Take the entirety of the history of human history, and the the last 70 years of peace among the major powers would represent less than 1%.
For more than the 99% of the time that human beings have existed, the default experience has been to kill anyone who isn't in your nation, kingdom or culture.
Even with everything that is going on in the world today of awful things, this is still the most peaceful or prosperous time there has ever been.
As far as we know, there has never been (at least since the birth of agriculture) so little misery and pain.
Don't lose sight of how amazing today, relative to every other period in history.
People become walking emblems of hate when society doesn't make sense anymore. When people perceive the social constructs to be disintegrating, they start having extremist thoughts, and that is what you see.
Look to that democracy is leaving millions of people unsatisfied and only a purge as people have desired in many countries can absolve them.
It's not because Nazism is a ideology that specifically attracts people with alluring policies- It's just a good catch phrase that has a lot of symbolic power.
Usually when you are dealing with people who are fed up and angry, they like to feel big and strong, and what better way than to make people fear you by waving your guns and offensive symbols.
People don't notice you in real, didn't get enough hugs, things not working out in your career.
Can't really pinpoint why this unsatisfaction and uncertainty and anxiety is enveloping you. Easier to round out your resentment on something concrete like hating a group of people (jews, women, muslims, liberals, whatever).
That's all it is. You've never met a Nazi who has had a fulfilling life. You've never met a racist who is genuinely happy, because that doesn't exist. A hate filled ideology feeds on people whose lives absolutely suck, as their own misery is the only thing that can drown out the total idiocy of their beliefs.
I believe that many of these Neo Nazis deep down know what they are saying is bullshit, which is why they seek groups to reinforce the beliefs they so desperately want to cling to. Reaffirmation, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance. It is always the same shit. It is always illogical, and it is always a belief system that runs on fear, hate, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy.
When Nationalism rose and was extremely popular in Europe 90-100 years ago, it too was because many peoples lives didn't work anymore.
The industrial demands of the 20th century displaced millions of people who had no desire to work in the cities. Nationalism becomes a call to turn back the clock. Strong men can lead them back to a better time to a world they understood.
Most people don't want to learn new life skills or be told to adopt to a new life. Immigrants and refugees and minorities always bear the blame. they always represent the wind of change, and therefore its easy to blame them.
Lastly, the terror campaigns have been effective. ISIS and Al Qaeda has achieved their objectives in baiting the western powers into conflict. They wanted the US to go into Afghanistan and Iraq to win un-winnable war.
They wanted Europe and US main populations to tear themselves apart over fear and disorganization from the terror attacks that have been running rampant since 9/11.
So terror has won. It has been super effective and played a easily manipulative western culture that overwhelmingly doesn't stop and think about the motivation of the attackers, but instead respond with emotional fueled anger.
If you want a canary in the coalmine example that is emblematic of all of this, look at Barbara Lee, and the many many many thousands of death threats she received for being the only sane person, meanwhile a vast majority of the US population along with a sweeping coalition of democrats and republicans collectively got baited with a war fervor.
It was not understandable then, and it's not understandable now, and the fact of the matter is that there is still total denial about the war crimes that has happened, the lack of accountability, the refusal to admit responsibility or clean up or rebuild after countless bombing raids. When you go to war and turn countries into failed states, it has sweeping consequences that create external disasters through a ripple effect.
A lot of this was a long time coming. A lot of the destabilization in the east has been underway for many decades, and so in humanitarian refugee crisis and among guerilla terror warfare against existing populations, it really is not that big of surprise that we are here today. >99% of human history suggests that the way human beings respond to these sorts of conflicts is through war, annihilation and total destruction.
Don't forget that the last 70 years post WW2 are completely unique unprecedented.
The US is not like any world power there has been before. It does bad things and respond with selfish interests, but it is not like the empires of the past.
The way you absolve ignorance is through exposure. It is not a coincidence that a lot of those who dislike immigrants and minorities are those who engage the least with them. They only have hate mongering media outlets to create their entire world view, so that is all they see. In Europe virtually all news we get about the middle east is negative. You don't see a news report that mentions islam or muslims without words like; terror, war, suicide bomber, jihad, caliphate, extremist, infidels. The connotation is so strong that people are deeply afraid of them.
So there the solution is to absolve people of ignorance, and that is done through exposure. If you study articles and testimonials from former KKK and Neo Nazis, the paradigme shift of how people abandon that way of thinking is almost all the same. It's not that punching them or throwing rocks at them makes them not believe it. Most of them who get into closer contact with the people whom they hate, end up being the catalyst that makes them doubt their own ideology.
And that has been a pretty established idea that psychologists have been trying to ring home for more than half a century- People are a lot of the time not going to change their opinion over outside stimuli (arguments, logical facts, peer pressure, threats). In fact, it is often shown to be detrimental and make them double down, because human beings have a natural affinity towards resisting things they feel is being pressured on them.
The solution is to make them realize itself that what they believe is bullshit, and the best way to do that is to not do what they want you to do. They feed of the controversity, the outrage and people on the liberal flank to engage them, fight them and prove their false ideas about how they are just as violent and that they are hypocrites who cannot preach their liberal ideas. The entire idea is to drag them down to their own level so they can feel a higher sense of moral superiority. That's what gives them power, and thats what they count on.
It also energizes them when video leaks of a trump supporter being curb stomped or beaten half to death. It sort of feeds into their false talking points and allows them to continually take things out of context. Essentially it ends up helping them, and just like the anxious and fearful conservatives who embrace the nationalism in all forms, it's based on that people put their own feelings above standing back and thinking this through and about why exactly people believe what they believe, and what they want.
A reasoning can be false. A belief can be fake. But nothing is unmitigated or unmotivated without a long long list of things that lead up to that point. In my opinion, if you're going to reduce the current climate to a simplistic good vs evil scenario where you clap yourself on the back, you've not fully grasped the entirety of what lead us to this point.
Ultimately, I believe what betrays conservative thinking and what makes them so much more dangerous, is that their world view is based around pessimism and what could wrong.
Fear and Anxiety stick in their world view a lot more forcibly than in liberals, and that requires a reframing of engagement with them. This is documented and proven again on again, on a deep psychological level. As the link shows, researchers were able to convince conservatives to see climate change differently, when they reframed the debate around climate change being a threat to American Soverignity. Instead of engaging with slander, labels and party lines, they engaged them on their sense of patriotism and engaged them on a playing field that they understand on a different psychological level.
If people cannot understand the point you're communicating, then the communication has to be altered in a way that can be understood, but that is unlikely to happen as long as both sides condemn each other in deadlock. There is no desire to understand either sides viewpoint because both sides deem the other side iredeemable and deranged.
But you do not exercise influence in others (on a personal or external level) by wanting to be understood and not wanting to understand others. There is value in roleplaying exactly how they perceive their fear and anxiety to play out. If you't, you cannot bypass. And to bypass you need to mir the conversation in a vacuum of talking points they believe in. You're not really getting there by calling anyone a nazi and then thinking you've achieved something.
I'd rather see someone try and exercise influence by appealing to their patriotism, sense of freedom and protecting those who will not interfere with their way of life, to make themselves, realize that they are on the side of muslims and the very country they come from, is based on ideas that protect immigrants.
It's not an easy process now that 60% of Americans get the majority of their news from facebook (echo chamber reinforced feedback loops). It's going to take a lot of positive examples to make them doubt their beliefs they've acculimated over the last +16 years on a daily basis. It's a war of cultural feel good news.
