There's only so much you can "learn" from a movie, particularly one about dancing, but when I was young one of my formative experiences involved watching a flick called "Swing Kids." In many ways the film was typical Hollywood fare; a group of teens who love swing music and are alienated from the society around them are determined to dance the nights away even though adults don't understand and regard swing music as a dangerous moral perversion. The catch however, is that the teens are German, and the society they're alienated from is a country falling step by step into Nazism during the 1930's.
Like many movies loosely based on historical events, the film took a few liberties with the source material, but the part about it that stuck out to me is the way it depicted a fascist effort to target young people by simultaneously stamping out forms of expression that threatened Nazi cultural hegemony, and actively educating (and re-educating through coercion) German youth with fascist ideology, sometimes against the will of wiser adults around them. Unlike many films about Hitler's "Third Reich," Swing Kids didn't pretend fascism was something that "just happened" but instead actively explored the idea that racialized hatred, extreme nationalism, and fascist ideas were something you had to indoctrinate people into, and that the Nazis knew it would work better if they got to their targets while they were young.
Of course, it was just a movie; yet even then it instilled in me a desire to spend a significant portion of my life studying the question of "how fascism could happen." Astonishingly, when I later found myself studying the rise of Nazism in Germany, I discovered that this silly movie had in fact gotten that bit right; the Nazis succeeded in part by targeting German youth and teaching them to be the kind of monsters that could support Nazism without question and would even turn on their own parents.
I bring this up because I'm concerned that adults in the Pig Empire haven't been watching what fascists (of all stripes) have been doing to our education system and the young people we're sending off to be shaped by it:
https://truthout.org/articles/the-rights-push-to-whitewash-history-is-a-precursor-to-fascism/
The Right’s Push to Whitewash History Is a Precursor to Fascism
"Beneath this sweeping repression aimed at silencing dissent, free speech and critical inquiry lies a series of right-wing policies that threaten to undermine education’s role as a democratic public sphere and its commitment to fostering critical thinking. In this environment, we can expect a sustained assault on critical pedagogy, historical understanding, informed judgment, faculty job security, critical literacy, civic awareness, and any effort to connect learning with civic engagement and democratic values.
For instance, far right legislators in states like Florida, Tennessee and Idaho are banning books and prohibiting the teaching of concepts related to race, LGBTQ+ issues and social justice. Public and higher education institutions are being defunded, particularly if they address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Many public school libraries are being stripped of resources, with some being transformed into detention centers. Students are bankrupting their future because of high tuition costs and staggering student debt."
While the quote I featured here naturally focuses on the fascist American right's attempt to erase history and thereby legitimize white supremacy, extreme nationalism, and the demonization of LGBTQ identities, it's important to understand that this transformation of education centers into a functional arm of a reactionary police state is by no means restricted to the Republican Party and its adherents. The transformation of American students and educators speaking out about and opposing extractivism, imperialism, and an unfolding US-backed genocide by Israel in Gaza, into criminals, terrorists, and "violent antisemites" is widely supported by so-called "liberal" administrators and lawmakers in the "brave new world" of our modern Pig Empire. Teaching and enforcing fascism via coercion remains the same, serves the same purpose, and produces the same results no matter who is doing it or what justifications they offer for doing so.
The uncomfortable truth here is that as our society becomes increasingly authoritarian across a bipartisan spectrum and as dictated by capital, this repression, indoctrination and assault on critical thinking is both a logical outcome, and a perquisite condition. After all, if you're going to kill billions of people as neocolonial capitalism boils the planet like soup for the benefit of ruling class billionaires, you can't rightly teach the next generation of leaders and drones that this is morally unacceptable and must be fought. How do you expect folks to make the trains run on time while that slaughter continues if you don't teach them to be fascists while they're young?
#Fascism #Education #Propaganda #Imperialism #Capitalism