I remember in school the teacher trying to explain it wasn’t just Hitler and a bunch of generals, it was a majority of a population, it’s so hard to get your head around so many people behaving so badly. Still a part of me thinks this is a joke or a fake image before my rational thinking kicks in.
I know these numbers, rationally this is not news, but emotional I just can’t believe this is true. Would I also be one of those supporters if I were born somewhere else? Are these people really like you and me?
I grew up in a fairly conservative household. I used to read the rags my parents considered newspapers, people in my social circles and schools were mostly middle to upper class, and I idolized my father.
It took me a long while to realize I was seeing through distorted glasses, even after I started mingling with different viewpoints.
There always was a gut feeling that something didn’t add up, cognitive dissonance maybe.
I sometimes wonder what kind of person I’d be had I not been high on the neurodivergent spectrum and pushed on the outside.
Privilege and social echo chambers make for pretty efficient blindfolds.
Yes exactly this. But even worse is that people’s opinions and pov on life shift during their life, also to the ‘wrong’ side. Am I good person for actively speaking up against the palastinian genocide, or am I just one of the lucky ones that haven’t gotten blindfolded (yet).
I never understood how fascism worked until recently. It’s not the top dictator giving orders, it’s everyone that wants to give him their power and act on his behalf without orders.
Dear Leader gives the people a boogeyman to blame for all of their fears. Dear Leader and his cronies spout lies upon lies about their boogeyman to keep the people scared and in line.
In essence, Dear Leader creates a problem, then sells a solution.
It’s a tad more insidious than that. Some people also secretly always wanted to be pieces of shit towards someone. Then dear leader gives them green light and a target to do all the awful things they wanted to do.
In high school, I thought that this stuff couldn’t happen here, not anymore, at least not at such a scale, and I was amazed that it had happened at all in the first place.
This common attitude of “we’re better than that” towards historical fascism is one of the reasons countries like the USA became so ready to succumb to it. If you assume it can’t happen to you, you’ll miss all the signs when it starts. We all need to recognize that Nazism is how ordinary people like ourselves can get when the conditions are conducive to it. Germans in the 1930s and 1940s were not uniquely evil; they were like us. No person or society is immune, and resisting Nazism starts with resisting it in yourself and your community.
It wasn’t even necessarily the majority. Not back then, and not now. What happens is that normalcy bias stops even people who oppose the regime from acting against it until it’s already too late:
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
— Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
I remember in school the teacher trying to explain it wasn’t just Hitler and a bunch of generals, it was a majority of a population, it’s so hard to get your head around so many people behaving so badly. Still a part of me thinks this is a joke or a fake image before my rational thinking kicks in.
See also:
80% of Israeli Jews support US President Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza, survey finds
Every society can fall to fascism when the conditions are right. Humans are pack animals and susceptible to mass delusion.
I know these numbers, rationally this is not news, but emotional I just can’t believe this is true. Would I also be one of those supporters if I were born somewhere else? Are these people really like you and me?
Keep questioning and the answer will be no.
I grew up in a fairly conservative household. I used to read the rags my parents considered newspapers, people in my social circles and schools were mostly middle to upper class, and I idolized my father.
It took me a long while to realize I was seeing through distorted glasses, even after I started mingling with different viewpoints.
There always was a gut feeling that something didn’t add up, cognitive dissonance maybe.
I sometimes wonder what kind of person I’d be had I not been high on the neurodivergent spectrum and pushed on the outside.
Privilege and social echo chambers make for pretty efficient blindfolds.
Yes exactly this. But even worse is that people’s opinions and pov on life shift during their life, also to the ‘wrong’ side. Am I good person for actively speaking up against the palastinian genocide, or am I just one of the lucky ones that haven’t gotten blindfolded (yet).
I never understood how fascism worked until recently. It’s not the top dictator giving orders, it’s everyone that wants to give him their power and act on his behalf without orders.
Dear Leader gives the people a boogeyman to blame for all of their fears. Dear Leader and his cronies spout lies upon lies about their boogeyman to keep the people scared and in line.
In essence, Dear Leader creates a problem, then sells a solution.
It’s a tad more insidious than that. Some people also secretly always wanted to be pieces of shit towards someone. Then dear leader gives them green light and a target to do all the awful things they wanted to do.
Yep. People suck.
I think you summed up microsoft’s last 30 years there.
In high school, I thought that this stuff couldn’t happen here, not anymore, at least not at such a scale, and I was amazed that it had happened at all in the first place.
Now I know better.
This common attitude of “we’re better than that” towards historical fascism is one of the reasons countries like the USA became so ready to succumb to it. If you assume it can’t happen to you, you’ll miss all the signs when it starts. We all need to recognize that Nazism is how ordinary people like ourselves can get when the conditions are conducive to it. Germans in the 1930s and 1940s were not uniquely evil; they were like us. No person or society is immune, and resisting Nazism starts with resisting it in yourself and your community.
It wasn’t even necessarily the majority. Not back then, and not now. What happens is that normalcy bias stops even people who oppose the regime from acting against it until it’s already too late: