Hitler’s rise to power, the Third Reich, the quiet hum of Nazism like electricity running through a live wire. The initial complacency of the Allied forces, the annexation of the Sudetenland, the invasion of Poland. The quiet hum of Germany, blissful in ignorance, their lives in their dimly light kitchens and carpeted living rooms.

How thoroughly high school history classes cover these moments. We gloss over the murder of the natives, the atrocities committed on our own soil. We fail to mention that the Civil War did not stop us from denying black people the right to exist on this country’s ground long after the abolition of slavery. We only briefly mention our very own labor camps or the plight of Japanese-American citizens in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Yet, we learn just how charming Hitler was. We learn the disarray and the inflation that Germany faced post-reparations. We learn about the desperation of the German people, about Hitler’s youth and Hitler’s ovens and Hitler’s cunning campaign.

Stained into blurry PowerPoints are years worth of images of malnourished skeletal figures, sullen eyes, mass graves. From middle school to high school to college, we learn of pink triangles and mustard gas and the fall of the Fuhrer. We are shocked by the statistics and the pictures and the stories until they become almost audibly commonplace.

There’s always a voice in the back of a middle school history classroom. “How did everyone just…let him do all that bad stuff? Why didn’t anyone stop him?”

Why do we let our leaders commit atrocities? Are we bound by bureaucracy and red tape? Are we complicit in the actions of our governments? Do we foster them, grow them, encourage them?

Why didn’t anyone stop Hitler? Why did we let Nazis walk free in the streets of German towns?

Why did we let Nazis walk free in the streets of Charlottesville? Why do we once again call them by another name, create excuses and justifications and easy passes? Why do we once again complain that it’s impolite to get involved in something that’s “not our business”?

If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately hop out. If you put a frog in lukewarm water and gracefully increase the temperature, the frog will boil to death. We can call them the “alt-right.” We can maintain that there are two sides of every story. We can shout that they have a right to spew their hatred just as we have the right to denounce it.

Meanwhile, they will pin pink triangles to jumpsuits, light crosses on front lawns, break store windows on street corners. They will build concentration camps 50 miles from our playgrounds and college campuses. They will build walls, they will demonstrate on live national television that bigotry has no consequence – even on American soil.

How do we become complicit in violence?

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