The "Incredibly Impossible to Derail This Thread" thread | Page 205 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Welcome back, meanmistermustard! Hope you’re feeling better.

Linde said

Funny Paper said
Is the NSB that well known in Holland that even teenagers would use it as a prank?  I thought they were a movement from the 1930s and pretty much ended when WW2 ended?

 

Of course! Kids have history classes at school you know. The point is that doing something like that, or saying things like ”Heil Hitler” and make that gesture we all know, is prosecutable. And besides that, it’s just highly offensive.

Or is my whole family just exaggerating?

I should imagine that the history of the Second World War is taught very differently in the US than it is in Europe, partly because we experienced very different wars. Europe was involved in what Hitler called “Total War”, which saw the civilian populations suffer hugely, even in countries – like the UK – that didn’t have the horror of occupation. The United States, whilst it suffered huge losses of military personnel in a just war, did not have the impact at home.

Here in the UK we escaped occupation, but the price was very high. My Nan was one of 11 children. She had four brothers and six sisters. She lost only one of her brothers to the fighting, though another lost both legs. Four of her sisters did not survive the London Blitz however. Those four sisters had seventeen children between them. Only one sister had allowed her children to be evacuated. She had five. Hers were the only children to survive.

Mine is far from the only family to suffer such heavy casualties, and what those in Occupied Europe suffered was so much worse.

Much of Europe, rightly in my opinion – though you would probably call it suppression of Free Speech, Funny Paper – banned many fascist movements and symbols at the end of the war, and later brought in Holocaust Denial laws to combat those who tried to say that the many genocides that the Nazi parties in Europe attempted did not happen.

It does not surprise me that the history of what happened is better taught in Mainland Europe, those countries that suffered occupation, than it is even here in the UK. Nor does it surprise me that any right thinking person would find offense, and be offended, by being compared to those who defiled and decimated so much of the continent.

At this time when sadly there are fascist parties emerging in parts of Europe again, with youngsters getting drawn in by their poison, I would have been disappointed, Linde, were you and yours laughing off such an insult as a youthful prank against your brother.

I applaud you for being offended and annoyed.