@Alan McDougall,
I think it is important that we revisit these awful events and refresh our understanding of them for I'm convinced that, within a decade, two at the outside, our committment to our humanitarian ideals will be sorely tested and we may well wind up the ugly, brutal ones in these trials.
The gathering "perfect storm" of overpopulation, climate change, deforestation, desertification, species extinction, nuclear proliferation, disease and pest migration and resource (notably fresh water) exhaustion is approaching.
We in the West (Europe and North America), are the most fortunate, being the "least and last" regions affected. These afflictions, while ultimately global, will not be uniform in their impact.
One of the darkest aspects of Hitler's malevolence was to cast non-Aryans as less human, something that quickly evolved into "less than human." Unless we in the West are prepared to accept radical restructuring of our governments, our economies and even our societies (and I don't believe we are) then we are going to have to find ways to condition our people to morally withstand the mass suffering that will be visited upon Africa, South and East Asia, the Middle East and even South America.
Europe is already struggling with the onset of climate migration from Africa. Many experts (including people at the Pentagon) foresee the day when the United States will have to create an impermeable bulwark against mass migration out of Central and South America. The operative word is "impermeable." Consider what that means.
In just a decade or two, each nation's greatest threat will be the country that lies immediately between it and the equator. The face of war is changing. Now we're seeing resource wars, wars of sustenance. We actually have a fairly good history of collapsed civilizations and this shows us that the one thing each of them has done prior to collapse was to raid.
While the face of war may be changing, the essential instincts needed to prepare humans to wage and to endure it carry over.
I apologize if my remarks seem unduly apocalyptic but you have to look away very hard to escape the reality of the changes underway. We tend not to see it because we don't directly feel it - yet. For example, the collapse of major fisheries around the world is well known but we in the West are predominantly meat eaters while the major source of protein for those in the Third World is fish.
I won't go on but I do hope that I've shown that it's more important now than ever that we think on the maniacal excesses of this man Hitler and how he infected an entire, advanced nation with his poisoned ideology. In the 21st century, Lebensraum takes on an entirely new dimension.
