Which is why Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free"
a look back at how Germany came under the sway of Hitler,
is such a famous reminder of how people allowed their government to get to the point of slaughtering civilians.
( sorta like we slaughtered so many civilians in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and even Pakistan, to name the most recent dirty deeds)
One of the more famous of the exerpts:
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise;
to receiving decisions deliberated in secret;
to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand,
or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure
or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes.
And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
= new reply since forum marked as read
