Ask Lemmy

Things that changed here in Germany (which I can think of off the top of my head):

• No presidential role. We don't have a single person with that much power anymore. The most powerful is the chancellor now.
• No emergency laws. Many nations have laws that when something goes wrong, their president gets superpowers to do whatever they want. This is regularly abused, not just by Hitler. To my knowledge, we don't currently have any such law.
• Secret voting. It is now illegal to make it public who you voted for. When Hitler rose to power, Nazis would sit in voting places and pressure people to vote for Hitler. And they would heckle people who didn't want to show their ballot card.

Having said all that, it should also be said that we do still currently have a very real Nazi problem. It's a few steps in the right direction, but no silver bullet.

moderates need to stop only punching left.

hitler got into power because their moderates refused to appeal to their leftist voters and supported facism and so hitler's side won the election and, later, the country after they disenfranchised the moderates and executed the leftists; right now it's looking like americans are going to follow suit.

Trying to appease fascists by avoiding confrontation or acting when they start chipping away at our insitutions willl just lead to more fascism. The nazis didn't spring forth overnight, they consolidated their power through legal means and appealed to the population's bigotry and hatred of 'others' without enough of a response to stop their ascension.

Basically the same thing that is happening in the west right now.

That the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

Every single one of them should have been executed. Might not have prevented the return entirely, but it would have made it harder, and perhaps made the newer ones less certain of their reception.

Not an expert but it seems to me the most important thing is education. In the U.S. they've been chipping away at that since at least the eighties. I'm not "handing it to them" but the right has put in the long term work to get us where we are today, with only feeble liberal centrist pushback.