan tweeted a portion of it to his nearly 25,000 followers after a crowd of torch-wielding white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, Virginia.

The film parallels our current political reality in an eerie way, highlighting the dangers of letting the loudest voices divide us.

The clip starts with a man atop a soapbox, shouting, "I see Negros holding jobs that belong to me and you! Now I ask you, if we allow this thing to go on, what’s going to happen to us real Americans?"

[rebelmouse-image 19531674 dam="1" original_size="400x299" caption="GIFs from "Don't Be a Sucker"/Internet Archive." expand=1]GIFs from "Don't Be a Sucker"/Internet Archive.

"I tell you, friends, we'll never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country without ... Negros, without alien foreigners, without Catholics, without Freemasons."

Up to that point, a man standing in the crowd was nodding along to the soapbox bellower, even remarking, "This fella seems to know what he's talking about." But once he realizes that he falls into one of the man's banned categories (he notes that he's a Freemason), he quickly changes his tune.

From there, another man, a Hungarian-born professor, steps in to deliver the story's moral.

"I have seen what this kind of talk can do. I saw it in Berlin," he remarks. "I heard the same words we have heard today."

"But I was a fool then," he says before delivering the kicker: "I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics. Unfortunately it was not so. They knew they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation."

Extremist groups rise to power by taking aim at different demographics. It's happening today, but we can fight back.

Whether you're a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, if you don't stand on the side of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, or the so-called "alt-right," you have something very important in common. It's in no one's long-term interest for these groups to succeed in setting us against one another and continuing their rise to power — no one's except their own.

Maybe you voted for Donald Trump in November, or maybe you didn't. Maybe you agree with the policies he's laid out, or maybe you're involved in the resistance. In the end, however, we probably all share a number of goals, even if we disagree on how to achieve them. Those goals are almost certainly not shared by white supremacists, and that's why it's important that we all take a stand against this hate.

Just because you or I aren't their targets now doesn't mean the same will be true a year from now, 10 years from now. There are people who need our support right now, and it's for the sake of the country as we know it.

You can watch the full video below or at the Internet Archive.

Trending Stories