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Milton Mayer’s 1948 book “They Thought They Were Free—The Germans, 1933-45” is a study of how a country of decent people was fundamentally transformed into a totalitarian horror by a small minority of committed national socialists.
“To live in this process is absolutely not to notice it. Each step was so inconsequential, so well explained or, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one understood where all these ‘little measures’ led no ‘patriotic German’ could resent them.”
“Uncertainty is an important factor, and it grows. In the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears or sees no protest. You speak privately to your friends, but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’”
“You are an alarmist. You are saying where this must lead but can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, but how do you know for sure when you can’t guess the end? On one hand, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your friends pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or neurotic.”
“The one great shocking occasion, when others will surely join you, never comes. If the last and worst act of the regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. But this isn’t the way it happens; in between come all the hundreds of little, some imperceptible, steps each preparing you not to be shocked by the next.”
“And one day, too late, your principles rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has completely changed right under your nose. The world you live in is not the world you were born in at all. “
In three short years the same creeping incrementalism has altered your world. Do you see it yet? We are being nudged and prodded little by little into a European utopian nightmare. First they came for the schools, then Fox, then the tea party, then the rich, then the Catholics, then…We think we are free.
Ron Taffe
Shawnee
Milton Mayer’s 1948 book “They Thought They Were Free—The Germans, 1933-45” is a study of how a country of decent people was fundamentally transformed into a totalitarian horror by a small minority of committed national socialists.
“To live in this process is absolutely not to notice it. Each step was so inconsequential, so well explained or, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one understood where all these ‘little measures’ led no ‘patriotic German’ could resent them.”
“Uncertainty is an important factor, and it grows. In the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears or sees no protest. You speak privately to your friends, but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’”
“You are an alarmist. You are saying where this must lead but can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, but how do you know for sure when you can’t guess the end? On one hand, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your friends pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or neurotic.”
“The one great shocking occasion, when others will surely join you, never comes. If the last and worst act of the regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. But this isn’t the way it happens; in between come all the hundreds of little, some imperceptible, steps each preparing you not to be shocked by the next.”
“And one day, too late, your principles rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has completely changed right under your nose. The world you live in is not the world you were born in at all. “
In three short years the same creeping incrementalism has altered your world. Do you see it yet? We are being nudged and prodded little by little into a European utopian nightmare. First they came for the schools, then Fox, then the tea party, then the rich, then the Catholics, then…We think we are free.
Ron Taffe
Shawnee
