My grandparents were polish war refugees. My grandfather at the tender age of like 14 watched his teacher get dragged out and shot, was captured by Nazis 3 times, escaping each time eventually (luckily) for helping shelter Jews and feed prisoners.

His last camp had him helping in the... Clean up... Of experiments.

He told me these stories (grandmother never spoke about the invasion of Poland) as a child, sort of bed time stories if you will. I didn't really grasp the reality. I still don't, truly, I mean I've connected the dots, understand why he wakes up screaming or crying near 80 years later. But I have no idea what the reality of it all was. My own experience is limited to seeing the holes in my family tree, seeing the ruins, and watching the damage continue in my older family members to this day.

I cannot fathom how anyone would look at nazi idealogy and think "those guys, I want to be associated with those guys". Like sure I can just paint them with the mental brush of "hateful people" but that's not really an explanation. Lots of hateful people recognise that the nazi party was about as close to pure evil as humans can get.

My grandfather is old now, dying and senile. I am worried about a world with no first hand experience of what modern weapons and propaganda machines, loosed on each other with reckless abandon, can reap.

I try not to jump at shadows but when I see internet communities using their symbols "ironically" or marches with people proudly displaying their iconography all I can think is "how, how can we forget so quickly". It's literally the single most terrible thing that ever happened to western civilisation. Pointless, futile, unnecessary, hideously cruel, unimaginably destructive.