This Isn’t History… It’s a Warning | Ordinary Fascism (Patreon)

Ordinary Fascism was one of the heaviest and most thought-provoking films I’ve reacted to on this channel.

Mikhail Romm’s 1965 documentary uses captured Nazi archival footage, much of it filmed by the perpetrators themselves. That makes it especially disturbing. This isn’t history recreated years later. You’re watching footage from inside the world that created it.

What hit me hardest was how the film shows fascism growing gradually through propaganda, nationalism, superiority, conformity, obedience and the steady dehumanization of other people.

The numbers make that progression even harder to process.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people were killed during the five-week campaign. By the end of World War II, around 6 million Polish citizens had died, about 1 in 5 people in the country.

In Belarus, newer research suggests the devastation was even greater than figures I previously discussed during my Come and See reaction. More than 5,295 settlements were destroyed with all or part of their populations, and broader estimates reach into the thousands beyond that. The human toll is now commonly estimated closer to 1 in 3 Belarusians.

Across the Soviet Union, roughly 27 million people died.

Twenty-seven million individual lives.

Another section that stayed with me came from Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made up largely of ordinary, middle-aged working men. At Józefów in 1942, they were reportedly given the chance to step away from participating in mass killing without punishment.

Out of roughly 500 men, only around 12 did.

That is one of the most frightening ideas connected to this documentary. Extreme violence does not always require everyone involved to be a fanatical believer. Conformity, peer pressure, obedience, ambition and becoming gradually accustomed to brutality can all play a role.

It leaves behind one enormous question:

How do ordinary people become participants in extraordinary evil?

The film’s focus on children made that question even more powerful for me. Hatred and ideas of racial or national superiority aren’t something children are born understanding. They have to be taught.

I also looked at modern casualty figures from the Russia-Ukraine war as a way of understanding scale. The research I used estimates more than 2 million combined military casualties and roughly 600,000 or more deaths. Even numbers that horrifying are still only a glimpse of the destruction World War II eventually reached.

That may be my biggest takeaway from Ordinary Fascism.

We look back at history already knowing where it ends. The people living through the 1930s didn’t.

They didn’t know where the next piece of propaganda, the next compromise or the next act of dehumanization would eventually lead.

There were moments during this reaction where I honestly didn’t know what to say. Sometimes the footage deserved silence.

This is very different from most of what we experience together on EnterTheCronic, but it reminded me why film and art matter. They can turn history from dates and statistics back into human beings.

Ordinary Fascism is not an easy watch.

But I’m very glad I watched it.

If you watch this reaction with me, let me know what affected you most and what you believe the biggest lesson from Ordinary Fascism is today.

Please keep the discussion respectful. Behind every statistic are real people, real families and an unimaginable amount of suffering.