America, 2017: The year we need to relearn the lessons of World War II. Like the lessons about how turning away refugees or persecuting immigrant populations are bad. And then there’s the lesson about fascism, which this 1947 video really brings home:
In the video, a speaker is angrily denouncing the fact that “I see negroes holding jobs that belong to me and you. Now I ask you, if we allow this thing to go on, what’s going to become of us regular Americans?” He quickly adds foreigners and the Catholic Church to his hate list, as a watching man says, in accented English, “I’ve heard this kind of talk before but I never expected to hear it in America,” with the man beside him responding that “this fella seems to know what he’s talking about” … until the speaker’s list of groups “we’ll never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country WITHOUT” includes Freemasons. Then the man who’d been nodding along says “What’s wrong with the Masons? I’m a Mason. Hey, that fella’s talking about me.”
“And that makes a difference, doesn’t it? Before he said Masons, you were ready to agree with him.”
“Yes, but he was talking about … what about those other people?”
“In this country, we have no other people. We are American people.”
“What about you, you aren’t American, are you?”
“I was born in Hungary, but now I am an American citizen, and I have seen what this kind of talk can do. I saw it in Berlin.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I was a professor at the university. I heard the same words we have heard today, but I was a fool then. I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics, but unfortunately it was not so. You see, they knew that 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.”
“I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics, but unfortunately it was not so.” We dismiss them at our peril.
Watch the full video here.