Sound Familiar?

 

I admit frustration - part of me is tired and wondering what is the point of speaking out anymore. Clearly the spirit of Self-Righteousness has the wheel at the moment - recklessly driving the bus closer to the edge of the cliff. 

Then God reminds me of all the men (and women) who gave their last breath to denounce tyranny. 

Okay, fine then. I choose not to be blind or silent. I'd rather be a vocal thorn in the side of evil than a silent facilitator. Eternity is a very long time. 

So, here goes... 

Milton Mayer, in his book, They Thought They Were Free, explored the question, "what would I have done?' by interviewing ten ordinary Germans after the end of WW2. In the time he spent getting to know these men, Mayer discovered what is intrinsically true about ordinary citizens during a slow take over of their lives and country, i.e., they often go along to get along, focusing more on their daily lives than on what is occurring in the secret agendas and determinations of those given the power to rule.

By examining the men's reasons for joining the Nazi party, why they chose not to resist, and how they reflect back on Nazism, Mayer convincingly demonstrated that while the German people did have a unique political culture and history that enabled the rise of Nazism, the Nazi movement or one like it could happen anywhere or to any people. 

Australia comes to mind, 2021.

After his year in Germany, Mayer concluded his ten Nazi friends could not admit that what had been allowed to kill millions of people, including all those who fought to stop Nazism, was bad. Almost all of his ten friends still talked about Nazism in a positive light. Herr Kessler openly admitted that while he considered National Socialism as a bad thing for him personally because he 'lost his soul', overall it was good for Germany. Most of Mayer's Nazi friends seemed to agree. None of the men expressed feeling any extreme guilt about the Holocaust, and on multiple occasions some of the Nazi men alluded that they were not fully convinced that the Holocaust actually happened.

Does this sound familiar?

“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 

Conclusion:  It is easier to fool someone than to get him to admit he was fooled is not just a terse quote. It defines the worst weakness of human nature - the inability to admit weakness - the root cause for the collapse of great empires. 

For Him, 

Meema