Excerpt from They Thought They Were Free -- The Germans, 1933-45 Milton Mayer

[ancianita]

We need to stay focused on the gradualism of the danger to this country.

Please read this historical reminder.

My take on our national events is this: I'd much rather be a wrong pessimist than a wrong optimist.

You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing...

...it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.

I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to.

Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html?fbclid=IwAR1T5Mwjv3xLGvRwoFzhhqyaORSvMH6stTyb2SjXCV0abww6iKqwPlBqbVY

[rurallib]

1. my lord the parallels are incredible

cross post in GD maybe more people will see it.

Thanks for the eye opener.

[ancianita]

2. We really need to take this to heart.

[BigmanPigman]

3. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich should be required reading in

High Schools. My mom and sister have it in their permanent libraries. I would have shown it in my classroom but it is too gruesome for younger kids. We are bound to repeat history since we as humans never learn from our mistakes.