I highly recommend actually reading it and understanding what it is and isn’t. Mostly I learned that there’s no simple answers, but also that people and even political movements were just as slippery then as they are now. But you may come away with something completely different. It’s an odd but interesting book.
Yes! I recently read this book and was pretty shocked by how much was chalked up to the German character.
I came away feeling neither comfort nor increased panic relating to the current US situation. I read the book because I was hand-wringing about how complicit I am just by getting on with my privileged and comfortable life right now. I didn’t really come away with any resolution to that question or clear ideas about how I should change my behavior.
I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.
My experience of Germans, having lived among them for almost a decade, and having married one of them, is that you can usually find a counterexample to any supposed German characteristic just by looking around the room. If there is any overarching theme to the German psyche, it might be a tendency to conservatism (in the sense of preferring to do things as they've always been done), but at the same time you've also got radical groups on the left and the right that are a fundamental part of the democratic fabric of Germany.
I think there are some cultural touchstones that are very German, and those have an influence on how Germans think and act, but I think this can be very contradictory and it's difficult to draw a single picture here. For example, people are very conscious of antisemitism here because of how much it's talked about in schools and the media, and that informs national foreign policy. But at the same time, Germans, like most Western Europeans, have grown up in a time of peace and see war and aggression as a cardinal sin. Both of these inform the German response to something like the situation in Gaza, but the result averages out to a policy that's broadly in line with many other liberal European states.
All in all, I think you'll get more insight from phrenology than from trying to figure out the German character in too much depth.
It’s easy to read your comment as meaning ‘never let others influence your opinions on right or wrong’ which is (I hope!) obviously ludicrous.
>I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong
But you're just going to see the swastika on the cover (which is used appropriately as the symbol of hate it represents) and you'll not even attempt discussions at preventing future Nazi-creating societies.
Good work /s
If you search my username, I have provided the couple-dozen quotes from this book that alarmed me most, in regards to society in 2020 (when I first read the book). I am not a supremicist in any capacity — I am a blue collar union electrician (so: I hate everybody equally smile_face.GIF). But I've heard it all on jobsites, and not all hate is "misdirected"...
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.
Which by the way was largely false, for both low and high-ranking Nazis. It was usually possible to slowly or even quickly distance yourself from directly committing atrocities (or coordinating them) and get fobbed off into some low-key administrative position without fearing anything like serious punishment. The Nazi machinery was harsh towards openly voiced disobedience and discontent, but surprisingly tolerant of a "weak stomach" or a lack of what their fanatics called moral fiber (being able to protect the race by butchering innocent others).
Christopher Browning in his book about Reserve Battalion 101, mentioned in the comment right above yours, emphasizes this point about a lack of severe punishment for not participating, repeatedly about the members of that death squad.
The ugly black magic of the Nazi system was specifically that it often made previously, otherwise ordinary people internally normalize mass murder into something they could do.
The above aside, image too the kind of empty shell of fundamental human morality you'd need to be to continue sending innocent people, including women and children to their deaths in gas chambers, just so you can avoid looking bad on the social scene around you.
It's not "illegal", it's just illegal. The US does not have open borders. It's illegal to cross without a visa or some other authorization. That's a fact, and in fact the law is a very reasonable one, because people who are knowledgeable about how humans work generally understand that open borders are a bad idea.
> There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing [...] and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries.
Is this meant to make it sound like it's somehow bad? If someone breaks the law, they deserve to be punished. In the case of people who entered the country illegally, the sane and rational thing to do is remove them from the country. This is, in fact, one of the most logical punishments imaginable, up there with being forced to leave while trespassing and being required to return stolen property.
Your comment is real "Hitler breathed air, and this other guy breathed air, therefore this other guy is bad because he's like Hitler" levels of manipulative suggestion that's completely devoid of any sort of points or content whatsoever.
My takeaway was the same as yours; the Germans (and everybody else) were (are) just like us.
The observations about the ineffectiveness of US propaganda in post-war Germany are interesting.
But for all the flaws of Meyer's work, the book is about how people thought they were free during the sordid, infamous Nazi period. Above all, the people who saw themselves as the honest folks supporting the good principles of the dictatorship.
It is also interesting to read how people — the very same who were supporters of the dictatorship and who helped persecute the target groups — are comfortable in all their justifications.
"Sure, we knew these people who were taken away. But what could we do?"
"I didn't do anything terrible. If something terrible happened, it happened later, elsewhere."
"The Great Leader failed only because he had some bad people in his circle."
there has been countless western and non western wars with slightly different patterns and a taste of "winner writes history".
one i find interesting is the french revolution. its also fairly recent, but not as tampered with as ww2 history. for example, there still are records of how terrible and cruel the revolutionaries were, how everyone was a royalist that needed to die and how the populace started to be ready to revolt - again - right after the change of power. thankfully, things eventually calmed down - as they were cruel, but not dumb.
either way I'd basically recommend expending the reading curriculum a bit.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 (02/2025, 473 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315 (11/2020, 382 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304 (04/2022, 239 comments)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/jd-vance-lie...
This article is all we need to know about fascism, the candidate admits this is the central tool they use on the path to gain unlimited power, even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially: "In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio."
The central problem is epistemological, the coding of explanations in mythological thought, which is narrative. The myth is the primary causal illusion. That causes that. When we add intent, which is elusive and reduces meaning subjectively, it robs any event of the true meaning load, we create propaganda without knowing it. There's the rub. If we wee the burning bush as just a brushfire, we are sane. See it as the voice of God, we're doomed.
The dilemma that The Guardian faces is that it neither wants to draw attention to the lie, but also doesn't want to let it stand without some counter-argument. After all, if you just ignore everything then no counter-argument is ever offered and that's not good either.
This is really the "democracy hack" they're using: you don't want to draw attention to it, but you also can't really ignore it. In a healthy system, people that employ these kind of shameless dirty tricks would be excluded by the sense of civic duty of other people of their own party, as well as enlightened self-interest because in the end this will be bad for everyone. Yet here we are.
https://x.com/HunnyBplus3/status/1835326924597366869
JD Vance: "Dana, [stories about Haitians in Springfield] come from first hand accounts of my constituents. I say that we're creating a story meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it. I didn't create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield, Kamala Harris' policies did that, but yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story."
> The central problem is epistemological
Yes!
Why does it bother you?
We do treat reposts as duplicates when a story has had significant attention in the last year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but that's a separate issue.
Occasional reposts are well within HN's norms, and when something is reposted, it's common to link to past discussions for comparison.
I remember particularly the teacher's statement that (paraphrasing, it's been a while) "if I could not resist, it means that anyone else of my station or below could also not resist".
The idea that an admission of impotence is not just a personal note, but also an observation of an actionable waterline that anyone with fewer means will also be unable to rise above...
"If I am unable to do X, who else is unable to do X?" is such a powerful question to consider.
"All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany." —p164
Related quote, with the teacher and the taylor (opposite ends of "Nazi spectrum") in agreement that the pro-Nazi mentality was pervasive.
>"Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my [ten] friends' view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual" –p69
Something I very much like about poetry, is that so much wisdom can be condensed into such succinct language. We fill the gaps with our own experiences, not relying on the author to lead us step by step. And I see poetry proliferating in modern times in song. (How else is a poet to earn a living?)
There frequently are reminders of who we are, where we come from, and whence we always return. Life is a wheel. From Black Sabbath:
They say that life's a carousel
Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well
The world is full of Kings and Queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It's Heaven and Hell, oh well
And they'll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It's Heaven and HellBonhoeffer got a lot of things right.
The experts, people that have dedicated their lives to understand authoritarianism have already given the alarm. Well, a specialist has even moved to Canada for god's sake.
And well, criticizing democracy is fashionable again. High profile figures started saying out loud that "maybe democracies are overrated. maybe democracies cannot deal with the world as it is now". Just listen to what people are actually saying instead of what you think they meant when they say it and you'll hear they saying that an authoritarian leader is what america needs now.
Yup. I've see it a few times a week on HN at this point
Well, that resonated just a bit. Oh well, back to doomscrolling.
I have no idea where our current "line" is but it's not the same as it was last time and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc
The other day I watched this interview with Dan Carlin from 4 years ago and near the beginning the interviewer says something like "I don't think any of us want to draw any comprarisons to current nations and Nazi Germany"
that caught me, because why not? Of course no one wants to actually create parallels, but do we see any? maybe we didn't see as many then, and it was more of a worry in 2021 about even thinking about the possibility of tipping MAGA into that territory. but then again after January 6th we should have seen that they basically don't have a line and are just pushing it gradually. They don't really know what to do when they get the new power either, but the people who could stop it may not even realize it because they haven't had to deal with this kind of thing before. like invading Greenland? taking it from Denmark? how do you even create a response to a suggestion like that? so nothing happens and they see what else they can do.
another edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc&t=570s
The really interesting part of the interview gets going around the 7:50 mark, but here Dan talks about the options if you're an average citizen trying to figure out what to do. A litany of poor options if you're trying to pick a side right now really resonates with me.
I don't understand mentions of "civil war" in the public lately (there's even a Hollywood movie about it).
There is only one party controlling the armed forces. I also doubt that any high-ranking officers would take the troops they command out of the command structure and then even order them to attack the government and other troops.
Not to mention that the new administration did some cleanup among the ranks already.
The chances for enough, or any, troops breaking away from the command are very low, no?
So who is going to fight that "civil war"? It looks to me like the government has overwhelming power. At most I see some troops refuse orders to shoot at the American people, or at other troops.
Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.
We have several recent real-world examples of that not working out for the military. Assuming like minded people wont self-organize is a bad starting point, and jets and tanks have a tough time doing things like enforcing curfews. That's also ignoring that such a scenario would involve portions of said military force joining the civilian resistance, including those in leadership positions.
Besides, I've always hated this argument, because why fight the military when they can just target the politicians directly.
In the 1940s, the DoD published a field manual on how folk with "puny little guns" - or no guns at all - can fight.
I've always been of the idea that 100 guys with guns gets wiped out with 1 bomb nowadays, so why do individuals arm themselves to the teeth and LARP in the woods? it is looking more like that's going to be a paramilitary arm, or "private consultants" to ICE and CBP. those resources aren't for nothing, and they certainly aren't for taking down the US military.
This is a WW2 figure who had a song written about him after he was martyred. It became the anthem of the Nazi party. I didn't ever hear about him in my many years in the US, until a few days ago on Wikipedia:
While they are actively replacing cabinet positions with loyal outsiders that have little-to-no experience within the organizations they now run (eg Patel, Hegseth), I think it’s reasonable to assume that there remains career leaders throughout that would put country before king.
You also need to look at loyalty within the rank and file of course.
When I talk to conservative friends about this scenario they generally laugh; of course the military would choose country over king. At least for now I think there remains enough institutional integrity that this is plausible.
It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pinochet, Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, the Spanish Civil War, Maidan and the Ukraine war, Cerén and Bukele in El Salvador, etc etc etc.
The point is, if you drew up a few dozen historical parallels that were at least as close to the current American predicament as is Germany in the 1930s, you might draw (and implicitly suggest your audience draw) more tentative and complex conclusions regarding the correct course of action. Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
Does it? I haven’t thought about shooting anyone. I would like to see more widespread awareness, protesting, and a general strike.
The “tech right” is a major player here and a lot of those folks idolize China right now.
I think the US has been spiraling toward authoritarianism since 9/11 personally. This did not start yesterday or with the most recent election, nor is it exclusively the result of the right or the Republican Party. A lot of people to the left have also abandoned liberalism and ideas like free speech. There’s been a broad based shift away from liberalism and individualism and toward collectivism, which always leads toward totalitarianism.
Right wing collectivism comes in the form of racism and nationalism, while for the contemporary left its identity-grievance politics and a resurgence of Marxism.
“Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?” is one of the questions I keep asking.
This is, is course, why it's the one preferred comparison.
Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
[1] https://i.sstatic.net/azSk3.png
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...
meanwhile, this is very pertinent to USA current climate. But interestingly, people will repost this, comment, vote, but nobody will ever think of discussing impeachment.
> Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong.
Since the organizing principle of the United States has been war, cold and hot, since about that time, one could argue we haven't been free since then.
1939, twenty-thousand attended
while all that was going on, it was normalized
in the end took 15 million military killed
38 million civilians killed
to stop it finally
when in 1930 it simply started by making all other political parties illegal
making all jews illegal immigrants so they could not have jobs, healthcare or even shop eventually
group after group made illegal so they could be disappeared
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/artifact/chart-of-...
Such books will no longer be published if universities are not free.
And if freedom begins to disappear, even those who believe themselves safely conformist are not safe...
That depends on which are the ways in which they are not free.
Government influence is categorically worse because of its very nature, but I'm trying to think of a more consequential influence in the US than the leftist hegemony in universities and coming up with nothing.
The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.
The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China).
The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work.
Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life.
In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power.
So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work.
And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
i think an important question is "who is this "all of us" you speak of and who made you god to pronounce it"
you are making an arbitrary distinction because vibes, because it's a cause you care about. it's irrelevant. if you take money for Alzheimer's research, you owe the government one (because that money is extracted from the people in a way you could never have done yourself). if you take money from, say a 501c3, it's a completed transaction of services.
It's not the case that the government is necessarily run by authoritarians cracking down on speech they disapprove of at colleges by threatening to withhold other funding. This is a novel development.
We can surely go back to funding schools without such strings attached.
It is true that if you are accepting money from Coca Cola, it will limit your ability to do work that goes against the interests of Coca Cola. To be independent, just stop accepting money from them.
But it only works because Coca Cola can't do much against an independent group. Of course, you need to be careful, which typically means hiring a good lawyer, but you should be fine. And the reason you should be fine is because the government is there to protect you, at least to some extent.
But you can't be independent from your government, unlike Coca Cola, they can raid your house and put your in jail if you do things they don't want you to do, and they have no one to answer to but themselves. Government censorship doesn't depend on whether you are getting paid or not.
how far do you want to take your strawman?
monasteries were financialy independent. when the "government changed" and the new rulers had no use for the church, all of them were raided and plundered.
it's very dangerous to have resources and not be politically positioned. you become a target more than a fortress. it's the one thing preppers don't get.
universities are facing the same problem as monasteries faced. they are huge bags of money already. excluding the UCs they are already rich and take government money more for the associations than the actual money.
It’s a different thing altogether to have the government itself weaponize “cancel culture”, however. As much as right wing people like to scream that “democrats are the same”, there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge (“if the left cancels, I can cancel too”). It’s a flight from moral infighting to authoritarian rule.
You not looking for it doesn't mean "little evidence."
It's well documented that the previous administration pressured social media to silence views it didn't like, as well as instances of debanking conservative organizations.
That's not to say this administration doesn't throw its weight around, too, but to think it's only one side make you complicit in the problem.
You’re quite literally a character from the book in this post, if you think they’re equivalent (your argument is verbatim what one of the nazis interviewed uses to justify having supported hitler)
Show us, then. There's nothing as egregious as what the right is currently doing to be found in the archives, and you know it.
If you think that, you've not been paying attention. Both sides doing it is disgusting and I think the right does it more than the left (at this point in time), but the left DOES do it.
But I also question that because out of the last 30 or so historical examples we have of fascism's rise, there's never been one instance of deposing it non-violently once it's been given power. Germany, France, Italy, Portugal's Estado Novo, Spain's Franco. I think the lone exception might be Finland's Lapua movement. So maybe there is nothing that could've actually been done. I don't know, these days I look around and I feel like it's inevitable.
The overall statistics are undeniable, though. I take some comfort in the fact that no two macropolitical situations are ever really identical, and in my naïve belief that overall, humanity still learns a tiny little sliver from the past.
The "other side" isn't great either. Would be great to have a sane alternative, I guess.
The real test is how any model handles corruption and expunges it because no matter the ideology, people are in charge and people are corruptible.
The only real model that can work is one that minimizes the power of those in charge.
THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat, our methods are justified. THEY have been doing this to us for years, now this is our chance to fight back.
And back then there was a proper systems conflict. People like Krupp actually had to fear being disowned by communists.
When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings.
I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said “leftists” and the other “fascists”.
My only question who is pushing the messaging and who does it benefit?
Authoritarianism is not a “one side” problem in the US and until we collectively figure that out each side will continue increasing it, all in the name of stopping the other sides’ extremists.
The equlibrium that is always reached in a first-past-the-post voting system is two parties that are mostly the same, and you vote for a party that's only slightly more of what you want (because those are the options) and your vote tells both parties which direction to move in, to chase more votes.
If the party that drone strikes its own citizens and imprisons Twitter users consistently gets more votes than the party that drone strikes its own citizens, imprisons Twitter users, and builds concentration camps, then the latter party will quickly figure out that the only way to win is to drone strike its own citizens, but not imprison Twitter users, or build concentration camps. And then the former party (now losing) figures out that doing none of the above is the way to win, but maybe they still tap all communications. And so on...
We got to the point we're at today step by step, with people voting for one new measure at a time, and parties taking notice of what measures people consistently vote for. The current parties did not spring fully-formed out of Zeus's forehead.
"The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
...and I recall people reading it and saying they don't see how Donald Trump ticks the boxes.
It's all very tedious to complain about when half the electorate supports it. It makes one feel like a nag and a broken record.
> Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
> But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
At the root, there’s either principled freedom or control.
But the psychology behind fascism stems from deep human quirks and is something eternal.
All those nations, except perhaps China, share the DNA. If we didn't already have names for their systems, we probably would describe them as fascistic.
What Trump has turned the American government into is closer to Fascism than to Liberal Democracy, no?
In future highschool textbooks Trump Fascism will have its own name ("Trashism" perhaps?) but it will be placed in the same chapter as the others.
For most of my teens I wondered what side I would have been on in 1930s Germany. If I would have had the courage to stand up to fascists. Even when they emerge among your friends. I used to wonder what side other people would end up on. Who would recognize fascism for what it was. Who would have the guts to call people out.
I read extensively about fascism. About the war. About the camp. About where all this came from.
Almost everyone has disapponted me in the past year. Not only the shits who turned out to be closeted fascists, but the cowards who do not dare to speak up. Because this time there was no excuse. Our history should have warned about this. And we failed. Almost all of us. Almost everyone makes excuses for themselves. For why they can't stand up to this.
The excuses are worse than the stupidity.
I do not despise people for being stupid. I despise people for being having had every opportunity to not repeat past mistakes and still
How have you been standing up to "this"? How do you expect others to stand up?
I read this book a few years ago and I can't stop thinking about this line of discourse (there's more of this subject in the book). I've felt this exceptional frustration and disgust towards the (in my opinion) wildly underreacting non-fascist millions in the States, more so than the fascists themselves, which seemed contradictory.
The closest I've come to communicating why is that one group is on script while the other isn't. For example, a deadly airborne disease is awful, but the truly scary thing to me would be witnessing doctors and immunologists just kind of shrugging their shoulders.
I grew up with this belief that for all their loud, obnoxious quirks and faults, Americans do not fuck around when it comes to their principles of liberty and freedom. I always admired that. I remember thinking it was a feature that they're so quick to protest and make a scene. I had, without any doubt in my heart and soul, anticipated total disaster. I was expecting to see protests and riots and fires and further uncelebrated but deemed necessary violence in response to the slow ablation of freedom and liberty.
It's quite possible that I'm wrong and that total disaster is premature. But never before have I felt this certain about an "everyone else is wrong" belief. It's scary and somewhat lonely. Reading this book made me feel much less lonely, and much more scared.
There's also a spirit of "I don't care as long as they get hurt more" that's stronger than ever.
The party of self-sufficiency and pulling yourself up into a better life with minimal oversight from government has become the party of cutting off your nose to spite your own face.
It's ridiculous.
The people are fractured, the people who are trying to fight for their fellow Americans are depicted as anti-American and enough Americans are buying it that the fractures continue.
I'm not from US, but isn't this obvious: I pay taxes hoping for police to do their job and handle criminals. Now some people are protesting and disrupting police job - I won't be happy about that.
To what % are you confident thst you would be one of the first participants in these, were the same to happen to your own country?
Humans are dark matter communicators. We code all the top-down biases seamlessly in news stories, speech, novels, movies, always as a by-product of social and virtue signaling. Even altruism comes with a handicap principle. Ultimately we are followers, not leaders, or adventurers, that would be chaos. If the leaders can fool the populace by mixtures of narratives, and sleight of hand oppress on behalf of enough pluralities status, the audience id placated and inert.
This is exactly the problem. Americans see their own country as perfect example of freedom and liberty, and the idea that they might be wrong never crosses their minds. When you try to explain to them that their culture has elements actively hostile to personal freedom, you get a syntax error at best.
One of the things that Trump is doing is pointing to general "wokeness", "cancel culture", and so on, and labeling them as censorship. The trick is that he's not exactly wrong. Most Americans have their entire livehoods tied to their employers, which usually are emotionless corporations that can fire said Americans at will. This means that, if you express an undesirable opinion, you can and will be fired, and self-censorship is a vital element of American culture. Many Americans celebrated this as a feature that allowed them to maintain social cohesion. Now that the tide has shifted and the list of socially acceptable opinions has changed, same Americans are suddenly very upset because they cannot voice their opinions.
It's not that Americans suddenly stopped valuing freedom and liberty. They never did, but you never noticed, because you never tried to cross the boundary. You can interpret this in two ways - either be sad that your vision of America isn't real, or be happy that for all bad things that Trump is doing, it's not a fundamental change in American society.
Alright, I'll bite. Mind elaborating more?
As a follow up question, are you talking more about positive or negative freedoms? I e. freedom-to vs freedom-from?
To answer your follow-up question: I understand "freedom" as "freedom to". This trivially includes "freedom from" through "freedom to choose not to participate in something".
People say to me, "Donald, I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say." And they're right! They right! They said nothing, they thought of nothing to say.
This isn't a drill. Let us assemble the Rebel Alliance.
Have you read history at all? "Revolutions" by entitled thieves who feel that every transaction they agreed to is somehow retroactively unfair because somebody else has more money is the surest way to kill an economy. Nobody wants to do trade with cannibals.
The American people are entitled to what was taken from them-- competent public education, accessible higher education and healthcare, laws preventing gross concentrations of wealth through the enforcement of anti-trust law (VC groups I'm looking at you), and for we computer dorks the use of ARPA funding to produce novel new technologies. Most or all of this is non-controversial for most Americans.
http://rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-histo...
Throughout history, people have been coerced into a subordinate position by the stronger party, without much choice over their fate other than to give in to pressure. Until that pressure grew too strong under the greed of the privileged, as it always does eventually, giving way to revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution
> According to a New York Times review, Stanley's book—a "slim volume"—"breezes across decades and continents" and says that Donald Trump "resembles other purveyors of authoritarian ultranationalism."
Remember that, then they attack the immigrants, the woke people, the trans gender and the leftist...
When you read these accounts, it always feels like no one had any agency or knowledge what's going on, that Hitler was basically a lone wolf who installed himself in power against the wishes of the nation, that had some outlandish ideas that no good German believed in, and that then he and a small band of his supporters somehow forced everyone to comply.
And to be clear, it was a totalitarian state, but it also wasn't North Korea and no Soviet Union. If nothing else, you could always leave. Many countries wouldn't take fleeing Jews, but as a dissenting German, you'd be welcomed with open hands almost everywhere.
So yes, of course there were people who hated the regime, and just decided they didn't want to or couldn't rock the boat. But a significant portion of the population approved of what was happening. Hitler was wildly popular. Millions of people enthusiastically bought into what he was selling. Germany perceived itself as a wounded lion after WWI. They felt they had a rightful claim on their "living space". And antisemitism in Europe needed no marketing. Tellingly, purges of Jews continued even after the war in the Soviet sphere of influence.
My point is, for every person who genuinely had no choice, there were ten who definitely had it, who more or less approved what was happening, and who would have been proud of it had Germany won the war.
How much of that was specifically because of Stalin ? (Noticeable changes after his death ?)
This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.
Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.
The vast majority of them do their jobs, pay their taxes, and consider themselves patriots and good people because they help their families and motherland, and are polite and well-meaning.
While their jobs help the military machine that murders thousands of innocent people every week, their taxes fund that machine, and their complacency keeps the system stable for decades, costing not only their enemies, but also themselves and their own kids their futures.
When starvation, war, and political terror come, they will consider themselves innocent victims of another unearned, unavoidable political tragedy - not understanding their own decades of inaction brought it on them.
And America isn't that far behind.
Not thinking objectively, living unconsciously, engrossed in short-term matters - is the worst sin that leads to all the other sins. It's how it happened in Belarus, Russia and it's how it's going to happen in US.
It’s difficult to know when to down tools and make noise. If they avoid the almost certain ruin of dissidence and just keep working and living, there’s a chance things blow over, and their families get a better future.
"A bad thing happened. We had been a little uneasy, but did not act on it. Well, of course it was hard to act on mere unease. Still, if only we had acted on it sooner...". And thus, what we take away is a simple lesson and call to action - are you feeling uneasy now? If so, it is time to stop and work to derail society from whatever track it is on.
Something that never makes it into these essays are all the times when people felt uneasy and overwhelmed, and yet nothing happened that in our backward-looking perspective ought to have been prevented. Were those feelings of unease distinguishable, to those who had them, from those experienced by the protagonists of this essay?
Something that is discussed even less are all the instances where people experienced the same unease and alienation and did act on them. The story of Nazi Germany is told as one of evil purpose-driven agitators, their evil enabling cronies, and a whole host of good people who were vaguely uneasy but did nothing. A parallel story unfolded throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, though. Germany had lost an existential war, and was under crushing pressure from the victors which wanted to be paid their dues in flesh. Society was tearing at the seams, the massive country to the East had fallen to a totalitarian revolution and rumours of repression and atrocities were trickling in every day even as their sympathisers engaged in street violence and made no secret of wanting to establish the same system at home. First the global financial crisis destroyed whatever semblance of stability and prosperity was left, and then government was paralysed due to lack of majorities even as a repeat loomed. Then, too, good people were vaguely and then increasingly uneasy - and then they decided to actually do something about it. That something was a last-ditch stabilising effort by setting aside factionalism and forming a unity government of anti-communist parties. The rest is history.
As far as more modern comparisons are concerned, I find it difficult to read this essay and not draw a comparison to the COVID years. "Receiving decisions deliberated in secret"? "Believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand"? "or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security"? "Demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before"? Unfortunately, for the Terminally Online, that period has now receded into history as a cute extended staycation that normalised remote working. This obscures the extent to which, right now, the US may be experiencing the results of good "big men" (on the other side) having decided to act on their increasing sense of unease.
It's awfully funny that your comparison is to the COVID years! There were a million deaths from COVID. It's almost as if those people don't exist anymore, all those people that died, that their lives were nothingness and not worth fighting for.
Was COVID something new? Yes. It killed a million people in the US because it was new. Is that similar to Nazi Germany's fear of the threat of Jews? To Nazi Germany's sudden decision to invade Poland? Why is COVID your touchpoint of something similar to that, and not something like 9/11, which killed far fewer people, but was enough to send the country to war, with lots of deliberations in secret and secret evidence that proved to be faked?
Nothing was faked with COVID, it was all out there in the open. People who actively lied and spread misinformation got tagged as doing so on some but not all platforms, but they could still speak just fine and have their views weighed against the warnings of the platform which was giving them the means to communicate their misinformation. It's not like a popular broadcaster who said something that the President disliked would get fired because the executives were getting strongarmed into firing the person.
I find your comment quite disturbing, and it is making me reassess just how far down the hole the US has gone. We are far closer to Nazi Germany than I had assumed. That a person that can form full sentences like you do, in paragraphs of thought, and still type these thoughts out. Perhaps its because I was a scientist and could evaluate all the information that was out there in the public, it wasn't a mystery, the basis for decisions was 100% transparent and open for anybody to see. For others, that listened to lies and never got the information or disregarded it as unintelligible, perhaps what you describe might make sense. But I suspect that there are many people like you, and it scares the hell out of me.
I'm sure that if you were tapped into certain strands of "the conversation" on Twitter at the time, you did not feel like any of these decisions were made behind your back for inscrutable reasons! I'm also sure that all the way from 1918 through to 1945, there were certain strata of society that were looped into the decision making and never once got the feeling that they were being governed "by surprise". In neither of those situations was this the case for the majority of the affected population, though, and appealing to your own rarefied status as a "scientist" hardly helps the argument that your own experience is any evidence that government during COVID happened by consent.
> Was COVID something new? Yes. It killed a million people in the US because it was new. Is that similar to Nazi Germany's fear of the threat of Jews? To Nazi Germany's sudden decision to invade Poland? Why is COVID your touchpoint of something similar to that, and not something like 9/11, which killed far fewer people, but was enough to send the country to war, with lots of deliberations in secret and secret evidence that proved to be faked?
Editing to replace a section here, because I was unhappy with the (lack of) clarity in my original text. I am not just meaning to make a two-way comparison between COVID and one or another of the German periods. We are looking at four distinct situations here:
(1) The Weimar interbellum (1918~1936). Well-meaning people were beset by a creeping unease over instability and communism (which by 1933 had already killed on the order of ten times your COVID figure). They chose to act on it by enabling Hitler's rise to power.
(2) The Nazi era (1936~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of communism, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease, but they did not act upon it. Bad outcomes.
(3) The COVID period (2019~2023?). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of COVID, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease. They chose to act on it by enabling Trump's rise to power.
(4) Trump II (2025~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Well-meaning people are beset by creeping unease. (What's next?)
Looking at the first three cases where outcomes are known, do you actually see some pattern that looks like it'd yield a good rule for when unease should be acted upon by well-meaning people? Given these examples and your alignment of course you would be tempted to say "when they are left-wing", but it's not like we can't find relatively left-coded examples similar to (1), or right-coded examples similar to (2). I would go looking to spin a narrative around the French Revolution, or the two phases of the Russian Revolution (which might well be parseable as a case of left action against the Empire, followed by a case of right inaction against the Bolsheviks), but this would require some more research to do at a reasonable level of quality.
> But I suspect that there are many people like you, and it scares the hell out of me.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I am not American or in the US anymore (though I spent many years there as a PhD student, including through the COVID years).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
Instead of me rambling on about this for the dozenth time, I'm just going to provide some of my favorite passages from the book:
>"My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends ... they were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it." —xiii
>"Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, 'the democratic part.' The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it." —p47
>"In good times, you work with reward. But in bad times and good, you work. These are good times. The regime?—the regime promised the people bread, and I bake the bread." —p32, quoting a 51 baker, Nazi party manager, in 1933
>"When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, 'Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.' " —p47
>"The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security ... what does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing ... so things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?" — p48
>"...'in 1938, during a Nazi festival ... the entusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' " —p51, quoting an anti-Nazi German imprisoned for hiding Jews
>"The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere." —p56
>"You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community's. But are the community's attitudes respectable? That's not the point." —p60
>"Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my friends' view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual" –p69
>"All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany." —p164
>" 'Many of the students—the best of them— understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today ... the young people, and yes, the old, too, were drawn to opposite extremes in those [earlier] years ... it is a very dangerous mistake, to think ... that Germans came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonesense that passed for truth' " —p192, a teacher reflecting on students
>" 'Understand, I was proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I belonged ... still—I didn't want those Jews from our town to see me wearing my insignia ... it hurt me to have Jews see me wearing them.' " —p200
>" 'It is easy these days to say anti-Nazi and even to believe it. Before 1933 I certainly was, but then—only again after the war.' " —p201
>" 'You say Totalitarianism. Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so it is easy for you to say, Totalitarianism—no. But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.' " —p223
>"The six [most] extremists all said of the extermination of Jews, 'That was wrong' or 'That was going too far,' as if to say, 'The gas oven was somew2hat too great a punishment for people who, after all, deserved very great punishment.' My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life." —p183
>"Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consuqence, not the cause of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists." —p277
>" 'It doesn't matter whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have discipline and order.' The sensitive cabinetmaker ... and the insensitive bill-collector ... said the same thing. Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one." —p284
>"There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich—the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build ... how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. 'Strategic bombing' was one of war's little jokes; the strategy was to hit ... houses" —p296
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There're dozens of typos above, typed while drinking my morning coffee.I hadn't skimmed through they thought they were free [author's styling] since first reading this extremely challenging book, six year ago.
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Whenever I've recommended to IRL friends (seeing "the book on your bookshelf with a swastika on it!"), nobody wants to read about Nazi's... but this book is about why such ideologies are so attractive, and why ought be avoided.
Read this book, but if the topic interests you Ordinary Men by Chris Rush expands much further on this topic, following a geriatric brigade of conscripted laymen "Nazis."
¢¢
It pays off to point out that actual Jews and opposition left completely different writings and opinions. They did not felt free, in fact. By the 1938, they were thoroughly victimized and fully aware of it.
There was a lot of fear in Germany itself.
The above are opinions and feelings of Nazi, basically. It make sense to write and analyze those, but they dont speak for non-nazi germans, they dont know former opposition, Jews or minorities actually felt and thought.
>"if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!" —p51, an anti-Nazi German, imprisoned for hiding Jews, quoting a Jewish girl he'd overheard telling her own mother.
Was there a reason you cited that particular quote..?
It's interesting, from that of certain famous Jewish POVs, that both Albert Einstein & Henry Kissenger also lamented similarly, well into their old ages (only being Jewish because of birth into Its customs).
I'd love to have real conversations [which is something this book assists readers with, regardless of "Nazi perspective only" as you somewhat-erroneously proclaim]. This is a book about ending hate.
1.) Notably, German Jews were German citizens, fought in WWI and actually frequently patriots. Likewise their non Jew partners. But beyond that, German political opposition were not free nor felt free, but they definitely were German citizens too. It is present in their writings.
2.) As for Jews, we have literal diaries (most notably by the Victor Klemperer) show fear, disgust and hate toward former friends Germans that went Nazi. In statistics, we see Jews committing suicides in larger numbers and running away.
> Was there a reason you cited that particular quote..?
Because that annoyed me the most. It is very cherry picked example that creates completely wrong picture of what Jews were saying and writing at that time.
> only being Jewish because of birth into Its customs
Nazi defined Jewishness per blood, if you had one grand parent who was Jew, you was Jew. They did not used religious definition and they did not cared about lifestyle.
So, what stops them ?
“What power have you got?”
“Where did you get it from?”
“In whose interests do you use it?”
“To whom are you accountable?”
“How do we get rid of you?”
The upside to large countries is that they are economically and militarily stronger, on average. This is leads to a high resistance to outside influence. The downside is large enough (arbitrary) populations encompass multiple ideologies and understandings of the world, which lead to infighting and ultimately destabilization. Note the 3.5% rule, among cultural drift and competing economic incentives.
On the flip side, a small concentrated population is more stable internally, but is fragile to outside influences.
The short answer is the masses are precisely who should rule. The long answer is that they can't if you want the nation to be independent. I posit, there is no optimal balance. There are only different choices that ultimately lead to ruin.
Keep on like that and you'll be accused of unscientificness.
For the germans interviewed in the book, it seems to be true that many had read or heard about the camps or other atrocities, but (1) not the “final solution” which was not in the press and (2) there seems to be heavy desensitization from 1933-1955 when the book was written.
Aside from the tailor that had started the fire at the synagogue, the other 9 interviewees had not directly witnessed atrocities being committed, and instead focused on their personal hardships during the war.
Even though they may have been literate, the people in Mayer’s book were ignorant of the specific realities. Perhaps willfully ignorant, yes, but the nazi regime really did not give any opportunities otherwise.
—
not an expert, just reporting my notes from the book.
i highly recommend all americans read it, its not a long book. it feels eerily familiar, even though many circumstances are drastically different.
There was not much hidden, the goal of making a big war in the east to conquer new land for the Aryans was there in big letters in the open.
His views towards jews likewise.
So they knew. Maybe largely did not wanted to know. And they did celebrate the victories of the german army as their own. They only stopped celebrating after the victories stopped happening and it was more and more clear that the war will be lost.
Also, Project 2025 was openly published. Anybody could read it. They aren't hiding the goals.
People just don't want to bother with it.
I would add to your statement that almost everyone should read it. It's unnerving to read how 'normal' all these people were in some way and how 'easily' it all happened because the population generally disliked jews.
This particular book is a out what nazi sympatizants and nazi themselves were saying after the war. It is what it is, but there was real motivation to not have own culpability in destruction of Germany in the open. (Which is what they have seen as tradegy, not the holocaust itself all that much)
Of course it's easy to say in hindsight they "knew" or "could have known", but in hindsight everything is easy, right? There were rumours about Jimmy Saville going back to the 70s, but did the British public really "know" what he was up to? Evne Mark Lawson, one of the few people who actually did stop and report a sexual assault (in 2006, see [1]) didn't really know the full extent of things, not really. He may have suspected, but that's not the same.
Another thing is that during the first world war there was a lot of (mostly British) propaganda about atrocities Germans were supposed to have committed, from raped and crucified nuns to Germans killing children for sport to the infamous "German Corpse Factory". This was widely reported and believed during the war, but after the war this all turned out to be a huge load of bollocks. It severely undermined the trust in the media.
There was 21 years between the wars – that's less time than the start of the Iraq war and today. Imagine what your response would be if the US government would say "we found weapons of mass destruction in $country, here as some vague satellite photos as evidence, we have no choice but to invade".
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/apr/01/the-day...
I'm not counter claiming the rest, but that fact seems off.
can be hard, it's happening right now, and a lot of people are really all in, love it. or ignoring it, or sinking into streaming services to distract themselves.
Take your average house frau today, and they think Trump rounding people up is just good old law and order.
People aren't thinking everything through, that's how the overwhelming distractions work.
I mean from a very trivial point of view, government spending constitutes a large amount of GDP.
What this comes down to, in my opinion, is the question of democratic allocation of resources and labor. Most people believe that there is a role for democracy in the allocation of resources and labor, which is to say that we think that certain societal goals (for example, defense, the care of the elderly or the poor, etc) should not be allocated to by markets but by democratic will.
This seems to be something almost all Americans agree on (though what things should be handled this way and how is contentious).
But to simply shrink the government away has the effect of decreasing the power of democracy to allocate resources, transferring that power to (in an ideal case, anyway) markets.
The fact is, most people do not want to live in a pure free market society, as far as I can tell. They want government services, they want safety nets, they want the air they breathe to be clean and safe. They want the power to decide that sometimes its worth spending money on stuff even if no one accumulates profits in the process.
It is very hard to conduct randomized controlled and double blinded trials on forms of government. I don't think people can even agree on how to measure how good a government is.