Posted on 06/12/2013 9:26:05 PM PDT by Bratch
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
(Excerpt) Read more at harpers.org ...
A friend of my uncle’s just died, a German immigrant who was in the army (their army), my dad worked for him decades ago and described a man that sounded like a Nazi to me.
This woman is kind of sick.
Great find, and thanks for posting. It would not flatter quite a few of my friends to suggest replacing “Nazi” with “Progressive” but it fits very nicely. Add a visceral need for an unearned sense of moral superiority and you have the entire package. They’re not opposites, they’re mirror images. BTT
Nazism didn’t arise from a vacuum, nor are Germans particularly susceptible to it. There is a climate in which it flourishes, when mob mentality overrules common sense. For some it’s just a brief insanity from which they quickly recover. Others become enamored of it, and when a powerful leader appears in such a climate, you have a perfect storm. It’s a lesson that cannot be ignored, or it will happen again, and again.
Just imagine the worst people you know, suddenly endowed with the power of life and death, and you’ll know who the Nazis, Communists, and other petty tyrants will be.
Yes, they are particularly susceptible to it - the fanatical obedience, the spying out the window on neighbors, the cupidity, the obsession with order.
Wow, that was interesting!
That was the most interesting piece that I have read in a while.
Tommyrot.
Obsession with order? No, not really so much as the obsession with controlling others. What they do, what they think, what they are allowed to say. The desire to ban anything that represents any kind of intellectual independence. That sounds a lot like a certain left-leaning party in this country.
Certainly food for thought. It’s not hard to see how it applies to Obamanism and the Progressive ideology. A Georgetown party with SEIU honchos, race pimps, old East Coast money, a smattering of others...
I am going to think about this for a while.
Agreed: hope our fellow FReepers take the time to read it.
Interesting read, almost as if reading an M. Scott Peck Psychological treatise on the inveigling of evil.
Goethe spoke of his fellow Germans as ‘’Noble in the individual and wretched in the collective’’.
All you need is a political group that has succumbed to personality cultism. Give them power, media driven popularity, mass appeal to the brainwashed zombies, and a sociopathic leader that can make lies sound like truth, and truth seem like evil. Turn everyone else into an enemy, and you have a Nazi dream. Actually you have the Democratic Party, and the darker side of Communism.
All institutions reward those who obey the institutional rules, and punish those who don’t. As rewards and punishments increase, and enforcement becomes more strict, more individuals are drawn into the behavior required by the institution. Some — like Edward Snowden — have the guts to resist it, but they know they’re risking their livelihood, at least, and possibly their lives. Others, out of desire for the rewards or out of fear of the punishments, go willingly down the institutional path.
I like to think that modern communications technologies will enable the “rebels” to maintain the morale and the ability to resist, but they also increase the power of the institution to identify both the compliant and the rebellious, and to apply corresponding rewards and punishments.
This is not the past. We must maintain and seek freedom through methods appropriate to the present. I don’t know what those methods are.
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