“It is 1969 in a high school history class in Palo Alto, California. The teacher, Ben Ross, is discussing the horrors of the holocaust. The students ask why it happened. If all the Germans weren’t Nazis, why did they just stand by and watch? The teacher goes home thinking about how to answer the question.
His answer is The wave.
The next day Ben Ross introduces his students to a new system based on discipline, community, and action. Students are to sit up straight with their hands on the desks. They must spring from their seats and give quick answers to the teacher’s questions. There’s a membership card and a special salute. What Ross never expected was that the students would love the new system. The discipline felt good. The new wave community was a kind of secret family, elite and special.
Like a kind of cancer, The wave moved beyond the classroom. Other students wanted to get involved and original members brought in new recruits with missionary zeal. At football games, if you weren’t a wave member you were forced to sit elsewhere. Anyone who said anything against the wave was considered an enemy. Anti-wave students were threatened or beaten up.
The experiment goes too far and the teacher is told to stop it. A school assembly of wave members is announced, coupled with promises of the appearance of the national leader of the wave. The lights dim and films of Hitler and the Holocaust appear. The film stops with the image of Hitler and his faithful followers still on the screen. Ross comes forward and asks the students to look at the soldiers surrounding Hitler. ‘Yes, you all would have made good Nazis. ...Fascism isn’t something those other people did, it is right here in all of us.’"
This reminds me of another post from elsewhere a couple months ago:
"Two old friends of mine -- a Jewish couple in their 80s, both retired university professors who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and eventually became U.S. citizens -- made a stunning remark to me a few months ago: 'You know, all our lives we have blamed our parents and our parents' generation for allowing Hitler to gain control. Now we're beginning to see how powerless they must have felt to stop what was happening all around them.'"
