This is a 46‐minute afterschool special that film historian Rich Brownstein recommended to me during a conversation. It is a reenactment of an actual classroom experiment from the 1960s which how, through subtle increments, authorities can slowly manipulate almost any ordinary adult into serving their agenda. Admittedly this reenactment is a bit cheesy at times (most obviously in how it looks like somebody held all of the students back a couple grades), but it has an important message to tell. The ending impressed me.
ETA: Just to clarify, while discipline and ultranationalism were important to Fascism, they were by no means the only factors leading to its atrocities, as the experiment misleadingly implied. While this experiment remains worth noting, its importance should not be overestimated either.
Click here for events that happened today (November 11).
1920: Walter Krupinski, Luftwaffe fighter ace, existed.
1923: The authorities arrested Adolf Schicklgruber in Munich for high treason for his rôle in the Beer Hall Putsch.
1926: Tōkyō named Captain Seishichi Yamaguchi as Tenryu’s commanding officer of.
1932: Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the NSDAP’s debts were piling up, and the presses for its publications were in danger of being stopped.
1935: AG Weser laid down the U‐27’s keel in Bremen, Germany.
1937: As Chinese troops at Shanxi abandoned Xinkou city and fell back toward Taiyuan, the Imperial Japanese army began to advance on Nanjing, China.
1938: Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy toured territory newly gained from Czechoslovakia and Berlin issued four gunboats’ construction @ 6,000,000 Reichsmarks each.
1939: The funeral of Czech student Jan Opletal, whom somebody killed earlier during the Czech independence celebrations, turned into a demonstration that the Wehrmacht crushed; the authorities closed Czech universities, sent 1,200 students to camps, and sentenced nine to death. (Coincidentally, Adolf Schicklgruber attended the funeral of those killed in the staged assassination attempt of November 8 in München, Germany.)
1940: The Royal Navy launched the first all‐aircraft ship‐to‐ship naval attack in history during the Battle of Taranto. Meanwhile, the Axis armed merchant cruiser Atlantis stopped Allied ship Automedon with gunfire in the Bay of Bengal, massacring seven crew and one gunner, then captured eighty‐seven of its survivors and their cargo, including top secret Royal Navy documents detailing military deployment in Asia and code schemes which Atlantis soon sent to the Empire of Japan.
1941: Around the same time that Kaga entered the drydocks at Sasebo Naval Shipyard, Japan, and Admiral Mitsumi Shimizu held a briefing at Yokosuka for the Axis Sixth Fleet officers aboard Katori on the Pearl Harbor raid, ten Axis submarines departed from Yokosuka Naval Base for Kwajalein of the Marshall Islands, where they would proceed for US Territory of Hawaii. I‐68 joined the Advance Expeditionary Force for the assault on Pearl Harbor; she departed Saeki, Japan for Kwajalein, Marshall Islands. Meanwhile, Axis submarine U‐580 collided with target ship Angelburg and sank thirty‐three miles west of Klaipeda, Lithuania by accident, killing twelve, but leaving thirty‐two alive. Hudson aircraft of № 53 Squadron RAF damaged Axis submarine U‐203 with four depth charges in the Bay of Biscay, but then Axis submarine U‐561 sank Panamanian ship Meridian, massacring all twenty‐six aboard. Within the Third Reich, report noted there were 700,000 Soviet prisoners of war employed as forced laborers.
1942: Axis forces in Case Anton occupied France’s zone libre.
I think this is most usefully viewed as an anecdote about social control, maybe particularly about how successively teenagers are to it. But that’s also a popular narrative and kind of wishy-washy, so I don’t know how much scientific value there is in recognizing this as an experiment. The only thing particularly fascist about this is the abolition of democracy, but even that as a marker of fascism has its roots in German attitudes toward democracy in the 30’s, which is contextual.
We don’t call most cults fascistic just because they exert social control on their members. And the line between religion, cult, and accepted societal structures are quite thin at times. Like, The Republic in Star Wars was already fascistic in all but name prior to democracy being dissolved, but many will fail to recognize that fact because its aesthetics hadn’t shifted yet. It seems like The Wave focuses on the aesthetics in a similar way that ignores why people would act this way in the first place.