> but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.

I can't tell you what my relatives were like leading up to the war (I certainly wasn't born at that point), but they were illiterate peasants from the south, far removed from the cities and politics.

My suspicion is that, if anything, they were like most southern Italians, who seem to have a profound distrust of the government and politicians.

If I'm honest, they didn't have any moral objections to the war--they just felt used.

Same in Sweden, the majority popular opinion started shifting away from supporting Germany late in the war as they were obviously losing.

> Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

And there's no doubt about it - it was a myth. Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944. Ivan and Uncle Sam were kicking down the door, extermination camps were working overtime, yet most people were still fully behind him.

The hardest thing for people to admit is that they've been duped.

And it is not the only case. The French people went to war in 1914 "la fleur au fusil"[0]. Jean Jaurès is assassinated for his pacifism and (his assassin would be found not guilty - despite being totally guilty - in 1919).

[0]: a more nuanced take that is illuminating can be read here: https://www.france24.com/fr/20140730-grande-guerre-poilus-vr...

I wouldn't necessarily call it comforting fantasy, people change their minds all the time. I think we're all to some extent able to justify some negative sides of any political movement as tensions rise.

I've felt this myself a few times now. Both when Trump was attempted assasinated and now with Charlie Kirk. I am sad that public discourse and our democracies are kind of unraveling these days and that this is just a sad reality of that fact. As far as Trump or Charlie Kirk go, I have no sympathy what so ever.

I'm not sure I really want to blame anyone for things becoming like this, it all seems like par for the course in the world we've created for ourselves. I just wish we were able to stop before this.

Fascism was quite fashionable at the time.

> Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

Another way this observation is manifested is how out of nowhere you have countries voting in extremist parties and politicians.

I think there is a general distance to a lot of things in today's society. Very few of us have to farm or hunt for our own food, or clean an animal carcass. I don't have a strong view on the moral aspects of eating animals (I'm not a vegetarian or vegan), but I think it'll probably do some good if anyone that eats meat at some point slaughters, cleans and butchers one of the animals they eat.

It’s John von Neumann’s idea, at least from the biography I read. Before too much praise is heaped upon him, he also strongly argued for a nuclear first strike on Soviet Union before they got their own nuclear weapons because it was best strategy from game theory POV.

I think it was Call of Duty 2 (when the franchise was still WW2-based) when they would show, in my recollection, an anti-war message including this one every time your character died. I think this was absent from later incarnations of the franchise.

I too was at Dachau on a day like that, over a decade ago. My partner recently asked me about it, and just thinking back to how I felt made my skin crawl. It's terrible to remember, and I hope I never forget.

The story wasn't actually about the trucker being hard working (or not), though I'm sure he was. He wasn't actually trying to make people believe he literally was the hardest working.

The joke is that everyone else he went to war with was claiming to be something else, so he must have delivered all the supplies himself.

The response is interesting to me, because having fought in a war, though I am not a US veteran -- I instantly got it. And the place I heard it from was more veteran dominated, and everyone instantly understood/appreciated the joke.