- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 (02/2025, 473 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315 (11/2020, 382 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304 (04/2022, 239 comments)

Well, that resonated just a bit. Oh well, back to doomscrolling.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Fascism_Works

The vast majority of them do their jobs, pay their taxes, and consider themselves patriots and good people because they help their families and motherland, and are polite and well-meaning.

While their jobs help the military machine that murders thousands of innocent people every week, their taxes fund that machine, and their complacency keeps the system stable for decades, costing not only their enemies, but also themselves and their own kids their futures.

When starvation, war, and political terror come, they will consider themselves innocent victims of another unearned, unavoidable political tragedy - not understanding their own decades of inaction brought it on them.

And America isn't that far behind.

Not thinking objectively, living unconsciously, engrossed in short-term matters - is the worst sin that leads to all the other sins. It's how it happened in Belarus, Russia and it's how it's going to happen in US.

Such books will no longer be published if universities are not free.

And if freedom begins to disappear, even those who believe themselves safely conformist are not safe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

I read this book a few years ago and I can't stop thinking about this line of discourse (there's more of this subject in the book). I've felt this exceptional frustration and disgust towards the (in my opinion) wildly underreacting non-fascist millions in the States, more so than the fascists themselves, which seemed contradictory.

The closest I've come to communicating why is that one group is on script while the other isn't. For example, a deadly airborne disease is awful, but the truly scary thing to me would be witnessing doctors and immunologists just kind of shrugging their shoulders.

I grew up with this belief that for all their loud, obnoxious quirks and faults, Americans do not fuck around when it comes to their principles of liberty and freedom. I always admired that. I remember thinking it was a feature that they're so quick to protest and make a scene. I had, without any doubt in my heart and soul, anticipated total disaster. I was expecting to see protests and riots and fires and further uncelebrated but deemed necessary violence in response to the slow ablation of freedom and liberty.

It's quite possible that I'm wrong and that total disaster is premature. But never before have I felt this certain about an "everyone else is wrong" belief. It's scary and somewhat lonely. Reading this book made me feel much less lonely, and much more scared.

So, what stops them ?

"A bad thing happened. We had been a little uneasy, but did not act on it. Well, of course it was hard to act on mere unease. Still, if only we had acted on it sooner...". And thus, what we take away is a simple lesson and call to action - are you feeling uneasy now? If so, it is time to stop and work to derail society from whatever track it is on.

Something that never makes it into these essays are all the times when people felt uneasy and overwhelmed, and yet nothing happened that in our backward-looking perspective ought to have been prevented. Were those feelings of unease distinguishable, to those who had them, from those experienced by the protagonists of this essay?

Something that is discussed even less are all the instances where people experienced the same unease and alienation and did act on them. The story of Nazi Germany is told as one of evil purpose-driven agitators, their evil enabling cronies, and a whole host of good people who were vaguely uneasy but did nothing. A parallel story unfolded throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, though. Germany had lost an existential war, and was under crushing pressure from the victors which wanted to be paid their dues in flesh. Society was tearing at the seams, the massive country to the East had fallen to a totalitarian revolution and rumours of repression and atrocities were trickling in every day even as their sympathisers engaged in street violence and made no secret of wanting to establish the same system at home. First the global financial crisis destroyed whatever semblance of stability and prosperity was left, and then government was paralysed due to lack of majorities even as a repeat loomed. Then, too, good people were vaguely and then increasingly uneasy - and then they decided to actually do something about it. That something was a last-ditch stabilising effort by setting aside factionalism and forming a unity government of anti-communist parties. The rest is history.

As far as more modern comparisons are concerned, I find it difficult to read this essay and not draw a comparison to the COVID years. "Receiving decisions deliberated in secret"? "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"? "Demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before"? Unfortunately, for the Terminally Online, that period has now receded into history as a cute extended staycation that normalised remote working. This obscures the extent to which, right now, the US may be experiencing the results of good "big men" (on the other side) having decided to act on their increasing sense of unease.

I remember particularly the teacher's statement that (paraphrasing, it's been a while) "if I could not resist, it means that anyone else of my station or below could also not resist".

The idea that an admission of impotence is not just a personal note, but also an observation of an actionable waterline that anyone with fewer means will also be unable to rise above...

"If I am unable to do X, who else is unable to do X?" is such a powerful question to consider.

I highly recommend actually reading it and understanding what it is and isn’t. Mostly I learned that there’s no simple answers, but also that people and even political movements were just as slippery then as they are now. But you may come away with something completely different. It’s an odd but interesting book.

The experts, people that have dedicated their lives to understand authoritarianism have already given the alarm. Well, a specialist has even moved to Canada for god's sake.

And well, criticizing democracy is fashionable again. High profile figures started saying out loud that "maybe democracies are overrated. maybe democracies cannot deal with the world as it is now". Just listen to what people are actually saying instead of what you think they meant when they say it and you'll hear they saying that an authoritarian leader is what america needs now.

Bonhoeffer got a lot of things right.

When you read these accounts, it always feels like no one had any agency or knowledge what's going on, that Hitler was basically a lone wolf who installed himself in power against the wishes of the nation, that had some outlandish ideas that no good German believed in, and that then he and a small band of his supporters somehow forced everyone to comply.

And to be clear, it was a totalitarian state, but it also wasn't North Korea and no Soviet Union. If nothing else, you could always leave. Many countries wouldn't take fleeing Jews, but as a dissenting German, you'd be welcomed with open hands almost everywhere.

So yes, of course there were people who hated the regime, and just decided they didn't want to or couldn't rock the boat. But a significant portion of the population approved of what was happening. Hitler was wildly popular. Millions of people enthusiastically bought into what he was selling. Germany perceived itself as a wounded lion after WWI. They felt they had a rightful claim on their "living space". And antisemitism in Europe needed no marketing. Tellingly, purges of Jews continued even after the war in the Soviet sphere of influence.

My point is, for every person who genuinely had no choice, there were ten who definitely had it, who more or less approved what was happening, and who would have been proud of it had Germany won the war.

This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.

Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.

This isn't a drill. Let us assemble the Rebel Alliance.

1939, twenty-thousand attended

while all that was going on, it was normalized

in the end took 15 million military killed

38 million civilians killed

to stop it finally

when in 1930 it simply started by making all other political parties illegal

making all jews illegal immigrants so they could not have jobs, healthcare or even shop eventually

group after group made illegal so they could be disappeared

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/artifact/chart-of-...

People say to me, "Donald, I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say." And they're right! They right! They said nothing, they thought of nothing to say.

Instead of me rambling on about this for the dozenth time, I'm just going to provide some of my favorite passages from the book:

>"My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends ... they were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it." —xiii

>"Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, 'the democratic part.' 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." —p47

>"In good times, you work with reward. But in bad times and good, you work. These are good times. The regime?—the regime promised the people bread, and I bake the bread." —p32, quoting a 51 baker, Nazi party manager, in 1933

>"When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, 'Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.' " —p47

>"The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security ... what does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing ... so things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?" — p48

>"...'in 1938, during a Nazi festival ... the entusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' " —p51, quoting an anti-Nazi German imprisoned for hiding Jews

>"The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere." —p56

>"You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community's. But are the community's attitudes respectable? That's not the point." —p60

>"Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my friends' view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual" –p69

>"All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany." —p164

>" 'Many of the students—the best of them— understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today ... the young people, and yes, the old, too, were drawn to opposite extremes in those [earlier] years ... it is a very dangerous mistake, to think ... that Germans came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonesense that passed for truth' " —p192, a teacher reflecting on students

>" 'Understand, I was proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I belonged ... still—I didn't want those Jews from our town to see me wearing my insignia ... it hurt me to have Jews see me wearing them.' " —p200

>" 'It is easy these days to say anti-Nazi and even to believe it. Before 1933 I certainly was, but then—only again after the war.' " —p201

>" 'You say Totalitarianism. Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so it is easy for you to say, Totalitarianism—no. But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.' " —p223

>"The six [most] extremists all said of the extermination of Jews, 'That was wrong' or 'That was going too far,' as if to say, 'The gas oven was somew2hat too great a punishment for people who, after all, deserved very great punishment.' My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life." —p183

>"Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consuqence, not the cause of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists." —p277

>" 'It doesn't matter whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have discipline and order.' The sensitive cabinetmaker ... and the insensitive bill-collector ... said the same thing. Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one." —p284

>"There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich—the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build ... how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. 'Strategic bombing' was one of war's little jokes; the strategy was to hit ... houses" —p296

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There're dozens of typos above, typed while drinking my morning coffee.I hadn't skimmed through they thought they were free [author's styling] since first reading this extremely challenging book, six year ago.

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Whenever I've recommended to IRL friends (seeing "the book on your bookshelf with a swastika on it!"), nobody wants to read about Nazi's... but this book is about why such ideologies are so attractive, and why ought be avoided.

Read this book, but if the topic interests you Ordinary Men by Chris Rush expands much further on this topic, following a geriatric brigade of conscripted laymen "Nazis."

¢¢

Remember that, then they attack the immigrants, the woke people, the trans gender and the leftist...

For most of my teens I wondered what side I would have been on in 1930s Germany. If I would have had the courage to stand up to fascists. Even when they emerge among your friends. I used to wonder what side other people would end up on. Who would recognize fascism for what it was. Who would have the guts to call people out.

I read extensively about fascism. About the war. About the camp. About where all this came from.

Almost everyone has disapponted me in the past year. Not only the shits who turned out to be closeted fascists, but the cowards who do not dare to speak up. Because this time there was no excuse. Our history should have warned about this. And we failed. Almost all of us. Almost everyone makes excuses for themselves. For why they can't stand up to this.

The excuses are worse than the stupidity.

I do not despise people for being stupid. I despise people for being having had every opportunity to not repeat past mistakes and still

Something I very much like about poetry, is that so much wisdom can be condensed into such succinct language. We fill the gaps with our own experiences, not relying on the author to lead us step by step. And I see poetry proliferating in modern times in song. (How else is a poet to earn a living?)

There frequently are reminders of who we are, where we come from, and whence we always return. Life is a wheel. From Black Sabbath:

   They say that life's a carousel
   Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well
   The world is full of Kings and Queens
   Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
   It's Heaven and Hell, oh well
   And they'll tell you black is really white
   The moon is just the sun at night
   And when you walk in golden halls
   You get to keep the gold that falls
   It's Heaven and Hell

Since the organizing principle of the United States has been war, cold and hot, since about that time, one could argue we haven't been free since then.

But I also question that because out of the last 30 or so historical examples we have of fascism's rise, there's never been one instance of deposing it non-violently once it's been given power. Germany, France, Italy, Portugal's Estado Novo, Spain's Franco. I think the lone exception might be Finland's Lapua movement. So maybe there is nothing that could've actually been done. I don't know, these days I look around and I feel like it's inevitable.