"....and that had they resisted at the beginning.......... it could have been avoided."

[pangaia]

The title is taken from a post by benfranklin1776, who then goes on to link to---

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
by Milton Sanford Mayer

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s 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 shocked—if, 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 isn’t 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 in—your nation, your people—is 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.”

“Ordinary people—and ordinary Germans—cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, of the nation, the race, the religion. Or, if they are not enemies (that comes later), they must be an element within the community somehow extrinsic to the common bond, a decompositive ferment (be it only by the way they part their hair or tie their necktie) in the uniformity which is everywhere the condition of common quiet. The Germans’ innocuous acceptance and practice of social anti-Semitism before Hitlerism had undermined the resistance of their ordinary decency to the stigmatization and persecution to come.

“In the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.”

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/978689.They_Thought_They_Were_Free

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Principiis obsta. Resist the beginnings.

"Consider in swift thought what kind of thing it is you love, and withdraw your neck from a yoke that may one day gall. Resist beginnings; too late is the medicine prepared, when the disease has gained strength by long delay. But make haste, nor wait on the coming hours; he who is not ready today will be less so tomorrow." - Ovid.

[pangaia]

2. Perfect....

[Karadeniz]

7. Where is that from in Ovid's works? Thanks.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

8. Remedia Amoris.

[FM123]

3. Profound words.

[trev]

4. If Hitler had served his entire prison term in 1923

he probably would have been unable to seize power in 1933. Should have been nipped in the bud immediately.

[benfranklin1776]

5. They are timeless warnings sadly

As we never seem to learn the lesson once and for all. But they are just as true now as when Ovid wrote his nearly 2000 years ago and when Mayer rewarned us scarcely a generation ago. But we have the benefit of their wisdom and the tools of our democracy to ensure the bloody lesson does not have to be relearned through bitter experience. Which is why resistance to the tryanny of this monstrous maladministration is the most vital cause of our times.

[TexasBushwhacker]

6. "Now you live in a world of hate and fear,"

That is EXACTLY what we are living in right now.