Does this sound familiar to anyone?

[dixiegrrrrl]

That is my single question..can anyone relate to the below ?
And for added points, does anyone know where the below book excerpt is from?

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, "was the ever widening gap, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with.
And it became always wider. You know, it doesn't’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.

"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.

Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to.
( Our government) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic person’ could resent,
must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.


the book is: They Thought They Were Free.
Milton Mayer
first published in 1935.
The people are Germans, in Nazi Germany.