frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

They Thought They Were Free (1955)

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
298•nataliste•3h ago•151 comments

Meta exposé author faces bankruptcy after ban on criticising company

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/21/meta-expose-author-sarah-wynn-williams-faces-b...
143•mindracer•2h ago•73 comments

Spectral Labs releases SGS-1: the first generative model for structured CAD

https://www.spectrallabs.ai/research/SGS-1
216•JumpCrisscross•10h ago•34 comments

iFixit iPhone Air teardown

https://www.ifixit.com/News/113171/iphone-air-teardown
211•zdw•11h ago•108 comments

Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 3

https://gautiersblog.blogspot.com/2025/09/writing-competitive-bzip2-encoder-in.html
68•etrez•1d ago•4 comments

AI was supposed to help juniors shine. why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

https://elma.dev/notes/ai-makes-seniors-stronger/
159•elmsec•13h ago•161 comments

$2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/09/18/2-weact-display-fs-adds-a-0-96-inch-usb-information-displ...
329•smartmic•17h ago•140 comments

Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank

https://www.theverge.com/tech/781387/backpacking-ultralight-haribo-power-bank
51•arnon•1h ago•33 comments

Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

https://seattleultrasonics.com/
663•hemloc_io•22h ago•532 comments

Universities should be more than toll gates

https://www.waliddib.com/posts/universities-should-be-more-than-toll-gates/
105•wdib•7h ago•79 comments

The bloat of edge-case first libraries

https://43081j.com/2025/09/bloat-of-edge-case-libraries
86•PaulHoule•12h ago•107 comments

Teardown of Apple 40W dynamic power adapter with 60W max

https://www.chargerlab.com/teardown-of-apple-40w-dynamic-power-adapter-with-60w-max-a3365/
172•givinguflac•3d ago•143 comments

Vibe coding cleanup as a service

https://donado.co/en/articles/2025-09-16-vibe-coding-cleanup-as-a-service/
166•sjdonado•8h ago•98 comments

Gluco data handler: Receive and visualize glucose data on Android

https://github.com/pachi81/GlucoDataHandler
11•croemer•3d ago•1 comments

Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/09/thirty-years-later-simcity-2000-hasnt-changed-but-i-have/
100•doppp•3d ago•105 comments

UK, Candada and Australia formally recognize Palestinian state

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/sep/21/keir-starmer-palestine-recognition-announce...
9•ath3nd•9m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How were graphics card drivers programmed back in the 90s?

35•ferguess_k•2d ago•23 comments

That DEA agent's 'credit card' could be eavesdropping on you

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dea-surveillance-hidden-cameras-federal-law-enf...
19•toss1•1h ago•2 comments

Lidar, optical distance and time of flight sensors

https://ams-osram.com/innovation/technology/depth-and-3d-sensing/lidar-optical-distance-and-time-...
40•mahirsaid•2d ago•8 comments

Designing NotebookLM

https://jasonspielman.com/notebooklm
257•vinhnx•20h ago•83 comments

Newton for Ladies (1737) – Newtonianism vs. Cartesianism

https://www.whipplelib.hps.cam.ac.uk/special/exhibitions-and-displays/exhibitions-archive/newton-...
10•bgilroy26•2d ago•4 comments

Learning Languages with the Help of Algorithms

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/17/learning-languages-with-the-help-of-algorithms/
52•ibobev•3d ago•27 comments

FLX1s phone is launched

https://furilabs.com/flx1s-is-launched/
289•slau•1d ago•203 comments

In defence of swap: common misconceptions (2018)

https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
89•jitl•14h ago•84 comments

Scream cipher

https://sethmlarson.dev/scream-cipher
282•alexmolas•3d ago•97 comments

Knitted Anatomy

https://www.knitted-anatomy.at/cardiovascular-system/
102•blikstiender•3d ago•5 comments

The dead weight loss of strictly isotonic regression

https://www.gojiberries.io/calibration/
3•neehao•2d ago•0 comments

Hololuminescent Display

https://lookingglassfactory.com/hld-overview
40•geox•3d ago•22 comments

Were RNNs all we needed? A GPU programming perspective

https://dhruvmsheth.github.io/projects/gpu_pogramming_curnn/
86•omegablues•2d ago•23 comments

Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years (2019)

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-44886585
130•Luc•4d ago•55 comments
Open in hackernews

They Thought They Were Free (1955)

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
295•nataliste•3h ago

Comments

kleiba•2h ago
Posted here multiple times before:

- 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)

dctoedt•2h ago
Spaced repetition promotes learning.
JKCalhoun•1h ago
Seriously though, this is the first time I've seen it (and I visit HN daily).
rsynnott•25m ago
I’d assume it gets flagged pretty quickly; the implied criticism of Dear Leader is not appreciated in some quarters.
nataliste•1h ago
I was reading the comments from the past times this was submitted, and I just wanted a reason to draw attention to this comment from 2020:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315#25104589

mallowdram•1h ago
We're seeking narrative to explain how and why these things are happening when narratives are how they are happening. When a species relies on inferior and limited tools, it suffers from their use. When the tool is seamless with the problem, it destroys us without us becoming aware.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/jd-vance-lie...

This article is all we need to know about fascism, the candidate admits this is the central tool they use on the path to gain unlimited power, even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially: "In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio."

The central problem is epistemological, the coding of explanations in mythological thought, which is narrative. The myth is the primary causal illusion. That causes that. When we add intent, which is elusive and reduces meaning subjectively, it robs any event of the true meaning load, we create propaganda without knowing it. There's the rub. If we wee the burning bush as just a brushfire, we are sane. See it as the voice of God, we're doomed.

toxic72•1h ago
It becomes more important with each repost
BolexNOLA•1h ago
It’s been 7mo and we’re not all here every day. It’s fine. I appreciate the post and discussion it sparked.

Why does it bother you?

teraflop•1h ago
Why are you interpreting it as a complaint, or an expression of being bothered?

Occasional reposts are well within HN's norms, and when something is reposted, it's common to link to past discussions for comparison.

brightball•2h ago
I wonder how many people interpret this based on “the other side” rather than objectively?
Amezarak•2h ago
Probably most.

A few years ago when people were being sentenced to prison for memes, the government pressured social media to censor and ban people, members of the US government requested people be deplatformed, banks and credit card processors “banned” individuals for their political views, and people were fired, we heard a lot about the paradox of tolerance, the Free Speech xkcd comic “showing you the door”, the idea that “freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence”, “you don’t have a right to a platform”, the important of the government shutting down disinformation, etc. People felt they had to express support for the cause du jour or face consequences, to be silent was to agree with terrible people.

Now very many of the same people have rediscovered the value of free speech culturally and legally, because the shoe is on the other foot and the other “side” is using these same powers and arguments.

Game theory says once one side defects in this situation you’re irrational to continue not defecting. Neither side has any reason to believe the other about these principles because they have both engaged in these authoritarian tactics. I don’t know what the way out is. “Imagine the roles were reversed” doesn’t work when people see it as retribution for what you did to them. I don’t see it getting better.

fifteen1506•2h ago
I don't recall the government using FCC to fire someone.

I'd rather wish the previous governments had closed down Fox News, though.

PS: not an USA citizen.

Amezarak•2h ago
That’s the problem. Everyone makes tendentious arguments about how their exact reasoning and mechanism is justified, while the other sides’ is not justified. The outcome is the same.

Edit: I have been rate limited so I cannot reply, but note I was referring to prior administrations coercing media companies to censor and deplatform people, so yes, it is functionally the same whether it’s the FCC or Congress or other executive departments doing the coercing.

estearum•1h ago
The mechanism is rather important though. Government coercing private parties based on content of speech is illegal. Private parties governing their own speech is not, and is in fact a key First Amendment-protected activity in and of itself.
stackbutterflow•44m ago
> The outcome is the same.

That's the problem. The outcome is not the same. It couldn't be more different. That's how one side knows they're right.

shredprez•8m ago
The outcome is not the same: allegedly repressive liberal administrations, internet businesses, and tv networks allowed openly authoritarian media to continually build momentum for a decade until that media delivered an authoritarian regime willing to actively dismantle the open system that allowed it to come to power. Contrast that with less than one year of the authoritarian regime, where the full force of the government apparatus is being used to crush political opponents by: defunding educational institutions, ending international soft-power programs, militarizing cities, threatening to de-license broadcasters, and classifying rights-based activist organizations as terrorists.

The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence, where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives. I'll join you in criticizing the liberal order any day, but it's beyond bad-faith to pretend the current administration is just more of the same.

_luiza_•2h ago
Feels like the game needs reframing;

Also possibly time for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to get an update.

adriand•2h ago
> A few years ago when people were being sentenced to prison for memes

Is this what you’re referring to? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/10/23/dou...

I agree that the left did not take free speech as seriously as it ought to have. However, today the president is as opposed to free speech as the most rabid leftist university protestor from a few years ago, and that is a lot different.

Amezarak•2h ago
Yes. Note that what Mackey did, and the content of his posts, was entirely legal and his conviction was overturned unanimously on appeal. To convict him originally, the government had to lie about him participating in a conspiracy - the reason the conviction was overturned is because they lied about the evidence of the conspiracy. There was never any dispute that merely posting what he did was legal.

I also wasn’t claiming his memes were criticizing Clinton.

Edit because I have been rate limited: if you contend that it was criminal, why did the government charge him only with a crime that it didn’t have actual evidence for?

estearum•1h ago
It really isn't "entirely legal" to deceive people as to how/when/where to cast their vote, and I don't think you'll find much sympathy for the view that it should be even among vigorous defenders of the First Amendment.

His conviction was overturned due to lack of evidence of that he knowingly joined a conspiracy (required by the specific statute they charged him under) not because what he did is protected speech.

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...

alecst•2h ago
To help me take this argument seriously, could you give a specific examples of when the shoe was on the first foot?

Like

> a few years ago when people were being sentenced to prison for memes

are you talking about the guy whose memes tricked thousands of people (of one political party) into thinking they could vote by texting a number?

Amezarak•2h ago
You may want to read the Appeals Court ruling that overturned his conviction 3-0 because the government lied.

But also consider the point that everyone has a reason why their exact situation is different than the other sides when the outcome is the same. They would say for example that Kimmel was simply deplatformed because he also spread misinformation.

There’s no way out until everyone agrees it is the outcome that matters rather than doubling down because their ideology is so correct that it is beyond contestation and the other side are enemies destroying democracy rather than rivals.

thfuran•1h ago
>They would say for example that Kimmel was simply deplatformed because he also spread misinformation.

Okay, but they would be either misinformed or lying.

ezekiel68•23m ago
They would not. I love Kimmel, but it turns out the story of the gunman is now much more layered and nuanced than "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them..." In Kimmel's defense, this was a developing story at the time, but it is not untrue, in hindsignt, that Kimmel spread misinformation.
ezekiel68•30m ago
Everyone voted them down, but there's a kernel of truth here.

We were all in favor of it when Judicial Activism gave us approved Liberal outcomes starting in the latter half of the 20th Century. We didn't realize that the only thing preventing "the other side" from weaponizing the same tactic was a generation of politicians loathe to violate the separation of powers. Once they all passed away, all hell broke loose and here we are...

As the Left used to point out, "You can't legislate morality." Except... they did. And now they are shocked -- SHOCKED, I TELL YOU -- to discover that the Right has lost its scruples in resisting the same temptation.

"Strung up on the gallows prepared for their enemies" (ancient morality tales) and all that.

tobias3•2h ago
As a German outside observer I can tell you there is only one side going down the facist path.

The "other side" isn't great either. Would be great to have a sane alternative, I guess.

brightball•1h ago
I think the sane alternative has long been modeled by the US Constitution.

The real test is how any model handles corruption and expunges it because no matter the ideology, people are in charge and people are corruptible.

The only real model that can work is one that minimizes the power of those in charge.

larrydag•49m ago
The US Constitutional government is meant to be slow, methodical and gridlocked. It is supposed to take enormous compromise to get any decision created into law.
Schnitz•24m ago
The US constitution is outdated and vulnerable. Modern constitutions like Germany’s basic law are a lot more resilient. We are watching the US constitution fail right now, it didn’t even take smart men to start dismantling it. I hope I’ll be proven wrong, but what indications do you see right now that the US constitution is performing as intended?
haswell•4m ago
I’m unfamiliar with German basic law, but considering the lawlessness we’re seeing play out in the US right now, I’m curious how/why modern constitutions are less vulnerable?

By this I mean: it’s not as if the things we see playing out are lawful. Is there a structural difference that somehow prevents the same kind of lawlessness?

Put another way, what stops a movement that decides to ignore Germany’s constitution from ignoring it should they somehow gain power?

nerdponx•1h ago
This line of reason is actually becoming more frequently used to justify things. For years, the right wing propaganda machine has been establishing the concept that conservatism and America as a whole is besieged by authoritarian leftists and their smug out-of-outch enablers the liberals.

THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat, our methods are justified. THEY have been doing this to us for years, now this is our chance to fight back.

ethical_source•49m ago
Are you just going to ignore the 2016-2024 state-directed viewpoint censorship on social media?
brightball•48m ago
Similar to calling everyone Nazi’s and fascists who has an opposing point of view?

When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings.

I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said “leftists” and the other “fascists”.

My only question who is pushing the messaging and who does it benefit?

AvAn12•31m ago
In what way are democrats (or, “leftists,” if you must) authoritarian?

Requiring face masks in a pandemic (which happened under the trump admin, in case anyone forgot) is not the same as masked goons throwing brown people into vans.

tobias3•34m ago
Yes, and then they call this openly a Reichstag fire moment and people still don't get the parallels.

And back then there was a proper systems conflict. People like Krupp actually had to fear being disowned by communists.

ethical_source•1h ago
As a German, what do you think of six AfD candidates dying under mysterious circumstances weeks before the election?

As a German, how do you feel about Verfassungsschutz making a government declaration that your most popular party is "far right extremism" and "incompatible with the democratic order"?

As a German, how do you feel about the government sponsoring endless social engineering and migration the public never asked for -- and it being illegal to object?

As a German, do you feel free? I guess you would if your worldview consists of safe, orthodox, DW-approved thoughts. Perhaps you feel you freely arrived at precisely those positions the state enforces.

As a German, don't even start judging the American political process. We have the first amendment and are still free to a degree you are not and will never be.

> sane alternative

Gee, I wonder what such an alternative party might call itself.

wyldfire•39m ago
> We have the first amendment and are still free to a degree you are not and will never be.

I'm not so sure about that. "It's no longer free speech [when someone criticizes the president]." [1]

This seems like it's remarkably in line with "they thought they were free" because here you are, thinking you're free. But in fact, your speech is not free because all three branches failed to protect you from this and have now signaled that this will go on.

What does it mean to have the first amendment if it's chilled like this and the only checks available are toothless? If SCOTUS were to review this and find that POTUS were wrong (itself a stretch), what remedy would they have? They would defer to the legislature who has already shown us that even in the face of an attempt to violently overthrow the legislature itself are not willing to use its power to check this demagogue.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/19/trump-no-longer-fre...

ethical_source•26m ago
You have to take Trump "seriously but not literally". The government threatened to revoke a broadcast license, a right to use a limited resource for the public good. Broadcast licenses come with rules to ensure the limited resource is used for public benefit: for example, you're not allowed to broadcast profanity over the air despite profanity in general being protected speech. Nobody is denying anyone's ability to communicate over privately owned channels. What Trump meant is that a network that uses limited spectrum to broadcast nonstop partisan lies isn't operating in the public interest and doesn't deserve the license.

Consider the contrast with the 2016-2024 state and corporate effort to suppress inconvenient truths as "misinformation". Remember when they used naked, hard power to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story? That's what real censorship looks like.

In America, you can express any viewpoint on social media and be treated fairly. That wasn't the case just a few years ago.

In most of Europe, and in the UK, you can't express certain ideas. The state will literally come to your house and arrest you if you have the wrong opinions on government policy. The US does not do that.

BDPW•5m ago
>In most of Europe, and in the UK, you can't express certain ideas.

This is total BS. In many European countries (the ones I know personally) this is not at all the case.

thomassmith65•2h ago
This post from 2003 has made the rounds several times in recent years...

"The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html

...and I recall people reading it and saying they don't see how Donald Trump ticks the boxes.

It's all very tedious to complain about when half the electorate supports it. It makes one feel like a nag and a broken record.

FridayoLeary•1h ago
There are clearly very many countries that tick most of those boxes. Including some that i wouldn't necessarily define as fascist. Prominent examples are China, Russia, Iran North Korea and other middle eastern countries. I'm not saying this list is incorrect, per se, but it is vague to the point of uselessness.
thrance•1h ago
I mean, as far as fascist states go China, Russia and North Korea are pretty up there? In the original "14 points" [0], the author explains this is not an exhaustive checklist that makes something fascist if it ticks all of the items, and gives motivation for such a list. Go read it if you have time to, it's rather short and well written.

> Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

> But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...

brightball•1h ago
Authoritarianism is IMO the common thread whether you’re talking about fascism or communism.

At the root, there’s either principled freedom or control.

thomassmith65•1h ago
1930s fascism can never occur again. It was a product of its time.

But the psychology behind fascism stems from deep human quirks and is something eternal.

All those nations, except perhaps China, share the DNA. If we didn't already have names for their systems, we probably would describe them as fascistic.

What Trump has turned the American government into is closer to Fascism than to Liberal Democracy, no?

In future highschool textbooks Trump Fascism will have its own name ("Trashism" perhaps?) but it will be placed in the same chapter as the others.

nerdponx•1h ago
It's inaccurate to blame Trump. He is a greedy egotistical idiot. Blaming Trump is like blaming a rock that hit you in the head. Look up and pay attention to who threw the rock. Blame them.

The Trump presidency is the culmination of a roughly 45 year campaign to return the United States to the Gilded Age, and to ensure it stays that way until it's bled dry and nothing remains of its corpse. The political and social problems that led to his second election have been a long time coming.

What's interesting is that the gaps in our political system that allow him to do so many illegal and distasteful things have always been there. The framers of the constitution never anticipated all three branches of government colluding together in alignment and bad faith, with the vociferous support of roughly half the voting population.

twodave•7m ago
I have come to conclude that there are both reasonable and unbalanced individuals on the extreme ends of both sides. When Obama was elected I had paranoid relatives telling me he was going to pilfer their 401k and bankrupt the country. Well, that never happened. When Trump was re-elected it was, “He is going to tear down democracy! He’s going to put gay people in concentration camps!” Last I checked we still have free elections, and nobody cares whether you’re gay. And we see political violence targeting both major parties. This also is not new. So I think this isn’t a result of anyone’s politics, but rather individual temperance; the voices we choose to amplify and listen to.
JKCalhoun•2h ago
"…it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

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

jackstraw42•2h ago
Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attempting to do their part to usher in the chaos. "They" are the ones who have the most resources who will rebuild and control after everything goes to shit, like how Europe and the US thrived after WW2 because they were the winners/rebuilders. Currently the right wants to skip the messy war part required to take control of a government and skip to the implementing changes part. Whether or not that actually happens, well right now they're trying to push the left into drawing the line.

I have no idea where our current "line" is but it's not the same as it was last time and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc

The other day I watched this interview with Dan Carlin from 4 years ago and near the beginning the interviewer says something like "I don't think any of us want to draw any comprarisons to current nations and Nazi Germany"

that caught me, because why not? Of course no one wants to actually create parallels, but do we see any? maybe we didn't see as many then, and it was more of a worry in 2021 about even thinking about the possibility of tipping MAGA into that territory. but then again after January 6th we should have seen that they basically don't have a line and are just pushing it gradually. They don't really know what to do when they get the new power either, but the people who could stop it may not even realize it because they haven't had to deal with this kind of thing before. like invading Greenland? taking it from Denmark? how do you even create a response to a suggestion like that? so nothing happens and they see what else they can do.

another edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc&t=570s

The really interesting part of the interview gets going around the 7:50 mark, but here Dan talks about the options if you're an average citizen trying to figure out what to do. A litany of poor options if you're trying to pick a side right now really resonates with me.

HK-NC•1h ago
Wasnt Germany better off in the decades following WW2 than the British that defeated them?
jackstraw42•1h ago
The Allies defeated Germany, not the British.
delichon•1h ago
It turns out that the British were one of the allies and about 380,000 of them died fighting the Nazis, so they have a good claim to having defeated Germany, with help from their friends.
jackstraw42•1h ago
Yes, I am not downplaying the role of the British and hoped no one would take it that way. The British were the first on alert as far as I know, and without them it would have been a whole lot worse.

USA swoops in towards the end (a large cost as well, but not as much of it and not on their doorstep) and takes a big role in creating the new world.

giraffe_lady•1h ago
Reassuring to hear that the british consider soviets their friends. Not joking.
immibis•1h ago
Mostly because the Allies took over and invested a bunch of money into them developing in ways that didn't involve fascism.
GLdRH•1h ago
That's not even remotely what happened
madaxe_again•1h ago
History disagrees with your bold statement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

GLdRH•1h ago
No it doesn't. They didn't "invest", they took everything that wasn't bolted to the ground, and then they took that too. A third of the country was taken away and millions of Germans displaced.
hollerith•1h ago
My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.

The Marshall Plan was a real thing.

My father also told me that before the Americans decided on the Marshall Plan, they considered other plans (also named for American generals IIRC) one of which involved sterilizing all German men.

LastTrain•1h ago
Give us your truth on it then I genuinely interested.
nativeit•1h ago
Which Germany?
GLdRH•1h ago
You probably only mean economic growth, otherwise that's hard to imagine
arrowsmith•29m ago
I suppose it's easier to achieve "growth" in percentage terms when you're starting from a low baseline (because your entire country got flattened by invading armies.)
DarkNova6•1h ago
Certainly not the ones occupied by the Soviet Union.
Archelaos•1h ago
East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1] It had catched up at around 1970. Since 1970 the two were roughly equivalent: some years one was ahead some years the other.[2] However, Germany is now considerably ahead of the UK in terms of per capita GDP measuered in PPP (ie. adjusted to local prices: aprox. 20% now, or 10 to 15 years (depending on your reference point).[3]

[1] https://i.sstatic.net/azSk3.png

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...

roenxi•1h ago
That is largely irrelevant, they weren't in control of their own destiny at that point. What we learned in the 50s/60s was that the US leadership in the 40s/50s had a really good idea of how to build a country up and score diplomatic wins. They did amazing things in Japan and Germany.

Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.

tomrod•1h ago
Afg/Iraq became places to funnel money to friends in security contracting.
ArnoVW•37m ago
As much as I lament the quality of leadership at the moment (and not just in the US) I am not sure that we can equate Afghanistan with Germany.

It is one thing to denazify a "modern western country" that shares most of your values, culture and religion, and that has had institutions for some time. It is another thing altogether to pull off the deal in a country that has never had a working civil society, civil institions, education, etc. Especially if you do not share it's culture or religion, and there is a part of the country that is still actively engaged in a military campaign to obstruct you.

Not saying that it couldn't be done, or that mistakes weren't made. Just that you can't compare the two like that.

moomin•1h ago
It’s something of a red herring. Britain got the largest slice of the Marshall Plan money, they just wasted it on things like trying to maintain the Empire. One thing you’d learn from the book is Germany definitely wasn’t in a good shape in 55.
username332211•13m ago
Apart from the Suez crisis and the Rhodesian embargo was there any serious British attempt to maintain the empire after the second World War?
rsynnott•28m ago
Nah, that’s really more a recent phenomenon, and is more to do with Britain’s weak growth over the last 20 years than anything else.
themgt•54m ago
The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil.

It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pinochet, Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, the Spanish Civil War, Maidan and the Ukraine war, Cerén and Bukele in El Salvador, etc etc etc.

The point is, if you drew up a few dozen historical parallels that were at least as close to the current American predicament as is Germany in the 1930s, you might draw (and implicitly suggest your audience draw) more tentative and complex conclusions regarding the correct course of action. Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.

api•27m ago
Some of it reminds me of the CCP, which I think is openly considered a model by some neo-authoritarians. Ubiquitous mass surveillance, social credit, and state capitalism with heavy control though regulatory pressure. I assume we will eventually see party men installed on boards of major companies, especially in media, tech, and entertainment.

The “tech right” is a major player here and a lot of those folks idolize China right now.

I think the US has been spiraling toward authoritarianism since 9/11 personally. This did not start yesterday or with the most recent election, nor is it exclusively the result of the right or the Republican Party. A lot of people to the left have also abandoned liberalism and ideas like free speech. There’s been a broad based shift away from liberalism and individualism and toward collectivism, which always leads toward totalitarianism.

Right wing collectivism comes in the form of racism and nationalism, while for the contemporary left its identity-grievance politics and a resurgence of Marxism.

“Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?” is one of the questions I keep asking.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS•11m ago
I would also remind the short of memory that during covid, the states with the most draconian restrictions were mostly left-leaning, and many were loathe to give up that control.

Control of the people comes from all sides. The end result is the same, but the methods are different, intended to make people happy to be controlled.

tbrownaw•5m ago
> Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.

This is, is course, why it's the one preferred comparison.

bboygravity•44m ago
This is probably the most ironic post I read in quite a while.

TLDR: brain washing is dangerous, we don't have headspace due to Trump oh and btw Trump is hitler.

jackstraw42•9m ago
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying this is obvious and nothing needs to be done, or that I'm totally wrong or what? Or saying that I'm being a conspiracy theorist by seeing parallels?
dctoedt•6m ago
[delayed]
Hilift•2h ago
No, they noticed. 90 years ago, 2/3 of the world's books were in Germany. They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening. Germans were acutely aware of the reality of the day to day situation and their previous history in WW1.
giorgioz•2h ago
Seems unlikely Germany owned 66% of the world books in 1935.

I'm not counter claiming the rest, but that fact seems off.

brabel•2h ago
You don’t know and you can’t know what it was like. The least you could do is try to listen to the people who were there and perhaps do at least a little bit of introspection and consider what you could’ve done differently, knowing what the consequences for troublemakers were. But that seems to be beyond you?
foldr•2h ago
I think OP is talking about the rise of the Nazis rather than the period where the Nazis were already in control and resistance was much more difficult. Although, in fairness, Hitler was already chancellor ‘90 years ago’.
osobo•2h ago
Did you even read the article? They explicitly point out that it was the learned class that was so busy with their other important things that they missed all of it. The whole thing is about how that played out.
csomar•2h ago
It is western propaganda. Germans were simply supportive of Hitler and, for the most part, Hitler did well by the Germans. Most people do not question actions when these actions do not affect them, let alone oppose them. And most people will not get involved in politics if the upside is negative.
Dumblydorr•2h ago
Hitler didn’t do well by the people. Real wages declined throughout Nazi reign. Their lands were destroyed. They were responsible for allowing genocide.

Source: Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The article shows how he lulled them step by step and diverted them from knowing this was worse than before. Sound familiar USA?

csomar•2h ago
They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different. We can hate the guy but he was not going to conquer Europe with the Germans and then sit at it empty.
fzeroracer•2h ago
One of the reasons they specifically lost the war was because Hitler was such a fuck up that he was decimating the German economy. When you look at how the war was progressing, the only outcome for the Nazis at the time was either defeat or collapse. Combined with the endemic usage of Pervitin and other drugs at this time both to fuel soldiers and keep the citizens relatively placated they were burning up everything both at the frontline and at home.
XorNot•1h ago
Bingo: the story of WW2 is that the Germans started with an effective army, and the Nazis ran it into the ground.

The saddest thing is subsequent decades of bizarre interpretations of this result because people got too excited about some effective German industry that they took Hitlers various wonder weapon attempts as planned engineering projects rather than engineers trying to put form to a mad man's rantings.

Hitler loved the idea of super heavy tanks, so the Germans kept trying to build them even though they were unreliable, ineffective and vulnerable.

Meanwhile the Sherman got a reputation for breaking down a lot...mostly because it kept surviving and being fixed in the field and continuing to provide effective armor support, whereas German tanks just died.

Dumblydorr•1h ago
No, not just. There were pre-war downsides and hardships for the people. read the book above, it’s clear the common German had a worse life before the war came, to say nothing of being drafted, being killed, losing a family member, or being incinerated.
metalman•2h ago
And only from reading Chinese history and how the Chinese inteligencia see's it can you get the full wieght that what to them is an inevitable and unstopable cycle. They go so far as to describe the stages and symptoms of each stage, along with specific societal conditions that we continue to replicate with a mechanical precision they gave the name "The turning of the dynastic wheel" The chinese with there long history, and pragmatic introspection have codified things like this in there pictographic written language, where the symbol for disaster is derived from combining the two symbols for danger, and oportunity.
HK-NC•1h ago
I have a chinese friend who said something similar to this, she believes much of the culture in the modern west is influenced by some shady chinese government attempt at controlling the speed at which said wheel turns, through Tiktok and stuff. While Id normally dismiss her as a nut, we do have rioting in the street arguing over a miniscule group of people wearing clothes dsigned for the opposite sex.
pessimizer•31m ago
Or maybe the fact that we're willing to destroy women's privacy and opportunities for them is the extreme position, and their clothing choices are a straw man?

Just like it's easy to ignore what's happening to a minority, it's easy for men to ignore what's happening to women.

Note, this* has nothing to do with transwomen, simply the idea that men with deformed genitals should be allowed to remove opportunities from women because they want to. With that opening, replacing women with men was a result of actual scouting. The concentration of men in women's track and field was 151x higher than you would expect from the population of people with that genetic condition.

Women aren't men with breasts, men without penises, men with dresses, men with makeup, men who are caring and supportive, men you want to have sex with, or any combination of the above. Women are women, and have a hard time in this world that losing the vocabulary to refer to themselves is not an improvement upon. Be compassionate towards your mother.

-----

[*] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/sep/19/sex-tests-brou...

unethical_ban•24m ago
On biological males in women's sports I think more people can agree on this.

But you're handwaving away the fact that conservative political parties are using trans existence as a wedge issue.

wizzwizz4•5m ago
We also had rioting in the street over this in Berlin, 1933-05-06 (four days before the famous bonfire). Occam's Razor says that shady Chinese government intervention is not needed.
ethical_source•44m ago
Are they wrong though? On our side, people like Spengler also model societies as pseudo-organisms with lives that go through birth, adolescence, adulthood, senescence, and death. There's a lot of merit to viewing history as cyclic and decay inevitable even if the details change from iteration to iteration.

Similar conditions produce similar outputs. Perhaps the linkage isn't quite as direct and repeatable as the Chinese think, but they have a point.

thrance•1h ago
> Hitler did well by the Germans.

That's an insanely stupid claim. Jews were systematically stigmatized and eventually sent to extermination camps. What we now call LGBT people and political opponents got the same treatment. Syndicalists too: one of the first thing Hitler did was make unions illegal. And even the "aryans" that supported him, saw their work hours get longer and longer and the pay smaller and smaller.

And let's not speak of the millions dying in a pointless war that ruined Europe.

Foreignborn•2h ago
I just read the book last week. What you said is not true in any useful sense. “Germans were acutely aware…” tries to reduce an entire population and years into one statement. Reality has much more color.

For the germans interviewed in the book, it seems to be true that many had read or heard about the camps or other atrocities, but (1) not the “final solution” which was not in the press and (2) there seems to be heavy desensitization from 1933-1955 when the book was written.

Aside from the tailor that had started the fire at the synagogue, the other 9 interviewees had not directly witnessed atrocities being committed, and instead focused on their personal hardships during the war.

Even though they may have been literate, the people in Mayer’s book were ignorant of the specific realities. Perhaps willfully ignorant, yes, but the nazi regime really did not give any opportunities otherwise.

—

not an expert, just reporting my notes from the book.

i highly recommend all americans read it, its not a long book. it feels eerily familiar, even though many circumstances are drastically different.

lukan•1h ago
Mein Kampf was published 1924 and distributed broadly.

There was not much hidden, the goal of making a big war in the east to conquer new land for the Aryans was there in big letters in the open.

His views towards jews likewise.

So they knew. Maybe largely did not wanted to know. And they did celebrate the victories of the german army as their own. They only stopped celebrating after the victories stopped happening and it was more and more clear that the war will be lost.

FrustratedMonky•1h ago
Yes.

Also, Project 2025 was openly published. Anybody could read it. They aren't hiding the goals.

People just don't want to bother with it.

lif•51m ago
PNAC (Project for the New American Century) published an interesting 'report' in 2000
chillingeffect•16m ago
In their defense, there is an inexhaustable supply of "take over w my ideology material."

This is a confluence of many conditions. Some long-focused efforts, some architecting and annealing of interests, some individual greed, some long-lasting effects of trauma, and some massive ignorance.

One of the only good points is that the American people are stubbornly allergic to authoritarianism. Yes there are exceptions, but mainly carved out by people trading it for self-interest. Many good surprises like Tucker Carlson's opposition to squashing free speech and the Republican's long-lasting distaste for pedophilia are still out there.

The post above pointing out how we're diff to Nazism is on point. There have been many more authoritarian plays since then. Americans remain conveniently ignorant of them.

Also we're being economically crushed and everyone feels it. Although racism is a powerful tool by this movement, it's actually centered around impoverishing everyone and the dizzying egos of its leaders.

victorbjorklund•28m ago
No shit they claim to not have known. No one would say "oh yea I knew they were killing children but i didnt care"?
BDPW•17m ago
What I took away from the book was that all these people were very eager to say variants of 'das haben wir nicht gewusst' when at the same time they also describe how the jews were systematically removed from their society and every part of civil society was taken over by the nazi's.

I would add to your statement that almost everyone should read it. It's unnerving to read how 'normal' all these people were in some way and how 'easily' it all happened because the population generally disliked jews.

FrustratedMonky•1h ago
"They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening"

can be hard, it's happening right now, and a lot of people are really all in, love it. or ignoring it, or sinking into streaming services to distract themselves.

Take your average house frau today, and they think Trump rounding people up is just good old law and order.

People aren't thinking everything through, that's how the overwhelming distractions work.

adriand•2h ago
If you’re interested in this topic, I really recommend reading How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley. [1] It’s a remarkable book - slim, easy to read, and enlightening. What was most astonishing to me was that there is a playbook: ever wonder why these regimes always target LGTBQ people, for example? It’s explained here, along with everything else you need to know about the mechanics of prosaic, predictable type of government.

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

ajuc•2h ago
Look at Russians right now.

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.

heresie-dabord•2h ago
> They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966, 2017 by the University of Chicago.

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

throwawaymaths•6m ago
Universities will not be safe from government meddling until they comprehensively stop taking money from the government first. Until such a point, they run the real risk of censorship and becoming the agents of the very thing that they are warning about.
Waterluvian•2h ago
> "Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better.[...]"

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.

Loughla•1h ago
The right in the US has convinced people that the only way to protect their own freedoms is to let them take the freedom from everyone, and allocate out appropriate permissions to the right people afterwards.

There's also a spirit of "I don't care as long as they get hurt more" that's stronger than ever.

The party of self-sufficiency and pulling yourself up into a better life with minimal oversight from government has become the party of cutting off your nose to spite your own face.

It's ridiculous.

mallowdram•1h ago
It's basic primate psychology, status is the key. It divides the society well-enough that if a majority are not inconvenienced, then the doublespeak creates a denial at all scales. Even things that are obviously absurd like vaccine denial aren't about across the board policy, the exclusive high status can still gain them. The policy and others are used as a political wedge to create eugenics, racism, whatever the underlying status-bias curve that gains them the weird pluralities to maintain a semblance of power.

Humans are dark matter communicators. We code all the top-down biases seamlessly in news stories, speech, novels, movies, always as a by-product of social and virtue signaling. Even altruism comes with a handicap principle. Ultimately we are followers, not leaders, or adventurers, that would be chaos. If the leaders can fool the populace by mixtures of narratives, and sleight of hand oppress on behalf of enough pluralities status, the audience id placated and inert.

SamoyedFurFluff•1h ago
Americans do not fuck around with loud proclamations but actions are harder. Don’t doubt that there are actions, though. But our media landscape is extremely fragmented and successful organizations of people are not covered. There are plenty of loud, mass protests happening everywhere in the country. But also understand that successful organizations that do get media attention are cracked down on. Not so long ago Los Angeles had mass demonstrations against ICE raids and the federal government literally sent in the military against its own people. Particularly conservative media covered these protestors as anti-American for their protesting, and this narrative made it so far as brought up repeatedly in spaces like Hacker News. Somehow optics of the protestors matters more than the actions of the government.

The people are fractured, the people who are trying to fight for their fellow Americans are depicted as anti-American and enough Americans are buying it that the fractures continue.

anal_reactor•1h ago
> 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.

This is exactly the problem. Americans see their own country as perfect example of freedom and liberty, and the idea that they might be wrong never crosses their minds. When you try to explain to them that their culture has elements actively hostile to personal freedom, you get a syntax error at best.

One of the things that Trump is doing is pointing to general "wokeness", "cancel culture", and so on, and labeling them as censorship. The trick is that he's not exactly wrong. Most Americans have their entire livehoods tied to their employers, which usually are emotionless corporations that can fire said Americans at will. This means that, if you express an undesirable opinion, you can and will be fired, and self-censorship is a vital element of American culture. Many Americans celebrated this as a feature that allowed them to maintain social cohesion. Now that the tide has shifted and the list of socially acceptable opinions has changed, same Americans are suddenly very upset because they cannot voice their opinions.

It's not that Americans suddenly stopped valuing freedom and liberty. They never did, but you never noticed, because you never tried to cross the boundary. You can interpret this in two ways - either be sad that your vision of America isn't real, or be happy that for all bad things that Trump is doing, it's not a fundamental change in American society.

jjani•30m ago
> 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.

To what % are you confident thst you would be one of the first participants in these, were the same to happen to your own country?

jleyank•1h ago
Free societies are not ruled by decree.
zetanor•1h ago
Free societies are not ruled through masses.
ethical_source•56m ago
Who gets to rule, then, and why? Your position that the masses shouldn't rule is at odds with a government legitimized by the consent of the government. Why should I or anyone else obey a government I don't consider legitimate?
ezekiel68•44m ago
Those who watch the Watchers.
victorbjorklund•30m ago
Which unfree society is ruled by the people? (not in name like north korea or soviet). Swizerland?
impossiblefork•11m ago
Switzerland is obviously ruled by the masses, and that is freedom for those masses, so I think what you say here is quite false.
phtrivier•1h ago
And yet, every government does _not_ stumble into fascism.

So, what stops them ?

big_jimmer•1h ago
Reading this, you can see how the political ideology of trumps supporters was so easily manipulated, and how effective the radicalisation of the right has been.
larrydag•1h ago
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy" -James Madison
47392725292•10m ago
- Tyler Robinson

You subhuman terrorists are in for a rude awakening.

4bpp•1h ago
The problem is that essays like this are always written, preserved and propagated with the benefit of hindsight, producing the mistaken feeling that an actionable lesson is contained within.

"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.

DavidPiper•1h ago
I listened to the audio book a few months back - probably the last time it appeared on HN, I'm not sure how else I would have stumbled across it. It's well worth the time.

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.

moomin•1h ago
I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are very much quoted out of context and b) an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.

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.

jebarker•28m ago
> an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.

Yes! I recently read this book and was pretty shocked by how much was chalked up to the German character.

I came away feeling neither comfort nor increased panic relating to the current US situation. I read the book because I was hand-wringing about how complicit I am just by getting on with my privileged and comfortable life right now. I didn’t really come away with any resolution to that question or clear ideas about how I should change my behavior.

m0llusk•46m ago
This is a very intense piece, but misses some critical points. Germany after WWI was suffering terribly under reparations that European Allies and the US insisted on. Previously wealthy professionals went broke and begged in the streets for scraps. When Hitler swept aside reparations there was a great economic updraft as Germans rebuilt their economy and got back to work. The politics of the time was driven by the economy. The US appears to be entering into a period of stagnation and a breakdown of global trading upon which it had become dependent and that is a very different situation with economic factors hitting politics in ways unlike past crises.
motoboi•34m ago
> "How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

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.

ryeats•24m ago
I think it has been happening for a while now cancel culture had a very negative effect on academia Jordon Peterson and Warren Smith being examples of that. I much appreciate Dr. Sam Richards who walks the fine line of trying to be centerist but he did comment recently how he does gets hate from both sides. Now I know this is going to be down voted because some will say I am both sidesing this when it's clearly one side right now. This is true I think that's however not a great argument to start a conversation. the founding fathers gave us a great foundation to work with it just takes open dialogue to convince enough of the other side that their is an actual good counter argument. The violence we have seen in the past couple months is only going to entrench positions because each side will want the result of that violence to have been meaningful furthering solidifing the separation. Currently I think American agree on the vast majority of things social media just does it's best to highlight our differences but the average person has mostly the same culture and the same day to day issues so I actually am hopeful.
herval•14m ago
The US has always been a very moralistic country. From banning alcohol and burning witches to its long struggle to accept differences (in skin color, gender or even the definition of freedom). “Cancel culture” is part of America since its foundation. It’s a moral tug of war.

It’s a different thing altogether to have the government itself weaponize “cancel culture”, however. As much as right wing people like to scream that “democrats are the same”, there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge (“if the left cancels, I can cancel too”). It’s a flight from moral infighting to authoritarian rule.

throwawaymaths•5m ago
> there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge

If you think that, you've not been paying attention. Both sides doing it is disgusting and I think the right does it more than the left (at this point in time), but the left DOES do it.

shrubby•10m ago
https://youtu.be/Sfekgjfh1Rk?feature=shared

Bonhoeffer got a lot of things right.

evantbyrne•9m ago
I have it on my shelf. Fascinating to read the perspective of regular citizens who organized themselves to do something terrible. Likely to remain relevant for as long as people can read it.