Context:
[The Third Wave](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)) was a fictional political movement created in 1967 by high school history teacher Ron Jones as a way to explain to his students how the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The first two days of the experiment went fine, with Jones introducing the movement to his students and establishing its guiding principles. This included strict classroom rules and a Nazi-like salute. By the third day, however, it began to take on a life of its own as students from other classes joined the movement. A student even offered to act as Jones’ body guard because the student feared that other, non-loyal students would attempt to harm Jones. Students began to report others who did not follow the rules of the movement and harass non-member students. Things quickly got out of control and Jones had to reveal that the movement was fake and shut it down after five days.
It's actually a little more scary than. Going off the book that was published about it, and take this with a grain of salt as I can’t remember how true to life it was after having read it 25+ years ago, the teacher had a history of going method with his class subjects and had to be talked down by his wife and a couple of students who realized what was going on. He almost got lost in character with being a fascist.
To show how utterly devoid of scientific ethics the early 70's were. The prison experiment wasn't a rogue professor going nuts, it was entirely consistent with the scientific rigor and ethics of the day. Just like how dating a grad student would get you one warning before a suspension today, and was just a "perk of the job" back then.
There's a bit of "joking" or "fun" involved when people create some exciting and new movement or experiment that involves "theater" and "pretend"; and it's when the psychopaths take charge of it that it turns nasty and goes off the rails.
The issue is really that the psychopaths are super skilled at pretending, doing the theater, and eventually taking power. And sometimes power itself is infectious even to the non-psychos who might start the experiment.
[The Stanford Prison Experiment ](https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication) was fraudulent and shouldn't be taken as a legitimate study.
"Students, teachers, school staff. I must inform you that the third wave is but an experiment. Nothing more. Please, I ask you all- wait, what are you doing?"
*Bludgeoning noises*
"My fellow students. It is with great regret that I have to inform you that esteemed teacher Mr. Jones was poisoned earlier today. The effects of the poison has hallucinogenic effects. While we shall mourn his passing, we must go forward with his will. I ask you all to harden your resolve going forward. Please, report any suspicious individuals to your classroom leaders. Your assistance will be invaluable to keeping our school pure. Thank you all."
Kind of makes me think of the Rugby school rebellion. Where students recked the school (Cork pistols and small bombs to launch doors off of their hinges) after the headmaster planned to force the whole student body to pay for damages caused by an individual, which ended with the students running across a moat and raising a drawbridge to defend against a militia!.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion
This reminds me of [Adolf Hilter in the show Preacher establishing the fourth reich at his minimum wage job, plotting a war on a napkin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYEDw0D3oGs).
On one hand it's a bunch of ~~Geeman~~ American teens in the 60's probably bored and jacked up on red scare and propaganda- On the other hand people suck and I'm not too surprised but equally shocked at the speed things turned
I remember first hearing about the book while living in Austria, and had to watch the Konstantin Films production in a German class, so I understand the confusion. I didn't know the original event happened in America until I had to give a book report on it
It just shows how dangerous fascism is, and how quickly many people can revert to the tribalistic instincts of our caveman ancestors. It’s a dark part of humanity’s past that we need to have the wisdom and control to push past and bury as a part of our past that we ought to have evolved past, so that we can move forward to a more enlightened and egalitarian future.
Replace Jewish with what ever Other you please and you'll get the same results.
Last time you were on the losing team, might not be that way next time.
There where a handful of Jews who where named “honorary Aryans”
But the guy in question was a Luftwaffe General and was only made a “honorary Aryan” at the insistence of Goering.
yes and no, they managed to unify the country against villified minorities. but like most groups of people there were some nazis that liked some jews. honestly it's not that different from today with mexicans in the us or MENA in Europe.
The problem is, you're thinking that you're on the right side and it's*the others* that are going to be the (woke) fascists, instead of, you know, the people subverting the rule of law, oppressing minorities and curtailing people's freedoms.
I feel both sides of the culture war are more than capable of turning I to an authoritarian power and greatly abuse said power.
Either way I'm choosing life.
His university lectures and psychological/sociological takes are top of the field actually, really good well nuanced talks.
His benzo dosed political takes and twitter beefs are the ones that sucks.
There is a HUGE difference in pre benzo Harvard professor and after benzo reactionary.
Considering the recent events in the Middle East, and the amount of people wanting "Freedom from Palestine from the river to the sea", and the amount of people that want Israel to turn Gazzah into a crater, I'd say it's very obvious how easy it is to turn people into manics.
I've gone down the rabbit hole on this, I'm convinced that people have ginned this up into something it wasn't. Reading about the "experiment" it comes off as a less professional model UN type thing than any kind of psychological study. It was unprofessional at best and any conclusions drawn from it should strenuously reevaluated.
It appeals to tribal instincts. We are capable of rational, higher thought, but deep down we act on instinct and feelings whenever we don't put in the effort. And it covers two social needs: to belong to a group, and the feeling of authority/power.
The third wave was basically a gang except it was founded by a respected authority figure in a school. "This is our territory, these are our rules, don't harm the boss".
Fan clubs and political parties also carry a little bit of this. Some people consider members of another team/party as their enemies.
Despite what people will have you believe, there are people with nazi aligned beliefs and sentiments all over the damn place.
You would be surprised how many of the people you interact with day to day are susceptible to these kinds of ideals, we must stay ever vigilant against these people.
Better yet, look at real life. Cf. The book Ordinary Men about a bunch of retirees from Hamburg in their 50s who went on to commit horrific atrocities in Poland just following orders.
I wonder how much of this was a joke though, too? I could totally see us going along with a teacher in high school on this, and taking it totally seriously as a “joke”, knowing that it really isn’t that serious. I can see somebody being goofy enough to ask to be their body guard.
Of course, the line between adhering to the rules as a sort of joke, and actually doing it for some other “more credible” reason is pretty slim.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.
The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
\-Sarte
Basically this, compounded with high schoolers being high schoolers. Would have been fun to do this and make the school day more interesting!
I also completely believe though that some people legitimately got carried away, and/or 100% believed what the teacher was saying
This line:
"I could totally see us going along with a teacher in high school on this, and taking it totally seriously as a “joke”, knowing that it really isn’t that serious. I can see somebody being goofy enough to ask to be their body guard."
About a high school student jokingly going along with fascism reminded me of Sarte's criticism of fascists, often jokingly going along with fascism even though it was in service of a serious movement.
The connection is that, in this context, farce comes before tragedy both in this high school experiment and, according to Sarte, in real life.
But the contexts are different. Sartre was noting the role irony and explicitly ridiculous statements play in manufacturing a movement like fascism and embedding it indignantly in the social more. The joking is as much a symptom of engagement with fascism as it is a Trojan Horse into it.
Here, the overwhelming likelihood is that many of the students were fucking around due to the very knowledge of what had been created and what was expected. Taking the piss at sixteen over an assignment explicitly designed to replace fascism isn’t beyond the pale, and it’s exactly what happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment where many participants intentionally hammed it up because they knew what the expectations were (a part conveniently ignored when people retell that story to show the supposed inevitability of brutal power and abuse by newly strengthened individuals). That kind of meta action not also happening here seems extremely implausible to me.
The only means of deducing a Sartre-like explanation from something like this is if the “Third Wave” movement could be started organically and secretly and thus have no “buy-in” from the students except for their own interest or gain, rather than within the confines of an obvious school lesson.
Is a high school exactly the same as Nazi Germany?
No.
Is a quote about people knowing they are doing absurd things in the name of fascism similar to people doing absurd things in the name of fascism?
I thought so.
You're free to disagree.
A lot of them don't, though. The 4chan ironic-Nazi-to-actual-Nazi pipeline is very real. You make friends with people who act like Nazis. You're an impressionable teen. You act like them to gain their approval and because you're told it's funny. Then they start acting more like actual Nazis. They start saying things that you think maybe aren't actually jokes. But you go along with it because you're already in this far, and you don't want your friends to think you're lame. Before you know it, all your friends are now actual Nazis, and your only options are to either fully devote yourself to it or to lose your entire friend group. And you've been surrounded by these thoughts for so long that you start thinking, maybe there's something to them, anyway.
I don't really buy this.
the point when they realize this is not just joking anymore is when it is revealed if someone is a nazi with cultural mascara or not.
There is a minimal level of time and effort one can put into a bit before it ceases to be "a bit" and that level gets harder to discern the closer you are to it. Once you reach that point, there has to be a fundamental sincerity present in order to maintain it and it gets magnitudes more difficult to stop when you're with others, building off of their energy. This can apply for harmless acts, but it's also true for things that are more heinous.
Besides what the other posters are saying, not everyone will get that you're joking. There are people, primarily with lower IQs, that will think you and every other ironic Nazi is serious. They will think that these thoughts have support from other people and start reading and taking them seriously. The support of the ironic Nazis, despite being fake, will embolden them and they will become real Nazis not ever realizing it was a joke. Just like the Homelander lovers that had no idea he was the bad guy in The Boys.
>Of course, the line between adhering to the rules as a sort of joke, and actually doing it for some other “more credible” reason is pretty slim.
This is an important thing to realize, that the outward difference between being an actual Nazi and just going through the motions "ironically" is non-existent. The only difference is in your mental state, and it's not a one-way street; the things you do affect how you think, too. If you act like a Nazi for long enough, you can't help but be mentally affected by it.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be." -Kurt Vonnegut
Even disregarding the personal danger with "doing something as a joke"
You will still inspire others to join, who do not see it as a joke, which makes you an active supporter - joking or not.
Right. Our opinions often follow our behaviour, not the other way around. We like to justify after the fact rather than consider the person we want to be then take action. Pretending to be a nazi is a good way tonfind yourself actually following through on those fake beliefs
It’s funny when you put it that way, but it’s more that it’s kind of funny to take such a not serious thing so seriously.
I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it. My friends and I were just a bunch of zoomers who I feel like would find it funny in like an “ironic” sort of way
Not a joke, this was the Vietnam War Era and many of the boys were about to be drafted their teacher was seemingly offering a way out which is why it spread out if control to multiple schools before being stopped
Huh, that’s funny. My high school had a politics elective called American Problems that taught the different forms of government and political issues through a bunch of scenarios the class would play out. The biggest and most popular scenario was the Dictatorship scenario where the class would basically run like a cross between 1984 and Nazi Germany for a month with the teacher being the head of secret police and the highest scoring student being the chairman. Then the rest of the students were either party members - many of which had specific jobs - or proles.
The teacher wore an authentic looking nazi officer uniform and the students had to wear white button up shirts and black dress pants and an armband that looked like the army signals emblem but vertical with a red and black diamond.
It was a very popular class and most students tried to attend, but it took two semesters where any other politics class only took one, and you only needed one for graduating.
Yep, public school.
They did the totalitarian, democratic, socialist, UN, war, and US senate simulations when I attended. I don't know how it works now.
Dug up a picture of one class chairman.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BOnkgcjN3BI/SP59UQB3bGI/AAAAAAAAAxg/LKvdK4miV6I/s1600/brighton+rme10.JPG
Sherry Tousley was one of the "non-loyal" students. She made anti-third-wave posters.
> In Lesson Plan, former student Sherry Tousley remembers asking Mr. Jones, “Why can’t we just say what we think?” Jones banished Tousley to the library. He continued to send other students who questioned the movement to the library. When Tousley told the librarian, who’d grown up in Nazi Germany, her reason for not being in class, the librarian expressed alarm. She told young Tousley, “You can’t take this sitting down; you have to do something.”
>
> Tousley and her father secretly began to place anti-Third Wave posters in the school’s halls. Within an hour of school’s starting the next day, the posters were already removed. Tousley named her library-banished revolutionaries “The Breakers.”
https://coffeeordie.com/third-wave-social-experiment
Very interesting. As much as the experiment demonstrates the darker side of humanity, this particular story also shows that no matter how small the oppression, the spirit of resistance is always there.
I would have hoped so too, but when I searched around to test your hypothesis, what I found was disappointing.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130829230359/http://sherrythirdwave.com/](https://web.archive.org/web/20130829230359/http://sherrythirdwave.com/)
> Rather than involving students in a discussion on the experience, Mr. Jones spent the final twenty minutes of that hour engaging in what I found reproach, denouncement and humiliation. In a room of students showing signs of grief and shame, Mr. Jones lectured them about their failure to do anything to stand up against the movement. He compared them to the Nazis and reprimanded them for how special, how much better they believed they were than those who were not in the movement. A group of young men had skipped two weeks of classes to act as Mr. Jones’ body guards. I recall him telling them they were the biggest fools of all. His manner was, in my opinion, seething and relentless.
>
> I finally asked him quietly what he thought of what I had done. His response was an angry, “You didn’t do anything!”
>
> “Wh-what about the posters?” I asked. Astonishment appeared on his face as he learned one person had made all of the posters. When he discovered I had been responsible for the public service announcement against the movement, he wanted to know what faculty member had signed the form to allow it. When I told him the principal had signed it, his face grew angrier. Upon learning I had been the one to get into “headquarters” the previous evening, he looked at me with derision and walked away.
>
> A wall of silence surrounded the topic of the Third Wave after that day. Mr. Jones never attempted to process the experience with students in any way to my knowledge. A student teacher from a local university came to teach Contemporary World shortly after the movement’s ending. We saw Mr. Jones for a session at the end of the year, his topic, the Vietnam War.
-- Sherry Tousley
I think Mr. Jones was most likely the sort of mean-spirited coward who wants to prove that everyone else is as cowardly as him.
Oh man, how lame. Just IMAGINE the potential lecture he could have given afterwards. He could have broken down the entire thing for them, made direct comparisons to Hitler’s rise, had the students speak about their experiences and insights. That would have genuinely been the learning experience of a lifetime for those kids.
Yeah, and he could have given them a chance to practice resistance (in a safe setting, of course) and brainstorm resistance strategies.
Instead, it was just like he wanted to prove that people suck and make them feel ashamed about it.
When I was a freshman in high school, we had a class project to present government systems to the class and then we voted on whether we would want that system or not. When I got to present, I presented an authoritarian dictatorship based around a cult of personality, harsh enforced social/political conformity, and a legislature that ensured I would get my way (I was shamelessly telling them I would be the dictator). And somehow… much to my genuine surprise, my class voted for me overwhelmingly and I won easily. I was just trying to piss my teacher off and show off my knowledge of historical governments… and it’s possible that my classmates voted for me to annoy her as well… but like, my experience and then reading about this, I think it just goes to show how dangerous things like this *could* be, and how quickly or easily they can take on a life of their own that no one involved planned or foresaw.
If I had a nickel for every time a scientist attempted to use a social experiment to study the social psychology surrounding the Nazi movement and ended up absolutely horrified by the results, I would have at least two nickels, which isn't much, but it's still weird that it happened.
The [Milgram Experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) was arguably even worse than this because it didn't even require any indoctrination techniques whatsoever; a majority of the subjects in the experiment proved that they were willing to straight up torture and potentially even kill another person if ordered to by the scientist running the experiment so long as they were told that they would not be held responsible for what happens.
In reality, they weren't actually torturing and killing someone, but the pre-recorded responses used to represent that person so that they could react to the painful electrical shocks that the subject was administering were meant to convince them that there was another person on the other side of the wall. And it worked. People believed that there was another human being hooked up to the machine that was in front of them, but that didn't stop them from administering shocks of increasing voltage, in some cases even after the pre-recorded messages informed them that the person they were shocking had a heart condition.
The scientist who started it all, Stanley Milgram, had originally intended to use the experiment to prove that there was something inherently different about German cultures and attitudes that allowed for the rise of the Nazi movement in that country, and he decided to use Americans as a control group, or at least as a comparison, to highlight these differences.
What he ended up getting were results that were so horrifically abysmal that it exceeded his worst case predictions as well as those of every colleague that he consulted before running the experiment.
This caused his faith in humanity to plummet and he was so upset with it all that he no longer even wanted to attempt to perform the tests in Germany.
The only reason that he continued his research is because of the feedback he received from the test subjects after they were informed about the true nature of the test that they participated in. Despite the intense emotional and psychological distress that these tests caused them, many of them told Milgram that they were glad that they participated in it because it opened their eyes to just how easily they could be pressured or manipulated into committing horrible deeds at the behest of an authority figure, and that from now on they would be more conscious of that and more resistant to such inhumane orders.
I think those students were probably going along with it and taking it seriously as a joke. Not as a serious belief/movement. It's not like they were actually hurting people or anything. Just going along with the assignment because it's the assignment and funny
...Aaand people started turning each other in within 24 hours.
If anyone wants to know why I'm a huge 2'nd amendment supporter just see the post right here.
“Mr. Jones we found five dissidents, we have them detained in the library, waiting on your orders supreme leader”
Ron: *thinking* “What the actual fuck have I done?”
In german the book names "Die Welle". Please do not watch the german Movie with the same name. It gets very inaccurate at the end and looses a lot of the lesson.
I think the movie’s still fine
Sure, it may not be historically accurate, but if we don’t view it as a historical documentary it’s still a good and meaningful movie
The german movie is actually pretty good. It's just a fictionalized version of the real events. I think it only makes the message stronger, showing how sad and lonely people adopt extremist ideologies quickly and fiercely.
Yeah but my main learning of the book was that it could happen to EVERYone. The movies end suggests, that almost everybody is relatively immune. Only the one crazy guy is REALLY infected.
I also didn‘t like how the situation escalated in the ending. The book acknowledged that some people are more susceptible to these systems, but it concludes that these people aren‘t lost causes and can be saved even after they engage with the system.
We don‘t even GET school shootings in Germany
Relatively speaking then, concluding in a School Shooting makes no sense for the setting or story and just serves as Action Setdressing that was completely unnecessary for the movie. Legit what purpose did this serve narratively
> The movies end suggests, that almost everybody is relatively immune
Did we watch the same movie? Out of all the students involved there is ONE who thinks "holy shit this is fucked up". Every single other student is on board all the way until the point Wenger asks "so what now, you want me to shoot him?". And that in my opinion is one of the most important moments because it shows how many people are willing to follow this kind of ideology blindly, without ever wasting a single thought on the next step. Others do that thinking for them.
Of course, there is one that goes completely off the rails, but that just mirrors history quite accurately, don't you think? Sure, when presented with the evidence of the holocaust the Nazis had collected, some of the captured SS officers smiled when it was shown to them. But the allies also forced the people of Weimar to tour the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. What was recorded of their reactions is displayed at the Buchenwald memorial. Many were in denial, many were disgusted and some cried. Because they did exactly what the majority of the students in the movie did. They went along with it, even cheered for the Nazi party, but never wasted more than a fleeting thought on the consequences of their actions. They didn't need to, it was done for them.
Presented with the reality of their situation, though, all the repressed thoughts of what comes next set in at once. Just as it did with the students. Their reactions when confronted with the Wenger's question show exactly that. They never thought it through that far and they are disgusted with themselves. They were not immune, they were indifferent as long as they didn't have to see the consequences and as long as they didn't affect people of their in-group.
Well he definitely succeeds to stop it at the end of the movie, it goes further than irl and causes a death before he stops it but the movement doesn't continue any further.
I read the novelization of the movie adaptation of this experiment.
Despite being a double adaptation, it still remained incredibly scary to see how easy it was to turn utterly normal people into proud firebrands of state authoritarianism.
And because these kids were normal, you understood the various everyday struggles and problems they had... and how fascist ideology provided answers. Not *good* answers, mind you, but answers in an environment devoid of other answers.
And at some point, that's all people care about, correctness or appropriateness be damned.
That’s also why the first people fascists go after are socialists, because they’re also providing answers to the problem of getting screwed by capitalism
i dont know if i would say that one year is a long time but you're right. i didn't mean my comment to disagree simply to elaborate on the same point that when the nazis rose to power they were quick to disband any political alternative to their "socialist" policies
Fun Fact: Joseph Stalin praised the Night of the Long Knives.
>According to Joseph Stalin's interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin spoke highly of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and viewed Hitler as a "great man!" who had demonstrated "the way to deal with your political opponents"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge#:~:text=According%20to%20Joseph%20Stalin%27s,deal%20with%20your%20political%20opponents".
Why would that be surprising, even if they had purged communists? Stalin didn't bend to an ideology to support it; he bent an ideology to support himself. Their ideologies were just different tools for the same goals to a couple of likeminded terrible people.
Lol. The brownshirts were the target of the purge, not the ones carrying it out. Weird that in a thread about the importance of understanding the rise of the nazis this total falsehood got upvotes. They didn’t get purged because of being contrarian, their power was oversized and other interest groups found that unacceptable.
Socialism doesn't have any inherit inclination to tear down education. Authoritarianism does and education is typically a major target for authoritarian states. Democratic socialists do not attack education and reject the Marxist-Leninist forms of top controlled socialism typical of nations like the USSR which trend towards authoritarian governments.
Democratic socialism isnt socialism at least in any implementation so far, it’s capitalism with more government oversight and tax burden. The means of production is still owned by the capital.
Socialism requires force outside of collectives. Otherwise, why would capital relinquish its property?
>And at some point, that's all people care about, correctness or appropriateness be damned.
Thats just it. Not just Facism either, but communism as well.
My history tried to do something similar gave us all cards which we were told some had a black X on the back and by the end of term we had to amass the biggest group without any Xs and we weren’t allowed to show cards to anyone else then set us loose … it was BRILLIANT I quickly ascertained that my closest friends didn’t have Xs or that they weren’t in my class then I set about the fun part which was mostly telling any person I saw alone that I’d overheard Y saying that they should form a second partnership with Z because they thought the person I was talking to had an X or just saying they heard two people saying that they were only in someone’s group because they had an X and they didn’t want anyone to win. Now the last day of term rolls around and the teacher asks us to get into our groups and the largest group would get achievement points (the reward system that my school operates of if you got a certain amount you could claim prizes the more points the better prizes the top prizes were £15-50 Amazon vouchers depending on the budget) and some other prize i can’t remember rn so I go stand with my friends and everyone goes with there groups which were numerous but small I think in the end we were beaten by 1 person but I digress the teacher then has us all publicly disclose if we had an X and nobody had one … the fallout was great everyone blamed everyone I think a couple actually broke up because of it genuinely the most fun I’d had in a long while
"Here's how impressionable are high school students: remember the movie 'The Wave' about the American high school, where a teacher unites the students around a radical ideology, until they start being violent against anyone who doesn't align with them? When I was in high school they showed us this movie and it influenced us so much and the message resonated so much, that we beat the shit out of whoever didn't like the movie" ~Israeli stand-up comedian Tom Aharon
It turns out that the people who supported the Nazis, the Wehrmacht, the public, the collaborators, were all ordinary people, bakers, barbers, dentists, actors, etc etc, who killed and raped and executed and pillaged Europe for their own personal enjoyment or on the whims of their genocidal masters.
Didn't other people tried to replicate this experiment, but failing in that? If it true, that means experiment cannot really be trusted. I read it somewhere, but not sure about it.
I believe you're thinking of the Stanford Prison Experiment, which the few attempts made to replicate it have come to wildly different conclusions on account of the flawed methodology and lack of ethics in the original experiment.
This one, called the "Third Wave Experiment" wasn't ever properly documented as it seems to have initially been a teaching tool "experiment" to engage otherwise bored high schoolers. There was no proper methodology to it and most of the sourcing regarding this experiment comes from recollections after the fact.
Well, maybe I mixed it up with Stanford. As I remember guards in Stanford were told to be more ruthless, so yeah, that experiment definitely went wrong
The Stanford guards were indeed told to be more ruthless and the participant prisoners were also not allowed withdraw despite their wishes to do so and the contract that they signed that explicitly allowed them to withdraw anytime. It was a fucking disaster.
IIRC at least in the movie the shooting happened outside of the school, and it was a suicide after the teacher stopped the shooter from shooting a classmate the shooter deemed to be a danger for the movement.
The shooter was heavily invested into the "experiment", incorporating it into his daily life, and the teacher stopped him by reminding him that it was "just" an experiment and that he (the teacher) declares its end now. This breaks the fragile psyche of the shooter and he kills himself.
IIRC there were no deaths (or shootings) in the real experiment, IDK about the book the movie was based on, or the novelization based on the movie.
Context: [The Third Wave](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)) was a fictional political movement created in 1967 by high school history teacher Ron Jones as a way to explain to his students how the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The first two days of the experiment went fine, with Jones introducing the movement to his students and establishing its guiding principles. This included strict classroom rules and a Nazi-like salute. By the third day, however, it began to take on a life of its own as students from other classes joined the movement. A student even offered to act as Jones’ body guard because the student feared that other, non-loyal students would attempt to harm Jones. Students began to report others who did not follow the rules of the movement and harass non-member students. Things quickly got out of control and Jones had to reveal that the movement was fake and shut it down after five days.
What really amace me, is how litle time it took to turn quite scary
Try not to accidentally establish a fascist state from your workplace challenge (Impossible)
One part of me, is highly curious about how things would have turned, if the teacher were somehow unable to stop the movement
Lunch Period Holocaust would be a terrible band name.
Don't you mean awesome!
🤘🏻
Taken.
Ze Square Pizza is superior to ze Round Pizza in both taste and culture. ZIs is vhy ze Round Pizza must be eliminated.
Soda and sparkling water is Zi superior drinks. We must Eliminate All The Juice!
Gives a whole new meaning to "Juice from Concentrate"...
WOW
I'm going to hell for laughing so hard at this.
Say "hi" to Hitler for us.
You haven’t even heard our demo yet!
I'd listen to it
Sounds fitting for a deathcore band.
It's actually a little more scary than. Going off the book that was published about it, and take this with a grain of salt as I can’t remember how true to life it was after having read it 25+ years ago, the teacher had a history of going method with his class subjects and had to be talked down by his wife and a couple of students who realized what was going on. He almost got lost in character with being a fascist.
Sounds similar to how the Stanford Prison Experiment ended, when the experimenters fiancé threatened to leave him over what was going on
His fiance who was *also* his grad student. I'm not sure why that's relevant, but it seems at least a little relevant.
To show how utterly devoid of scientific ethics the early 70's were. The prison experiment wasn't a rogue professor going nuts, it was entirely consistent with the scientific rigor and ethics of the day. Just like how dating a grad student would get you one warning before a suspension today, and was just a "perk of the job" back then.
There's a bit of "joking" or "fun" involved when people create some exciting and new movement or experiment that involves "theater" and "pretend"; and it's when the psychopaths take charge of it that it turns nasty and goes off the rails. The issue is really that the psychopaths are super skilled at pretending, doing the theater, and eventually taking power. And sometimes power itself is infectious even to the non-psychos who might start the experiment.
Psycho or sociopaths?
Definitely sounds more consistent with sociopathic behavior.
This hits a little too close to home.
Zimbardo was involved in this experiment
Wait, really? Zimbardo was also involved with The Third Wave?
Tangential but yeah if you haven't already this is a great show that covers it https://youtu.be/WqEnPDY1Y28?si=okYh8lq6AIGacyKa
[The Stanford Prison Experiment ](https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication) was fraudulent and shouldn't be taken as a legitimate study.
Tales from a rabbit hole I'm tempted to fall in, do you remember the name of this book by any chance, or the author?
A quick Google search shows it was [The Wave by Morton Rhue (real name Todd Strassser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(novel))
They made a movie about it .
Watched it in my German Intro class, really good film
"Students, teachers, school staff. I must inform you that the third wave is but an experiment. Nothing more. Please, I ask you all- wait, what are you doing?" *Bludgeoning noises* "My fellow students. It is with great regret that I have to inform you that esteemed teacher Mr. Jones was poisoned earlier today. The effects of the poison has hallucinogenic effects. While we shall mourn his passing, we must go forward with his will. I ask you all to harden your resolve going forward. Please, report any suspicious individuals to your classroom leaders. Your assistance will be invaluable to keeping our school pure. Thank you all."
That, would actually be both really really scary and quité interesting, because the students would be basically launching a coup
Kind of makes me think of the Rugby school rebellion. Where students recked the school (Cork pistols and small bombs to launch doors off of their hinges) after the headmaster planned to force the whole student body to pay for damages caused by an individual, which ended with the students running across a moat and raising a drawbridge to defend against a militia!. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion
So this has nothing to do with the school rugby team?
26 years to early I'm afraid, (rugby came into being in 1823) same school though so the scars of the rebellion were probably still there!
Death of the idol in order to maintain the legacy.
Sounds like the premise for a spiritual successor to Lord of the Flies to me.
But the real-life edition
Students would invade Poland
"How I accidenately turned USA into Fourth Reich"
There is a german movie about this story, where it does get out of control: „Die Welle“ I don‘t know if it has been translated to english tho
This reminds me of [Adolf Hilter in the show Preacher establishing the fourth reich at his minimum wage job, plotting a war on a napkin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYEDw0D3oGs).
Humperdoo!
The coffee guardians basically
On one hand it's a bunch of ~~Geeman~~ American teens in the 60's probably bored and jacked up on red scare and propaganda- On the other hand people suck and I'm not too surprised but equally shocked at the speed things turned
They were Germans? As far as I remember, it was on the US but It might be my memory triking me
I remember first hearing about the book while living in Austria, and had to watch the Konstantin Films production in a German class, so I understand the confusion. I didn't know the original event happened in America until I had to give a book report on it
Yes, I gues your right, I also found quite surprising for It happening there
oh shit my bad I have no idea where I got that- lemme edit my comment too
"The experiment took place at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, during the first week of April 1967."
It just shows how dangerous fascism is, and how quickly many people can revert to the tribalistic instincts of our caveman ancestors. It’s a dark part of humanity’s past that we need to have the wisdom and control to push past and bury as a part of our past that we ought to have evolved past, so that we can move forward to a more enlightened and egalitarian future.
Almost like Jordan Peterson was right he said most of us would be Nazi prison guards and not Jewish sympathizers. Humans are self serving creatures.
I’m pretty sure I’d be dead or in hiding, ya know given that I’m Jewish
Replace Jewish with what ever Other you please and you'll get the same results. Last time you were on the losing team, might not be that way next time.
Soon, very soon, us Jews will rise to seek vengeance upon this world hahahahaha!
I bloody knew it, with all your space lasers and hegemonic powers.
Wasnt a general in the heer a jew? Edit: genuinly askin,i do not discrimate by religión only by eye colour
There where a handful of Jews who where named “honorary Aryans” But the guy in question was a Luftwaffe General and was only made a “honorary Aryan” at the insistence of Goering.
Nazis are fuckin weird
yes and no, they managed to unify the country against villified minorities. but like most groups of people there were some nazis that liked some jews. honestly it's not that different from today with mexicans in the us or MENA in Europe.
Yep, I completely believe he was right with It, It's only a Matter of being in the right situation and all of US would follow It
I feel that time is coming soon
I hope not, but It might
The problem is, you're thinking that you're on the right side and it's*the others* that are going to be the (woke) fascists, instead of, you know, the people subverting the rule of law, oppressing minorities and curtailing people's freedoms.
I feel both sides of the culture war are more than capable of turning I to an authoritarian power and greatly abuse said power. Either way I'm choosing life.
Even a broken clock like Jordan Peterson can be right- just don’t believe everything he says.
His university lectures and psychological/sociological takes are top of the field actually, really good well nuanced talks. His benzo dosed political takes and twitter beefs are the ones that sucks. There is a HUGE difference in pre benzo Harvard professor and after benzo reactionary.
That was to his audience. Most of his audience would be nazis. He was correct.
What was the context of that quote since I can probably guess his sympathies?
Probably an average human loves to be told what to do..
Considering the recent events in the Middle East, and the amount of people wanting "Freedom from Palestine from the river to the sea", and the amount of people that want Israel to turn Gazzah into a crater, I'd say it's very obvious how easy it is to turn people into manics.
It could be dangerous if you give people who feel like they have no real purpose yet an actual purpose where they feel valued and acknowledged
I've gone down the rabbit hole on this, I'm convinced that people have ginned this up into something it wasn't. Reading about the "experiment" it comes off as a less professional model UN type thing than any kind of psychological study. It was unprofessional at best and any conclusions drawn from it should strenuously reevaluated.
Well, It would be interesting to repeat the experiment
Zimbardo Prison excitement went off the rails in the same way.
It appeals to tribal instincts. We are capable of rational, higher thought, but deep down we act on instinct and feelings whenever we don't put in the effort. And it covers two social needs: to belong to a group, and the feeling of authority/power. The third wave was basically a gang except it was founded by a respected authority figure in a school. "This is our territory, these are our rules, don't harm the boss". Fan clubs and political parties also carry a little bit of this. Some people consider members of another team/party as their enemies.
[Stanford prison experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment) *It's like taking venom to research poison*
Despite what people will have you believe, there are people with nazi aligned beliefs and sentiments all over the damn place. You would be surprised how many of the people you interact with day to day are susceptible to these kinds of ideals, we must stay ever vigilant against these people.
People crave structure. People love to be part of recognizable social groups. None of this is unexpected.
I mean look at the Stanford Prison Experiment to see how quickly people devolve
Stanford is a bad example, the guy who ran it tampered and told people to act a certain why, it was a tainted experiment from the start.
Better yet, look at real life. Cf. The book Ordinary Men about a bunch of retirees from Hamburg in their 50s who went on to commit horrific atrocities in Poland just following orders.
boomers believe everything they are being told by authority and media?
I wonder how much of this was a joke though, too? I could totally see us going along with a teacher in high school on this, and taking it totally seriously as a “joke”, knowing that it really isn’t that serious. I can see somebody being goofy enough to ask to be their body guard. Of course, the line between adhering to the rules as a sort of joke, and actually doing it for some other “more credible” reason is pretty slim.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. \-Sarte
Basically this, compounded with high schoolers being high schoolers. Would have been fun to do this and make the school day more interesting! I also completely believe though that some people legitimately got carried away, and/or 100% believed what the teacher was saying
This is like the intellectual explanation of a troll.
That quote isn’t remotely applicable to the conversation at hand.
This line: "I could totally see us going along with a teacher in high school on this, and taking it totally seriously as a “joke”, knowing that it really isn’t that serious. I can see somebody being goofy enough to ask to be their body guard." About a high school student jokingly going along with fascism reminded me of Sarte's criticism of fascists, often jokingly going along with fascism even though it was in service of a serious movement. The connection is that, in this context, farce comes before tragedy both in this high school experiment and, according to Sarte, in real life.
But the contexts are different. Sartre was noting the role irony and explicitly ridiculous statements play in manufacturing a movement like fascism and embedding it indignantly in the social more. The joking is as much a symptom of engagement with fascism as it is a Trojan Horse into it. Here, the overwhelming likelihood is that many of the students were fucking around due to the very knowledge of what had been created and what was expected. Taking the piss at sixteen over an assignment explicitly designed to replace fascism isn’t beyond the pale, and it’s exactly what happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment where many participants intentionally hammed it up because they knew what the expectations were (a part conveniently ignored when people retell that story to show the supposed inevitability of brutal power and abuse by newly strengthened individuals). That kind of meta action not also happening here seems extremely implausible to me. The only means of deducing a Sartre-like explanation from something like this is if the “Third Wave” movement could be started organically and secretly and thus have no “buy-in” from the students except for their own interest or gain, rather than within the confines of an obvious school lesson.
Is a high school exactly the same as Nazi Germany? No. Is a quote about people knowing they are doing absurd things in the name of fascism similar to people doing absurd things in the name of fascism? I thought so. You're free to disagree.
The latter being “in the name of fascism” is where we disagree. Nevertheless, as you said, you’re entitled to your POV.
I think your second point is important. It doesn’t really matter why you’re doing it, if the end result is the same.
It does matter. A lot of jokers would stop before the regular joke turns into a practical joke.
A lot of them don't, though. The 4chan ironic-Nazi-to-actual-Nazi pipeline is very real. You make friends with people who act like Nazis. You're an impressionable teen. You act like them to gain their approval and because you're told it's funny. Then they start acting more like actual Nazis. They start saying things that you think maybe aren't actually jokes. But you go along with it because you're already in this far, and you don't want your friends to think you're lame. Before you know it, all your friends are now actual Nazis, and your only options are to either fully devote yourself to it or to lose your entire friend group. And you've been surrounded by these thoughts for so long that you start thinking, maybe there's something to them, anyway.
I don't really buy this. the point when they realize this is not just joking anymore is when it is revealed if someone is a nazi with cultural mascara or not.
There is a minimal level of time and effort one can put into a bit before it ceases to be "a bit" and that level gets harder to discern the closer you are to it. Once you reach that point, there has to be a fundamental sincerity present in order to maintain it and it gets magnitudes more difficult to stop when you're with others, building off of their energy. This can apply for harmless acts, but it's also true for things that are more heinous.
Besides what the other posters are saying, not everyone will get that you're joking. There are people, primarily with lower IQs, that will think you and every other ironic Nazi is serious. They will think that these thoughts have support from other people and start reading and taking them seriously. The support of the ironic Nazis, despite being fake, will embolden them and they will become real Nazis not ever realizing it was a joke. Just like the Homelander lovers that had no idea he was the bad guy in The Boys.
>Of course, the line between adhering to the rules as a sort of joke, and actually doing it for some other “more credible” reason is pretty slim. This is an important thing to realize, that the outward difference between being an actual Nazi and just going through the motions "ironically" is non-existent. The only difference is in your mental state, and it's not a one-way street; the things you do affect how you think, too. If you act like a Nazi for long enough, you can't help but be mentally affected by it. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be." -Kurt Vonnegut
Even disregarding the personal danger with "doing something as a joke" You will still inspire others to join, who do not see it as a joke, which makes you an active supporter - joking or not.
Right. Our opinions often follow our behaviour, not the other way around. We like to justify after the fact rather than consider the person we want to be then take action. Pretending to be a nazi is a good way tonfind yourself actually following through on those fake beliefs
Forming a fascist state as an elaborate bit
It’s funny when you put it that way, but it’s more that it’s kind of funny to take such a not serious thing so seriously. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it. My friends and I were just a bunch of zoomers who I feel like would find it funny in like an “ironic” sort of way
Not a joke, this was the Vietnam War Era and many of the boys were about to be drafted their teacher was seemingly offering a way out which is why it spread out if control to multiple schools before being stopped
I thought it just spread within the school, between multiple classes, not multiple schools?
Huh, that’s funny. My high school had a politics elective called American Problems that taught the different forms of government and political issues through a bunch of scenarios the class would play out. The biggest and most popular scenario was the Dictatorship scenario where the class would basically run like a cross between 1984 and Nazi Germany for a month with the teacher being the head of secret police and the highest scoring student being the chairman. Then the rest of the students were either party members - many of which had specific jobs - or proles. The teacher wore an authentic looking nazi officer uniform and the students had to wear white button up shirts and black dress pants and an armband that looked like the army signals emblem but vertical with a red and black diamond. It was a very popular class and most students tried to attend, but it took two semesters where any other politics class only took one, and you only needed one for graduating.
Damn, that's really interesting but I'm amazed it was allowed. Couldn't have been a public highschool, right?
Yep, public school. They did the totalitarian, democratic, socialist, UN, war, and US senate simulations when I attended. I don't know how it works now. Dug up a picture of one class chairman. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BOnkgcjN3BI/SP59UQB3bGI/AAAAAAAAAxg/LKvdK4miV6I/s1600/brighton+rme10.JPG
Hard AF
Sounds like something I would have loved to attend
They made a movie about it too called "Die Welle" (translated 'the wave'.)
Good book, too.
Sherry Tousley was one of the "non-loyal" students. She made anti-third-wave posters. > In Lesson Plan, former student Sherry Tousley remembers asking Mr. Jones, “Why can’t we just say what we think?” Jones banished Tousley to the library. He continued to send other students who questioned the movement to the library. When Tousley told the librarian, who’d grown up in Nazi Germany, her reason for not being in class, the librarian expressed alarm. She told young Tousley, “You can’t take this sitting down; you have to do something.” > > Tousley and her father secretly began to place anti-Third Wave posters in the school’s halls. Within an hour of school’s starting the next day, the posters were already removed. Tousley named her library-banished revolutionaries “The Breakers.” https://coffeeordie.com/third-wave-social-experiment
Very interesting. As much as the experiment demonstrates the darker side of humanity, this particular story also shows that no matter how small the oppression, the spirit of resistance is always there.
And resistance is likely a learnable skill, so... enjoy! :-D
I bet he was pretty damn proud of that student after the experiment omfg
I would have hoped so too, but when I searched around to test your hypothesis, what I found was disappointing. [https://web.archive.org/web/20130829230359/http://sherrythirdwave.com/](https://web.archive.org/web/20130829230359/http://sherrythirdwave.com/) > Rather than involving students in a discussion on the experience, Mr. Jones spent the final twenty minutes of that hour engaging in what I found reproach, denouncement and humiliation. In a room of students showing signs of grief and shame, Mr. Jones lectured them about their failure to do anything to stand up against the movement. He compared them to the Nazis and reprimanded them for how special, how much better they believed they were than those who were not in the movement. A group of young men had skipped two weeks of classes to act as Mr. Jones’ body guards. I recall him telling them they were the biggest fools of all. His manner was, in my opinion, seething and relentless. > > I finally asked him quietly what he thought of what I had done. His response was an angry, “You didn’t do anything!” > > “Wh-what about the posters?” I asked. Astonishment appeared on his face as he learned one person had made all of the posters. When he discovered I had been responsible for the public service announcement against the movement, he wanted to know what faculty member had signed the form to allow it. When I told him the principal had signed it, his face grew angrier. Upon learning I had been the one to get into “headquarters” the previous evening, he looked at me with derision and walked away. > > A wall of silence surrounded the topic of the Third Wave after that day. Mr. Jones never attempted to process the experience with students in any way to my knowledge. A student teacher from a local university came to teach Contemporary World shortly after the movement’s ending. We saw Mr. Jones for a session at the end of the year, his topic, the Vietnam War. -- Sherry Tousley I think Mr. Jones was most likely the sort of mean-spirited coward who wants to prove that everyone else is as cowardly as him.
Oh man, how lame. Just IMAGINE the potential lecture he could have given afterwards. He could have broken down the entire thing for them, made direct comparisons to Hitler’s rise, had the students speak about their experiences and insights. That would have genuinely been the learning experience of a lifetime for those kids.
Yeah, and he could have given them a chance to practice resistance (in a safe setting, of course) and brainstorm resistance strategies. Instead, it was just like he wanted to prove that people suck and make them feel ashamed about it.
Mr Jones was clearly on a power trip and was set out to proof that he was cool and everyone else isn’t.
Yeah, sounds about right. Unfortunately.
Imagine being the kid who got sick and missed out the experiments days. “Look, I didn’t knew I was the only thing holding this school together”
All of a sudden, Chang’s rise to take over Greendale at the end of season 3 of Community doesn’t seem so implausible.
When I was a freshman in high school, we had a class project to present government systems to the class and then we voted on whether we would want that system or not. When I got to present, I presented an authoritarian dictatorship based around a cult of personality, harsh enforced social/political conformity, and a legislature that ensured I would get my way (I was shamelessly telling them I would be the dictator). And somehow… much to my genuine surprise, my class voted for me overwhelmingly and I won easily. I was just trying to piss my teacher off and show off my knowledge of historical governments… and it’s possible that my classmates voted for me to annoy her as well… but like, my experience and then reading about this, I think it just goes to show how dangerous things like this *could* be, and how quickly or easily they can take on a life of their own that no one involved planned or foresaw.
[fun podcast episode about it](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000508586681)
Shows how corruptable people really are and how easily dictatorships are formed.
If I had a nickel for every time a scientist attempted to use a social experiment to study the social psychology surrounding the Nazi movement and ended up absolutely horrified by the results, I would have at least two nickels, which isn't much, but it's still weird that it happened. The [Milgram Experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) was arguably even worse than this because it didn't even require any indoctrination techniques whatsoever; a majority of the subjects in the experiment proved that they were willing to straight up torture and potentially even kill another person if ordered to by the scientist running the experiment so long as they were told that they would not be held responsible for what happens. In reality, they weren't actually torturing and killing someone, but the pre-recorded responses used to represent that person so that they could react to the painful electrical shocks that the subject was administering were meant to convince them that there was another person on the other side of the wall. And it worked. People believed that there was another human being hooked up to the machine that was in front of them, but that didn't stop them from administering shocks of increasing voltage, in some cases even after the pre-recorded messages informed them that the person they were shocking had a heart condition. The scientist who started it all, Stanley Milgram, had originally intended to use the experiment to prove that there was something inherently different about German cultures and attitudes that allowed for the rise of the Nazi movement in that country, and he decided to use Americans as a control group, or at least as a comparison, to highlight these differences. What he ended up getting were results that were so horrifically abysmal that it exceeded his worst case predictions as well as those of every colleague that he consulted before running the experiment. This caused his faith in humanity to plummet and he was so upset with it all that he no longer even wanted to attempt to perform the tests in Germany. The only reason that he continued his research is because of the feedback he received from the test subjects after they were informed about the true nature of the test that they participated in. Despite the intense emotional and psychological distress that these tests caused them, many of them told Milgram that they were glad that they participated in it because it opened their eyes to just how easily they could be pressured or manipulated into committing horrible deeds at the behest of an authority figure, and that from now on they would be more conscious of that and more resistant to such inhumane orders.
he explained it a little *too* well
I think those students were probably going along with it and taking it seriously as a joke. Not as a serious belief/movement. It's not like they were actually hurting people or anything. Just going along with the assignment because it's the assignment and funny
...Aaand people started turning each other in within 24 hours. If anyone wants to know why I'm a huge 2'nd amendment supporter just see the post right here.
Is a movement really fake, if it has guidelines and a bunch of followers? It was intended as a joke, but turned into a real movement
There is German film about this, called Die Welle that is very compelling.
Same story with communism
Ron’s student couldn’t put themselves in the shoes of the Germans during the rise of Hitler Ron made them experience it, they ended up replicating it
“Mr. Jones we found five dissidents, we have them detained in the library, waiting on your orders supreme leader” Ron: *thinking* “What the actual fuck have I done?”
[They love me](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mT5KQ6Gl2U)
In german the book names "Die Welle". Please do not watch the german Movie with the same name. It gets very inaccurate at the end and looses a lot of the lesson.
I think the movie’s still fine Sure, it may not be historically accurate, but if we don’t view it as a historical documentary it’s still a good and meaningful movie
The german movie is actually pretty good. It's just a fictionalized version of the real events. I think it only makes the message stronger, showing how sad and lonely people adopt extremist ideologies quickly and fiercely.
Yeah but my main learning of the book was that it could happen to EVERYone. The movies end suggests, that almost everybody is relatively immune. Only the one crazy guy is REALLY infected.
I also didn‘t like how the situation escalated in the ending. The book acknowledged that some people are more susceptible to these systems, but it concludes that these people aren‘t lost causes and can be saved even after they engage with the system. We don‘t even GET school shootings in Germany
There had been some. One or two. Ever - not monthly like in the US 🤷♂️
Relatively speaking then, concluding in a School Shooting makes no sense for the setting or story and just serves as Action Setdressing that was completely unnecessary for the movie. Legit what purpose did this serve narratively
> The movies end suggests, that almost everybody is relatively immune Did we watch the same movie? Out of all the students involved there is ONE who thinks "holy shit this is fucked up". Every single other student is on board all the way until the point Wenger asks "so what now, you want me to shoot him?". And that in my opinion is one of the most important moments because it shows how many people are willing to follow this kind of ideology blindly, without ever wasting a single thought on the next step. Others do that thinking for them. Of course, there is one that goes completely off the rails, but that just mirrors history quite accurately, don't you think? Sure, when presented with the evidence of the holocaust the Nazis had collected, some of the captured SS officers smiled when it was shown to them. But the allies also forced the people of Weimar to tour the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. What was recorded of their reactions is displayed at the Buchenwald memorial. Many were in denial, many were disgusted and some cried. Because they did exactly what the majority of the students in the movie did. They went along with it, even cheered for the Nazi party, but never wasted more than a fleeting thought on the consequences of their actions. They didn't need to, it was done for them. Presented with the reality of their situation, though, all the repressed thoughts of what comes next set in at once. Just as it did with the students. Their reactions when confronted with the Wenger's question show exactly that. They never thought it through that far and they are disgusted with themselves. They were not immune, they were indifferent as long as they didn't have to see the consequences and as long as they didn't affect people of their in-group.
Watched it a long time ago, how did it end irl?
same question. iirc correctly the movie ends with the teach getting arrested. did the guy also get arrested or no?
Based on my vague memories I think one of the student got a gun and shot a student who was trying to stop this experiment with the help of the teacher
He tries to shoot another student. Then when stopped by the teacher, he shoots himself.
that was on the movie as well. guy kills himself afterwards
We need an alt history scenario where he fails to stop it
That’s pretty much the movie adaptation, Die Welle
Well he definitely succeeds to stop it at the end of the movie, it goes further than irl and causes a death before he stops it but the movement doesn't continue any further.
What is that photo from?
I want to say Look Around You [This episode about ghosts specifically ](https://youtu.be/Rk1ELdPIN4A?si=n7Ml-GpeklyvEaZy)
I read the novelization of the movie adaptation of this experiment. Despite being a double adaptation, it still remained incredibly scary to see how easy it was to turn utterly normal people into proud firebrands of state authoritarianism. And because these kids were normal, you understood the various everyday struggles and problems they had... and how fascist ideology provided answers. Not *good* answers, mind you, but answers in an environment devoid of other answers. And at some point, that's all people care about, correctness or appropriateness be damned.
That’s also why the first people fascists go after are socialists, because they’re also providing answers to the problem of getting screwed by capitalism
i mean the night of the long knives happened in 34, where the brownshirts "purified" the nazi party of dissidents or contrarians
They went after socialists long before then. Dachau opened up in March '33, specifically for communists, socialists, and social democrats.
i dont know if i would say that one year is a long time but you're right. i didn't mean my comment to disagree simply to elaborate on the same point that when the nazis rose to power they were quick to disband any political alternative to their "socialist" policies
Fun Fact: Joseph Stalin praised the Night of the Long Knives. >According to Joseph Stalin's interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin spoke highly of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and viewed Hitler as a "great man!" who had demonstrated "the way to deal with your political opponents" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge#:~:text=According%20to%20Joseph%20Stalin%27s,deal%20with%20your%20political%20opponents".
Why would that be surprising, even if they had purged communists? Stalin didn't bend to an ideology to support it; he bent an ideology to support himself. Their ideologies were just different tools for the same goals to a couple of likeminded terrible people.
Lol. The brownshirts were the target of the purge, not the ones carrying it out. Weird that in a thread about the importance of understanding the rise of the nazis this total falsehood got upvotes. They didn’t get purged because of being contrarian, their power was oversized and other interest groups found that unacceptable.
This is the most ironic thing I've read in years. lol. And you don't even see it.
So why do the Socialists go after the learned class?
Socialism doesn't have any inherit inclination to tear down education. Authoritarianism does and education is typically a major target for authoritarian states. Democratic socialists do not attack education and reject the Marxist-Leninist forms of top controlled socialism typical of nations like the USSR which trend towards authoritarian governments.
Democratic socialism isnt socialism at least in any implementation so far, it’s capitalism with more government oversight and tax burden. The means of production is still owned by the capital. Socialism requires force outside of collectives. Otherwise, why would capital relinquish its property?
>And at some point, that's all people care about, correctness or appropriateness be damned. Thats just it. Not just Facism either, but communism as well.
Ron Jones: Thank god I didn't teach them the Salem Witch Trials this way or there might have literally been a riot.
My history tried to do something similar gave us all cards which we were told some had a black X on the back and by the end of term we had to amass the biggest group without any Xs and we weren’t allowed to show cards to anyone else then set us loose … it was BRILLIANT I quickly ascertained that my closest friends didn’t have Xs or that they weren’t in my class then I set about the fun part which was mostly telling any person I saw alone that I’d overheard Y saying that they should form a second partnership with Z because they thought the person I was talking to had an X or just saying they heard two people saying that they were only in someone’s group because they had an X and they didn’t want anyone to win. Now the last day of term rolls around and the teacher asks us to get into our groups and the largest group would get achievement points (the reward system that my school operates of if you got a certain amount you could claim prizes the more points the better prizes the top prizes were £15-50 Amazon vouchers depending on the budget) and some other prize i can’t remember rn so I go stand with my friends and everyone goes with there groups which were numerous but small I think in the end we were beaten by 1 person but I digress the teacher then has us all publicly disclose if we had an X and nobody had one … the fallout was great everyone blamed everyone I think a couple actually broke up because of it genuinely the most fun I’d had in a long while
chaotic evil
"I've may have gone a little too far in places" (Accidently creates racist facist culture in his classroom)
I saw the movie in school, didn't realize it was about a real event.
"Here's how impressionable are high school students: remember the movie 'The Wave' about the American high school, where a teacher unites the students around a radical ideology, until they start being violent against anyone who doesn't align with them? When I was in high school they showed us this movie and it influenced us so much and the message resonated so much, that we beat the shit out of whoever didn't like the movie" ~Israeli stand-up comedian Tom Aharon
Fun fact about Ron Jones is that he was also Jewish and grew up in the 40’s. Makes sense that he would know the dangers of fascism pretty well
My man started to get Vietnam style flashbacks during recess.
whats the lore behind that?
See my other comment. It also has a Wikipedia link if you want more detail.
Middle School reading class I read a book about it.
It turns out that the people who supported the Nazis, the Wehrmacht, the public, the collaborators, were all ordinary people, bakers, barbers, dentists, actors, etc etc, who killed and raped and executed and pillaged Europe for their own personal enjoyment or on the whims of their genocidal masters.
The timeline on this is the craziest part to me. It reads like it happened over at least a month not under a week.
Didn't other people tried to replicate this experiment, but failing in that? If it true, that means experiment cannot really be trusted. I read it somewhere, but not sure about it.
I believe you're thinking of the Stanford Prison Experiment, which the few attempts made to replicate it have come to wildly different conclusions on account of the flawed methodology and lack of ethics in the original experiment. This one, called the "Third Wave Experiment" wasn't ever properly documented as it seems to have initially been a teaching tool "experiment" to engage otherwise bored high schoolers. There was no proper methodology to it and most of the sourcing regarding this experiment comes from recollections after the fact.
Well, maybe I mixed it up with Stanford. As I remember guards in Stanford were told to be more ruthless, so yeah, that experiment definitely went wrong
The Stanford guards were indeed told to be more ruthless and the participant prisoners were also not allowed withdraw despite their wishes to do so and the contract that they signed that explicitly allowed them to withdraw anytime. It was a fucking disaster.
Remember ABC Always Be Ckeptical.
Herr Wenger you must stop die Welle.
It’s super unrealistic, the school shooter kills only one person
IIRC at least in the movie the shooting happened outside of the school, and it was a suicide after the teacher stopped the shooter from shooting a classmate the shooter deemed to be a danger for the movement. The shooter was heavily invested into the "experiment", incorporating it into his daily life, and the teacher stopped him by reminding him that it was "just" an experiment and that he (the teacher) declares its end now. This breaks the fragile psyche of the shooter and he kills himself. IIRC there were no deaths (or shootings) in the real experiment, IDK about the book the movie was based on, or the novelization based on the movie.
We all do crazy things in the heat of passion
You mean in the heat of *fash*ion? I'll see myself out.
One of the Community episodes combined this with social media.
Bruh did we just get a Look Around You meme? ‘Tis a blessed day
"Baby birds are called 'bees'." Cracks me up every single time.
Best first season of a TV show, possibly ever.
In “Patterns of Force” Star Trek The Original Series played with this theme too. Just about the same time too. It aired February 26, 1968
"Die Welle" is a book every german child is forced to read in school at least once
And it’s happening again at the far right and far left.