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Showing Original Post only (View all)"But Then It Was Too Late" - A really eye opening text [View all]
The link is to chapter 13 of Milton Mayer's moving work "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45"
If you have the opportunity to read the entire book, a pdf copy is available online, I highly, highly recommend it. If you are like me, you often wonder how Germany and the German people evolved under the Third Reich to permit such atrocities against humanity. Well, this book helps to answer that question.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
This is an excerpt from Chapter 13:
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. Thats 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 shockedif, 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 isnt 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 inyour nation, your peopleis 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.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you havent done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
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I have read this and think it is terribly important. I believe most people think it could never
rhett o rick
May 2013
#1
I believe he's really just talking about In-Sourcing at the expense of Americans losing their jobs
whathehell
May 2013
#25
I've never bought this apology by Niemoller. Nazism was a Christian phenomenom and Hitler
byeya
May 2013
#35
Another excerpt. Sorry don't have the chapter number, had it pasted in an old OP, long ago. -
Mnemosyne
May 2013
#4
I believe apologists contribute to the creep to the right by giving free passes to all Ds.
GoneFishin
May 2013
#8
I could not agree more. Amazing to hear bush policies excused, a few years ago would never have
Mnemosyne
May 2013
#9
As an example, the IRS "scandal" is manufactured. I do not root for a team color.
GoneFishin
May 2013
#12
You act as if Obama's progressive critics are indistinguishable from his reactionary critics.
Jim Lane
May 2013
#13
Those 4 paragraphs come immediately before the ones in the OP. Very important book - those who don't
kath
May 2013
#22
This is why some of us are so frustrated with the creeping fascism we now excuse. nt
Demo_Chris
May 2013
#5
Many people have pondered how the Nazi’s got the power they did and so many followers
YeahSureRight
May 2013
#15