I'm not convinced that the kids weren't just looking for something to do that wasn't a conventional high school activity. It's a very engaging teaching methodology, but is the ideological content driving the uptake there or is it the novelty?
For sure there have been other threads about this on HN but I can't find them at the moment.
Edit: never mind, I found it - from 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167683. There's some question about how much of the story was embellished or distorted after the fact, especially because decades went by before some of the interviews about it. But there's at least one contemporaneous source.
If anything this 'experiment' just shows that bored teenagers are easily convinced to bandwagon on an innocuous group. They just had to hold their hand a certain way and address him as "Mr. Jones"? Come on, they probably were treating it as a meme.
It lacks any semblance of scientific rigour, but (as we're both aware) there are numerous examples of huge numbers of adults engaging in similar tribalism, at a tragic human cost.
It's the people who are confident they could never get pulled into the Nazis or the Red Guards that you need to worry about. That kind of utopian self-assuredness leads to tragedy.
It always makes me sneer when this is brought up. 3 days of some guy trying to create and manage (in very minor ways) and organization (that ultimately did nothing of consequence) consisting of way more people (teenagers) than he ever managed (actually, can you even honestly say a school teacher is adept at managing even 30 people? the frame within which they operate is largely set from above, they will do what they always do as long, as a teacher does what all the other teacher do), then on the 4th day dramatically exclaiming "I created a monster! and you all are part of it, and never even noticed!" isn't really much of an experiment. Then everybody accepts "the results of an experiment", because it supports the existing political narrative and it's such a nice story overall.
This is way, way over-hyped. Every 14 year old Tik-Tok channel owner with large enough community (especially if it ever managed to create new "viral" challenge or any other meme) has more to say about community management, than this guy.
However, even though I dismiss this so called "experiment", I think there are some things that could be pointed out about the German Reich in regards to it. Both are to point out it is really not as surprising that people followed the leader as we usually pretend it is.
First one is about how "normal people were inclined to support horrible things". Well, even though Hitler was extremely charismatic figure, the thing is — it wasn't really him who made people believe something weird, it's actually rather that his politics were quite populistic and he just said what almost everybody in the country was thinking to begin with. Even antisemitism wasn't something Hitler or his party introduced, every other person at the time was antisemitic, and even many higher-up party members attribute their commited antisemitism to reading Henry Ford books and not "Mein Kampf".
Second is actually about the teens. Yes, Hitlerjugend was a political organisation, but if you actually think about it, it was just giving teenagers what they want more than anything in the world: a sense of unity. Most of them don't get it today, and they actually suffer from that. In a sense, participating in an organisation like that is the most beautiful thing that can happen to a teen. We shouldn't forget that it was actually a very nice way for kids to spend their free time (which they have way too much of), with all these hikes and games and traditional boyscout activities. This alone would make it quite a prolific youth-organisation, as it really did these things well. But I actually think sense of unity it gave them is way, way more important, since every other teen struggles (and, in modern society, usually fails) to find something like that.
Some of them took wanting a sense of unity rather literally:
> "Zu den Reichsparteitagen fuhren auch Mitglieder vom Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) und der Hitlerjugend. Bei 900 der BDM-Mädchen, die 1936 vom Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg zurückkehrten, wurden anschließend Schwangerschaften festgestellt. ... Daraufhin wurde 1937 das Kampieren im Freien untersagt."
That 900 nazi girls were knocked up by hitler youth would have been less problematic if the Nazis had not re-enacted the old anti-abortion laws in 1933, strengthening them in 1935 and 1936. (which still doesn't excuse lack of condom use)
One of my high school English teachers showed us the movie this was based on. It definitely had an effect on me. I do believe, unfortunately, that most people are sheep and would go along with and get swept up in a popular movement like Nazism. But too many people focus on the particular ideology of Nazis rather than the mechanics of the social movement itself. One could easily imagine a modern movement with completely different outgroups than who the Nazis targeted, that may not even be considered offensive to ostracize today, and a good number of people would go along with it and get swept up in the emotions and the frenzy of it all.
"We're building an army of young people to create millions of good jobs and stop climate change in the process."
Building an army? Check. Recruiting young, impressionable people? Check. Strong symbolism and personal sacrifice for "greater good" moral overtones? Check.
Yeah, if I had to guess the next Nazi movement will be in the name of fighting climate change or some other quixotic mission like that. As HL Mencken said, "the desire to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."
Eco-fascism seems to be a valid candidate for the next societal nightmare. The "Right" has not yet discovered ecology as a trigger (especially the "Extreme Right") but I reckon that's only a matter of time.
It might not be any of the organizations that exist today, but the point still stands.
That said; I don't consider combating the climate crisis a "quixotic quest". I consider it the only way forward for humanity.
I don't believe we have a crisis. By any measurable standard the plant kingdom is doing phenomenally well under the current climate, with CO2 acting as a fertilizer as noted by NASA. I also do not think that CO2 PPM is a climate control knob. There are far more mechanisms in the climate system than simply CO2 and we have absolutely no control over those. A good super volcano would plunge the earth into a mini ice age and then fossil fuels would be the last of our worries, as we'd be more worried about growing enough food to survive. We should be teaching adaptability and be prepared for any outcome, not having any illusions of control over nature.
I'm inclined to emphatically disagree, even just on a political level; climate is already changing, rendering huge swaths of the Earth inhabitable. This will force people to migrate to (literally) greener pastures. Within the next 25 years we'll have millions of people on the run. This will put unprecedented pressure on all our political systems. Given how miserably Europe failed addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, I do not have high hopes for the coming Climate refugee crisis to result in anything but more political extremism. I can already hear them say "Das Boot is voll".
> By any measurable standard the plant kingdom is doing phenomenally well under the current climate, with CO2 acting as a fertilizer as noted by NASA.
My worry is less about plants and more about human civilization.
> There are far more mechanisms in the climate system than simply CO2 and we have absolutely no control over those.
True, but CO2 is the one mechanism we've turned up to 11. Maybe we can start turning it down to 0 and simultaneously figure out how to deal with the methane that has started to leak from the Siberian permafrost and from the ocean bottom.
> A good super volcano would plunge the earth into a mini ice age and then fossil fuels would be the last of our worries, as we'd be more worried about growing enough food to survive.
There's also nothing that we can do about a super vulcano. Or a galactic gama ray burst. It's within our capabilities to deal with antropogenic climate change.
> I also do not think that CO2 PPM is a climate control knob.
I also don't see CO2 PPM as a knob. It's probably more of a ratchet. We should stop ratcheting.
> We should be teaching adaptability and be prepared for any outcome, not having any illusions of control over nature.
Control is an illusion, agreed. But even if you cannot control an outcome, you can still try to influence it. Also, I don't see how this helps the vast majority of humanity that has yet to reach a decent living style. Since many of these areas have yet to build up sufficient educational infrastructure, how do you expect these countries to be able to prepare? What would a lecture in "Adaptability" or "Preparedness for Any Situation 101" look like? And since we already know the situation we're going to be in - why not mitigate the as much of the damage as we can, while we can?
