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Attempt to put into words March 1, 2024 what has changed in the past 10 years in the southern states of the USA... In that time,, I've lived in Austin, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Orlando, Florida; Pueblo, Colorado; Atlanta, Georgia; Lake Havasu City, Arizona; Cape Giraudoux, Mousiness; New Orleans (all around); yPorland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; Vale, Colorado area; San Antonio, Texas;; Washington D.C. area (Virginia); A couple cities in Ohio; and visited many other areas for shorter period, such as Las Vegas, Nevada.
“Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 , published 1955
“As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. Tailor” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
“The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
I haven't live under wartime, it's as much as the attitude of pining for it around me
It's a constant psychological hate that you are sourounded by. Both online and in real-world symbols and behaviors. You witness Fox News and Newsmax on TV screens in resturants, tavers, shops - and nobody objecting to the hate messaging being broadcast. You see Twitter, Reddit, Facebook changes to hate-messaging. You see avsence, or silhouettes as I tend ot use as a metaphor, avoidance of "I love all people, as I think love makes the world better".
I find connection with Surkov's passage in "Less than Zero" book about autism and his mimicing autism, mocking autism, for purposes of power. Even before the pandemic, the rise in arguing about vacinnes from 2013 onward cuasing autism became more out-group hate oriented.
“Ordinary people—and ordinary Germans—cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, of the nation, the race, the religion. Or, if they are not enemies (that comes later), they must be an element within the community somehow extrinsic to the common bond, a decompositive ferment (be it only by the way they part their hair or tie their necktie) in the uniformity which is everywhere the condition of common quiet. The Germans’ innocuous acceptance and practice of social anti-Semitism before Hitlerism had undermined the resistance of their ordinary decency to the stigmatization and persecution to come.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
“In the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.” ― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
“I think," says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, "that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, then in Italy, we said to one another, 'That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.' But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it at all, I still say, with unbelief, 'Germany—no, not Germany.” ― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
Some fiction: Catch-22
Non-fiction Hanna Ardent
“National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man's repudiation of "the rascals". Its motif was, "Throw them all out.”
― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, *Principiis obsta* and *Finem respice*—'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?”
― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Just look at the mind-fuck everyday people are doing to each other, at least I hope this isn't a nation-state... and just some greedy person wanting the revenue.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1b3bat7/what_the_fck_is_this/
“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
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