Ultranationalism in practice

Word	What it means
Fascism	Extreme nationalism, a single leader, the individual subordinated to the state, and violence treated as legitimate politics.
Totalitarianism	A state seeking control over every part of life — economy, culture, information, private belief.
Lebensraum	“Living space” — the Nazi claim that Germany needed to expand east.
Appeasement	Conceding to an aggressor's demands in the hope of avoiding war. The Munich Agreement, 1938.
Holocaust	The systematic murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, along with Roma, disabled people, Polish civilians and others.
Nuremberg trials	1945–46. Established that individuals can be held criminally responsible for acts of state; following orders was rejected as a defence.
Decolonization	Colonies becoming sovereign states, mostly between 1945 and 1975. It roughly tripled UN membership.
Non-violent resistance	Mass non-cooperation, boycotts and civil disobedience, as used in the Indian independence movement.
Partition	Dividing a territory along national or religious lines, as in India and Pakistan in 1947.

• Grievance. Versailles and the war guilt clause gave Germany a national humiliation to point at.
• Collapse. The Great Depression produced mass unemployment and discredited the existing government.
• A promise of restored greatness, made by a movement outside the discredited system.
• A scapegoat — an internal enemy blamed for both the defeat and the collapse.
• Control of information. Radio, film, posters, rallies and schooling all carrying the same few messages, with competing sources suppressed.

Appeasement, fairly considered. Munich handed over the Sudetenland in 1938; Germany took the rest of Czechoslovakia within six months. With the slaughter of 1914–18 twenty years in the past, the policy was far more understandable at the time than it looks now — and saying so is a stronger answer than condemning it.

Sequence. Germany invaded Poland in September 1939; Britain and France declared war two days later. Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought in the United States. The war in Europe ended in May 1945.

The Holocaust is the case against which the Genocide Convention was written in 1948. Understanding it as the end point of a process — definition, exclusion, concentration, extermination — rather than as an isolated horror is what makes the earlier steps recognisable elsewhere.

Nuremberg. Crimes against humanity were prosecuted for the first time and superior orders rejected as a defence. The principle leads directly to the International Criminal Court, created in 2002.

Canada's record is mixed, and the course expects you to say so: a major military contribution, and also the internment of Japanese Canadians and the turning away of the MS St. Louis.

Scale. Most of it happened between 1945 and 1975, and UN membership roughly tripled. Colonial peoples used the language of self-determination that Europe had used in 1919 and had declined to apply to them.

India. Gandhi's campaign made the colony ungovernable without mass violence by the nationalists — non-cooperation, boycotts, civil disobedience. Independence came in 1947 together with a partition that displaced millions and killed enormous numbers. Both halves belong in an honest answer.

Why it keeps failing. Populations are mixed, so any border leaves some group as a minority inside it. Partition in India and the breakup of Yugoslavia both show how fast the principle can produce the violence it was meant to prevent.

• Mixing up the war's start and American entry. 1939 in Europe; 1941 for the United States.
• Condemning appeasement without explaining it. Say why it looked reasonable at the time.
• Treating decolonization as uniformly successful. Partition and its consequences are part of the story.
• Leaving Canada out. The course expects Canadian evidence, including the uncomfortable kind.