In the US History curriculum, students struggle to understand the finer points of fascism and how it led the globe into a second world war. I’ve tried many ways to help them consider this, but I think I’ve found the answer. Last week, I generated a solid lesson outlining the details of this complex governmental institution, by first having students evaluate the US Government’s relationship with the tell-tale signs of fascism. I printed and distributed the goals of fascism from this great article at Addicting Info called “You Might be A fascist If...” Each student had one quotation that defined fascism. They shared their detail and then debated whether the US has been guilty of said violation.
For example:
“You are obsessed with security, and war. You feed this obsession by spending trillions of dollars building up a large military force and are willing to sacrifice domestic programs your people count on to keep your military huge. You start unnecessary and costly wars and you are paranoid of other nations.”
When forced to first wrestle with America’s fascist tendencies, students better connected the dots as to how the worldwide depression led to a rise in the fascist governments in Italy, Germany, and Japan--to name a few. Since we had just covered WWI and the Depression, students knew how citizens around the globe struggled. And, they admitted that people could be coerced by their government.
Clearly, some cases compared closely to the United States while other were more of a stretch, but inevitably students recognized that even the US contains elements of what most would define as fascism. This lesson generated lots of questions about international policy and governmental corruption. From this discussion, I carefully segued into ways in which Mussolini and Hitler concentrated power in the state apparatus--for fascism.
And one more quotation for good measure:
“You are obsessed with national power and pride and believe your country doesn’t have to follow the rules and shouldn’t ever apologize for doing things that are wrong.”
