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They Thought They Were Free (1955)

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Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#131

Post by jjani »

Waterluvian wrote: post #34

> "Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better.[...]" 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 t…

> 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.

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?

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#132

Post by arrowsmith »

_9ptr wrote: post #51
HK-NC wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasnt Germany better off in the decades following WW2 than the British that defeated them?

You probably only mean economic growth, otherwise that's hard to imagine

I suppose it's easier to achieve "growth" in percentage terms when you're starting from a low baseline (because your entire country got flattened by invading armies.)

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#133

Post by jebarker »

moomin wrote: post #105

I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are very much quoted out of context and b) an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable. 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 an…

> an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.

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.

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#134

Post by victorbjorklund »

Foreignborn wrote: post #28
Hilift wrote: post #7

No, they noticed. 90 years ago, 2/3 of the world's books were in Germany. They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening. Germans were acutely aware of the reality of the day to day situation and their previous history in WW1.

I just read the book last week. What you said is not true in any useful sense. “Germans were acutely aware…” tries to reduce an entire population and years into one statement. Reality has much more color. 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 hea…

No shit they claim to not have known. No one would say "oh yea I knew they were killing children but i didnt care"?

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#135

Post by rsynnott »

HK-NC wrote: post #39
jackstraw42 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attem…

Wasnt Germany better off in the decades following WW2 than the British that defeated them?

Nah, that’s really more a recent phenomenon, and is more to do with Britain’s weak growth over the last 20 years than anything else.

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#136

Post by api »

themgt wrote: post #109
jackstraw42 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attem…

The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil. 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 Pin…

Some of it reminds me of the CCP, which I think is openly considered a model by some neo-authoritarians. Ubiquitous mass surveillance, social credit, and state capitalism with heavy control though regulatory pressure. I assume we will eventually see party men installed on boards of major companies, especially in media, tech, and entertainment.

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.

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#137

Post by ethical_source »

wyldfire wrote: post #122
ethical_source wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> We have the first amendment and are still free to a degree you are not and will never be. I'm not so sure about that. "It's no longer free speech [when someone criticizes the president]." [1] This seems like it's remarkably in line with "they thought they were free" because here you are, thinking you're free. But in fact, your speech is not free because all three branches failed to protect you from this and have no…

You have to take Trump "seriously but not literally". The government threatened to revoke a broadcast license, a right to use a limited resource for the public good. Broadcast licenses come with rules to ensure the limited resource is used for public benefit: for example, you're not allowed to broadcast profanity over the air despite profanity in general being protected speech. Nobody is denying anyone's ability to communicate over privately owned channels. What Trump meant is that a network that uses limited spectrum to broadcast nonstop partisan lies isn't operating in the public interest and doesn't deserve the license.

Consider the contrast with the 2016-2024 state and corporate effort to suppress inconvenient truths as "misinformation". Remember when they used naked, hard power to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story? That's what real censorship looks like.

In America, you can express any viewpoint on social media and be treated fairly. That wasn't the case just a few years ago.

In most of Europe, and in the UK, you can't express certain ideas. The state will literally come to your house and arrest you if you have the wrong opinions on government policy. The US does not do that.

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#139

Post by unethical_ban »

pessimizer wrote: post #128
HK-NC wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a chinese friend who said something similar to this, she believes much of the culture in the modern west is influenced by some shady chinese government attempt at controlling the speed at which said wheel turns, through Tiktok and stuff. While Id normally dismiss her as a nut, we do have rioting in the street arguing over a miniscule group of people wearing clothes dsigned for the opposite sex.

[flagged]

On biological males in women's sports I think more people can agree on this.

But you're handwaving away the fact that conservative political parties are using trans existence as a wedge issue.

Re: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

#140

Post by Schnitz »

brightball wrote: post #55
tobias3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German outside observer I can tell you there is only one side going down the facist path. The "other side" isn't great either. Would be great to have a sane alternative, I guess.

I think the sane alternative has long been modeled by the US Constitution. 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.

The US constitution is outdated and vulnerable. Modern constitutions like Germany’s basic law are a lot more resilient. We are watching the US constitution fail right now, it didn’t even take smart men to start dismantling it. I hope I’ll be proven wrong, but what indications do you see right now that the US constitution is performing as intended?
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