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They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

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Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#321

Post by bsenftner »

ookblah wrote: post #134
noduerme wrote: post #73

"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's h…

i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this. at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things wo…

It's the combination of a desire for student obedience and the intellectual damaging power of religion. Far too often a young student is told their youthful and essentially unsocialized behavior is sinful, including their own thoughts, and that coupled with an Orwellian level of obedience socialization with religion and you create crippled intellects that are afraid of their own thoughts and are perfectly obedient church members and employees. They are minions in the most literal sense and the United States is filled with them, obedient and terribly dangerous.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#322

Post by 0xEF »

This is hard to read.

I see myself in some of these words. I am by no means complicit in what is currently happening in the US as a US citizen, but I genuinely have no idea how to fight any of it. People want to throw words around like "resist" and "disrupt" and any other revolutionary buzz words, but the fact is I still have to get up every morning, pour my coffee and go do my job because that paycheck is what allows me to do anything else at all, in my life. I don't have the luxury of risking termination because I decided to call in sick to go to a march at my state's capitol.

I voted accordingly, I signed the petitions, I followed the rules and keep a strong moral compass to be a good human to other humans, upholding a "do no harm" policy that I take quite seriously. None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it did.

Reading this excerpt makes me feel like the Germans the book is about, the ones that history can look back on with a heavily judgemental 20/20 vision powered by the historical perspectives that came _after_ these people's lifetimes. I am not capable of being so self-righteous that I can look back on German citizens during the Nazi regime and say "well, they should have known better."

We never really know how we will react to circumstances until we are impacted by them. People go around thinking they won't fall for phishing emails and yet it is one of the most successful methods employed by predatory scammers. We might believe all our decisions are our own, while marketing has mastered the art of subtle manipulation and dark patterns that heavily govern our consumer habits. Our minds imagine arguments or stressful situations where we are able to consider multiple paths, choosing the one where we come out on top, but when we are actually in those moments, we fall back on irrational decision making and emotional reactions.

I think we got to now the same way the Germans did back then, pointed out in the article;

> It was all rigmarole, of course, but 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 the fundamental things. One had no time.

We are busy, distracted, inundated with things that want to control our attentions and have been for years. We were primed for this exact thing to happen to us, and now we are in it. The story of the frog in boiling water comes to mind.

Thanks for sharing. I, and so many others, have much to think about and reconsider about what we want our lives to mean.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#323

Post by jvanderbot »

ookblah wrote: post #134
noduerme wrote: post #73

"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's h…

i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this. at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things wo…

This is a beautiful book.

In particular this excerpt is frustrating though. As said directly in the text, it's hard to see the beginnings. Yes, many things are changing right now, but to be fair, if you went to any random trump supporter and showed them this text they would immediately recognize it and tell you all the things the prior admins have done that matches these "sudden" decisions "made in secret" that nobody should disagree with.

It discusses tactics, which are easy to recognize in expansion of power, but also in illiberal thinking anywhere, but I don't see in this excerpt (or remember in the original book) discussion of root causes. One thing that really stuck with me though was that many of the interviewees were quite happy with what the party had done for the country, on an individual level. This was rebuilding, providing party benefits, etc. And many joined up because they had to to advance socially or in their career. Again, things that become a Rorschach blot even in hindsight because, I guess, they are always using these tactics to push their agenda over ours until it spirals out of control, regardless of who "we" / "they" are.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#324

Post by bsenftner »

rsynnott wrote: post #228
ookblah wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this. at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things wo…

> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditiona…

A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#325

Post by KaiserPro »

The "oh we need to educate" stage is well passed.

What I dont understand is what the democrats and constitutionalists are doing? Where are they?

Trump only cares for loyalty and power. Hes also really thin skinned, so what mystifies me is how he's let Musk take all that power from him?

Why aren't the "opposition" hammering the point that Musk is/has effectively usurped Trump?

If I wanted to eject Musk's control over the state, that is where I would start. Trump knows that musk yeets anyone who he sees as weak, so why not exploit that to get some level of constitutional control back?

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#326

Post by intended »

KaiserPro wrote: post #325

The "oh we need to educate" stage is well passed. What I dont understand is what the democrats and constitutionalists are doing? Where are they? Trump only cares for loyalty and power. Hes also really thin skinned, so what mystifies me is how he's let Musk take all that power from him? Why aren't the "opposition" hammering the point that Musk is/has effectively usurped Trump? If I wanted to eject Musk's control over…

they are. search for it.

If their response isnt strong enough, I highly reccomend forumlating your own, and add to the voices pushing against it.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#327

Post by Ste_Tokyo »

helpfulContrib wrote: post #243
eigart wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing your posts hours after Trump launched a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is quite the sight. You’re like the black knight from Monty python. Edit: I welcome the pushback on this post. The message I meant to convey is that of two evils. Yelling at the losing candidate does nothing for Gaza. It alienates even people who care (but I’m not perfect). I apologize for the divisive nature of my post.

Anyone who had hope that Trump would avert the catastrophe was clearly ignorant of the facts of his subservience to the greater Israel plan. Meanwhile, while Palestinians are eating cats, we are free to refer to Monty Python all we like. Just don't mention the war .

[flagged]

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#328

Post by bsenftner »

taurknaut wrote: post #301
rsynnott wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditiona…

I see this as very different from "i'm eating ivermectin because bigpharma wants me to buy their vaccines" or whatever it is people say. There are certainly fascism experts out there, but the one thing that I've noticed again and again is that they emphasize how effective fascism is at changing forms and tactics. Today, most of the countries we refer to as authoritarian or fascist are formally liberal democracies (by…

> this is just who we are as a people.

I do not believe that. I believe this situation is engineered, and we have some very long game playing manipulators being very successful today.

Society engineering is real, and there are many players active in that game.

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#329

Post by intended »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #161
gambiting wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is? You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's…

> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests? > It's part of being a global hagemony It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drain…

Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert?

Or do you not trust experts at this point time?

Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

#330

Post by Dylan16807 »

bregma wrote: post #268
Dylan16807 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trump got a majority because the prior majority political party was literally participating in genocide, which was on display for the entire world to see. Is the argument here that people vote based on what the prior party was up to, while completely ignoring whether the new party will do less or more of the same action? Because that's really depressing if it's true.

Most votes are cast against something, not for something. That's why negative ads work, no matter how annoying and insulting they are. Most of the Americans I've spoken with who acknowledge voting for Trump said they did so either because they were against abortion or because the were against the great replacement. My sample is small though and may not be significant but there is a similar pattern in my country.

Even if that's negative at least your examples are voting for the right party.
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