Never again ask "How did Germans let it hapen?"

[Cyrano]

We know now, because we're on the same horrible path.

The only ones who can (lawfully) stop it right now are the Republicans.

Yet, the Republican Party has chosen to nothing to stop the madness.

So are the rest of us helpless?

Seems so.

And if you think these thoughts are extreme/insane/out of line, how long will you wait to confirm that my beliefs are out of line? And when is "too late," "too late?"

One more thought: Who among us will, in some future day, be saying, "I didn't know." or, "I was only following orders."

Sorry people. This is how it begins.

[Irish_Dem]

1. I agree 100%.

[spike jones]

32. The Holocaust resulted

“The Holocaust resulted neither from a confluence of circumstances beyond human control nor from history’s inexorable march. It happened because ordinary people failed to stop it.”

[Irish_Dem]

33. But we can also see how dangerous and difficult it is to combat tyranny.

The cheating, lying and intense propaganda is hard to overcome.

[Rural_Progressive]

35. We have even less of an excuse than the Germans

since we have access to a social media network that enables us to exchange information not pre-filtered through controlled news media outlets.

[Irish_Dem]

36. Yes but social media was used to lie and to subvert the election.

It is a two edged sword.

And Germany did not have a ruthless wealthy oligarch who helped the Nazis get power and keep it.

[questionseverything]

38. for whatever reason important articles don't "catch on"

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029733199

since the mid 60s the country has "voted" redder and redder even tho by all appearances we are more and more liberal

dhs admitted, no one checked the machines or the ballots,,,bradblog covered it,,,Rachel covered it

Hillary on her book tour told rachel ..paraphrasing here....thank goodness they are getting rid of the voting machines in va....the whole country needs to follow

neither really raised a blimp on the countries radar

[not fooled]

65. Looks like Hillary knows

that election theft has been happening via voting machines, for many years in many elections where the GOPee scored "unexpected" victories that did not match the exit polls.

If we had actually had a functioning democratic voting process during the last few decades, this country would be vastly different. We would have policies that reflect what Americans want, not a few greedy billionaires.

[ThoughtCriminal]

44. The Germans also had double digit unemployment and inflation

Americans don't seem to need an excuse, we hate out of stupidity.

[Duppers]

51. Exactly: Americans hate out of STUPIDITY.

Thank you.

We are a nation of blind, pathetic, materialistic, stupid, complacent cowards.

[SergeStorms]

67. And presently.....

we have a deranged, racist "leader" whose given license to every racist, white supremacist piece of shit in the country to exercise their "right" to act on their repulsive beliefs. Abject racism in America was always hiding in the background, but it's been "legitimized" buy our White Supremacist in Chief, and are they ever reveling in their new-found position of power. People have been fighting back against them, but they show no sign of willingly returning to the shadows.

THIS is Donald J. Trump's legacy.

[Duppers]

74. Even most R voters I know

are racists.

[spike jones]

40. The White Rose: It is not this dark yet, but its getting there.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-white-rose-a-lesson-in-dissent

The White Rose Leaflets
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/wrleaflets.html

“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes - crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure - reach the light of day?”

“We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

[Granny M]

68. Thanks for the link.

Lessons we must heed.

[cilla4progress]

2. I agree, as well

and how swiftly it changed here from Obama, who elevated and called us to our better selves....

[Cyrano]

5. Yeees. Seems like a thousand years ago that we had Obama

The evolution of human decency has taken thousands of years.

The destruction of basic human values can take place in a mere 10 months, -- as we've seen.

[world wide wally]

11. It takes longer to build a house than to tear one down

[raccoon]

45. Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one. --Sam Rayburn nt

[nini]

3. We have no excuses either

We have access to information they didnt back then. At least its much more available. This congess is allowing this to continue and this country will never recover in my lifetime. What a nightmare.

[rainin]

10. They have no excuses.

I won't take responsibility for their ignorance and unwilingness to know. I maintain that everything we see today was know-able before the election. Thus, I did not vote for him.

[Va Lefty]

4. Yeah I've watched enough documentaries to know where we're headed

[Cyrano]

6. I fear we may be headed into an era

where the past may be forgotten.

People who lost loved ones in the holocaust are still alive. Now, more than ever, it's time to ask them to speak out one final time. I dread the thought that when they are gone, the horror of the past will also be gone in the collective memory of humanity.

And as we all know "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." (George Santayana)

[lunatica]

66. Steven Spielberg has made sure to chronicle

The Holocaust through making videos of the survivors’ experiences. It’s a massive project he started after he made the movie Schindler’ List. He wanted first hand witnesses to tell their stories.

I hope this makes you feel a little less afraid of the future. It helps me.

[no_hypocrisy]

7. We're letting a minority of this country change our democracy, if not outright destroy it.

Are we going to end this now?

[mehrrh]

8. Sinclair Lewis tried to tell us

In the 1930's Sinclair Lewis wrote a book called It Can't Happen Here -- it was prescient for the script of 2016-2017 and Donald Trump.
Lewis was referring to the fascism rise in Germany -- and how it might come to America.

[kerry-is-my-prez]

37. Sinclair Lewis also wrote "The Jungle" which changed this country and shocked it. It exposed the

conditions of the poor in the slums. People read it and demanded change. That's when Jane Addams and others opened homes for the poor. The people who did this and became social workers were the children of the wealthy and the powerful.

[First Speaker]

39. That was actually Upton Sinclair...

...the rest of whose work is very much worth reading, incidentally...

[kerry-is-my-prez]

41. Whoops! Sorry Upton - you were a great man. Wish we had more like him nowadays. But people

don't read books much anymore.

[world wide wally]

9. America is impotent

[orangecrush]

12. We are NOT helpless!

Every act of resistance is a reaffirmation of morality.

[mountain grammy]

13. I couldn't agree more.

[Initech]

14. Something went very wrong in the last 4 years.

We need to pin point the precise moment when our country started turning to shit.

IMO, it was Sandy Hook. That is when we as a country should have disarmed and said "enough is enough". But nope.

It was the first time I ever heard of that piece of shit Alex Jones. I was totally appalled, disgusted, and horrified by the way he and his fans were treating the victims of that tragedy. They actually successfully justified murdering children. They went there. The guns started flying off the shelves thanks to ultra paranoid gun nuts. We haven't been the same since.

[Grammy23]

15. We do it one day at a time.

We express our outrage but nothing changes. Then another outrage comes along. We express our outrage. All that happens is we talk about fixing things in 2018 or 2020. That will be far too late but we somehow comfort ourselves by believing that the usual way of fixing things — turn them out of office at the next election — will work.

We are in uncharted territory at this point. What happened in 2016 has, no doubt, been in the planning for a long time. Putin got his man, tRump, to be the front end of the take over. The one we all saw. But behind the scenes we have far more sinister and dark figures at work. Do we think a single American would have willingly voted for trump if they knew that Putin organized this coup? tRump is being USED and he is too eaten up with his own self importance to get it. They will cast him aside like a worn out shoe when they are finished using him. If he doesn’t have a food taster, he’d better get one. Putin has some SPECIAL chocolate cake for that dolt.

But this is how it is done. A day at a time. Just wear us down. And so far, they are succeeding. If we wait until the next election to save ourselves when we already have a pretty clear idea of what was done and continues to be done to us, we might as well surrender and accept that the country we thought we had is done. Finished. Caput.

Waiting to do SOMETHING is not an option. Period.

[smirkymonkey]

20. This! All of it!

I am so tired of just letting this all happen around us and I am sick of the impotent leaders who are silent.

[arthritisR_US]

16. You are absolutely correct. We are watching history

repeat itself and it’s scary as hell. Wake The Feck Up People!

[SummerSnow]

17. I found this blog about that. i thought it was very interesting.

http://matthewbrucealexander.com/2013/05/16/how-could-the-german-people-let-the-holocaust-happen/

How could the German people let the Holocaust happen

by MATTHEW BRUCE ALEXANDER on MAY 16, 2013

* This was a very long article, please read the first few 6 paragraphs first at the link. I posted the last few articles that stood out to me




During the recent Democratic National Convention, and now during the Republican National Convention, we can see the government engaged in the most audacious displays of human rights violations while a compliant populace does little more than take a few moments to whine about it. Even by the US government's charter, itself a human rights violation for any right-thinking anarchist, these acts are execrable. The local police of Denver and Minneapolis, assisted at least by the FBI, are engaged in acts of intimidation against would-be protesters. Ranging from physical assaults to threatening searches and seizures and even outright theft, the aim is to crush resistance from any sheep who would protest that the shepherd was coming to resemble the wolves.

Together, we all let this happen. We started to worship the police and other government officials. We made laws to elevate them to a superior status. We treated their deaths as greater tragedies than others, and their work as more important. We permitted them certain behaviors that no other person could dare engage in. Even when government behavior is finally chastised, it is chastised in the abstract, and no punishment to individuals is given. We allowed them to prohibit a behavior that is perfectly legal, except when done to those of exalted status (such as the mere act of photographing them).

It is not hard to see a dark future out there. And it is out there, like some hulking beast in a horror flick. It hasn't shown up yet, and we don't know with accuracy what it looks like, but we know that it is ugly. And no one is going to do anything about it, even if it gets worse. Not when the draft is reinstituted, not when the internet is censored, not when war breaks out with Iran, not when elections are postponed, not when Muslims are corralled in detention centers like Jews in Germany and Japanese in America a few generations ago, not when a nuclear bomb is dropped on Iran… all this and more looms on the horizon, avoidable in theory but maybe not in practice.

And if we don't avoid it, the blame will be ours, because we didn't give the politicians and their jack-booted thugs exactly what they deserved. Once upon a time, a man like Sam Adams could torch the house of a British official, run the bastard out of town, and still be elected to the Continental Congress as well as Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. Nowadays we suffer from some fundamental perversion whereby we hold in reverence the very boot that grinds our faces into the pavement. And those of us with the spit wads look about sheepishly, waiting for someone else to fire the first shot.

That is how the Germans could permit tyranny to flourish. They did it the same way we do. May our fellow Man forgive us if we allow our situation to progress from here like the German situation did from 1932 to 1945.

[Mr.Bill]

18. I read recently on this website

(can't remember where, so can't link it) someone said or tweeted or whatever, Did you ever wonder what you would have done during the rise of Nazism or the civil rights movement? You are doing it right now.

[spike jones]

29. by @matthewamiller Resist

by @matthewamiller:
"If you've wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany or during the civil rights movement, congratulations: you're doing it now."
.................................................
You are either doing it right...or you are doing it wrong. Your choice.


From somewhere else:
“The Holocaust resulted neither from a confluence of circumstances beyond human control nor from history’s inexorable march. It happened because ordinary people failed to stop it.”

[Mr.Bill]

30. Thanks. n/t

[Duppers]

53. A MLK quote

"..The great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councillor or the KKK, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice..."
- Martin Luther King


That's middle America, more devoted to "order" than to justice.


And i'm afraid I know too many of these - complacent, materialistic, stupid people. They want and need to normalize all the lies, crimes, and injustices so that they don't feel obligated to take a stand and do something - sometimes to even VOTE.

They don't want anything to get "messy." Well, guess what.

[Duppers]

54. Here.. HAB911's great thread..

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029516889

[PatrickforO]

19. Yes, when we ask that question we need only look in the mirror.

When we moralize about what 'decent' Germans could have done to prevent the awful rise of the 12 year Third Reich and Axis of Japan/Italy/Germany that cost the world 60 million lives and laid Europe and much of Asia in ruins, we must look in the mirror. Because as 'decent Americans' we are doing those things now.

Will it be enough?

[Bradical79]

21. Yeah, got front row seats

We've got more checks to get through to reach Hitler level of domestic power, but that only matters if enough of the American public decides it matters.

[canetoad]

22. Good post

Hitler and the National Socialists harnessed resentment, using as tools the thousands upons thousands of returned WW1 soldiers as a base. Why should they be eking a meagre living when the Communists and Jews were living it up on their efforts on the battlefields?

Right wing radio, Fox, Breitbart - they all stoke resentment. Of a black president, for those who have jobs when they are losing theirs and for immigrants. You are spot-on in your assessment, sadly.

[Enoki33]

23. Really like the comment that every act of resistance is a

reaffirmation of our morality. That is what we have to believe. That is what we have to do.

[adigal]

62. We all talk a good game, who who is actually resisting and how?

Hey, let's boycott corporate goods, I say!!
Oh, no, that will hurt the employees!! Besides, I NEED my new $1000 i-phone.

Hey, let's all take off on the same day!!
No, that would get us fired!

Hey, let's all declare 15 dependents and hold our own tax dollars until April!!
No, you'll get in trouble. (even though we pay them, just in April)

Hey, let's march on DC and close that city down - use vacation days, etc.!
No, we can't give up vacation.

We all need to revisit Neil Postman's great essay, "Amusing Ourselves to Death."

[calimary]

24. I keep thinking about that poem "First they came for the trade unionists...

And I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a trade unionist...”

Yep.

And the one about how the only way for evil to triumph is for good men (and women!) to do nothing.

Let’s not forget, too: that first one ends with “then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up.”

I wonder if that lesson from about 80-or-so years ago might be learned in time, this time. I read an essay awhile back - which theorized that these cycles repeat every 80 years or so, because those who lived through it and could warn and instruct and give eye-witness accounts of how it started and what led up to it - die out and any safeguards that arose to prevent another one get relaxed or compromised or done away with, altogether. Because the later generations see those remedies as bothersome or too expensive and start cutting them away since there’s no problem anymore. “Problems? WHAT problems? There aren’t any! Why do we need all these laws/regulations/protections anyway?

So then it becomes much easier to get in trouble again. I think what I read had to do with the modern-day idiots (I’m talking about YOU, Paul Ryan!) who see no reason to maintain the social safety net set up by the New Deal, because those same safeguards PROTECTED and PREVENTED the kinds of abuses & recklessness that caused those woes to begin with. I believe the same latter-day naïveté applies to the frightening rise of the racist radical “right”.

[stevenleser]

25. Sounds a lot like my election night article...

http://steveleser.blogspot.com/2016/11/hate-wins-election-america-at-risk-of.html

[ProudProgressiveNow]

26. K&R nt

[FigTree]

27. And let me add an even scrarier note:

“This all occurred in what was, or at least seemed by the late 19th century to be, Europe's most cultivated, certainly its best-educated country. Germany had the world's finest elementary school system, the highest literacy rate and the best universities; by 1913 more books were published annually in Germany than in any country in the world. Its technical skill, its industry, its relentless business savvy (a trait, interestingly, commonly associated at the time with both Germans and Jews) marked it off as among modernity's singular successes. The Weimar era [1919-1933], the German Jewish sociologist Karl Mannheim boasted, represented a new Periclean age. Soon he, like so many others fortunate enough to survive, had to flee for his life.”
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/books/enlightenment-all-around.html?pagewanted=all

[uponit7771]

49. WOW !!! So Germany was tip of the spear society before Hitler. US is third largest country on Earth

... I pray stupid ass'd Trussia will never ever get around to weilding the power Hitler had

[Eliot Rosewater]

28. GOP wants tax cuts and racism written into law, they will and are risking all life

on the planet to get it.

I have said this a thousand times, and trump is STILL is in the WH

[sinkingfeeling]

31. Agree. In my opinion, the United States of my birth is gone. It has been

replaced by rule by money.

[Duppers]

55. That's it.

Greed.

[Soxfan58]

34. A horrific history lesson

Being played out in front of us. RESIST!!!!!

[Denis 11]

42. Could we derail the republicans by

Registering R to vote in their primaries when we see a particularly hideous candidate like Trump.

[Soxfan58]

70. We would need to be cautious

Some places the knuckle draggers would insure Dem wins. What we need is young, smart progressives to get into public service. Campaign on a platform that shows freedom is more than guns, and heathcare for everyone benifits us all. We need to remind people that our Grandparents, and parents already fought this shit and kicked its ass.

[NBachers]

43. I said during the voting season "Vote like it's 1932- only this time, you can do something about it"

And, with voter suppression, gerrymandering, and treasonous sabotage by the republican party, I'm not that optimistic about 2018 or 2020.

I'm very impressed and supportive of individual Democrats, but the Democratic Party itself seems clueless, ineffective, misguided, and lost.

[JI7]

46. Because many people actually supported it

[uponit7771]

47. +1, ... and most Germans living in those towns STILL ... STILL DID NOT BELIEVE UNTIL ...

... they were taken to the camps to clean up themselves !!!

[Butterflylady]

48. We are suppose to learn from history.

Evidently, tRump voters haven't.

[TexasBushwhacker]

50. Sinclair Lewis told us in 1935 in "It Can't Happen Here"

And yes, it became a best seller again in 2016.

[Solly Mack]

52. I haven't. Not in a long time.

[benld74]

56. Did Hitler have assistance within German government??

[donotpissoffacow]

57. The enemy looks just like us.

Unless we learn what distinguishes us from them (fascists), we will simply trod the well worn path to war and destruction.

Conservatives are easily detected in any number of ways: written tests, brain scanning, etc. We must discover why their brains went wrong (as I prefer to believe) and ours went right (or left, I'm so confused). Facts, talking, explaining, reasoning will have no effect except to raise your blood pressure.

No doubt there is a gene and 'all' we have to do is figure out how to switch it on or off with epigenetics. Preferably before the Russians/Republicans do. You know they are looking. Causation is another matter entirely. Obviously, wingnuts still think there are saber-toothed tigers behind every chair, curtain or bush and can't turn off their autonomic responses or contact their frontal lobes. I am NOT being sarcastic. That's the way it works. Conservative brains stall somewhere in the middle.

If it's not genetic, then we must look at social intervention. Having a unified, public, fact-based education starting from birth if necessary might work. Don't get your knickers in a twist, but we might need what is essentially 're-education' for parents. Charter schools and home schools are only producing self-interested or self-satisfied citizens.

Talk about Gordian knots or philosophical quandaries! Pithy stuff. Politics? Social structure? Privacy? Eugenics? Keep in mind that tigers are practicing eugenics while keeping deer healthy. So are Snowy Owls when they share their dead young with their live young. There is a real life out there, bloody in tooth and claw, that many of us have never had to face. The time may be coming when you will have to ask what you will do for your country and species.

[lordsummerisle]

58. k&r n/t

[Doodley]

59. Is anyone here really saying that millions of people are going to be systematically exterminated?

I agree that this is a low point, that Trumpism is an affront to the values of decency and fairness, and I do see parallels with 1930s Germany, but Trump can't even succeed in his desire to ban people based on religion, as he wanted, so to think this is going to lead to gas ovens is extreme IMO. It could take an election or a small handful of GOP Senators to revolt or Mueller for order to be restored.

[adigal]

60. I asked some a-hole conservative on twitter last night who was saying horrid things about "libtards"

what he would do if he could. Would he kill us all? Put us in camps? Gas us?

He didn't answer, but I KNOW the answer. The conservative media have dehumanized us, just like the Germans did to the Jews. 15 years ago, Limbaugh called Dems the enemy. I was upset then, and I see what happened now.

More and more I am thinking the only solution is a #bluexit. There is a great article on it online that explains how we do this peacefully. I cannot see any way to put the Divided States of America back together.

[justgamma]

61. Read "They Thought They Were Free"

It happened gradually step by small step.

""To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"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."

[Honeycombe8]

63. I started seeing this with the passage of The Patriot Act after 9/11.

What The Patriot Act did was allow the govt to spy on its citizens without having to show any cause for it, or get a subpoena. It was an historical law. The sort of thing that Russia and Nazi Germany did. America did not do things like that. Ever. Americans had guaranteed freedoms to protect them from the government.

But I saw how easy it was for people to go along with it. "I don't do anything wrong, so why should I care?" was the general thinking. Or, "We need to do whatever we have to, to catch the bad guys."

A coworker said to me, "But there's a reason for it." I told her, "Yes, there's always a stated reason to pass a law like that. That's how they get people to go along with it."

But America has certain things that are guaranteed and mean what it is to be American. The freedom not to be spied on, secretly taped in private, and surveilled in private by the government is one of those things. Officials sanctioning white supremacy is another. Officials who label the free press as enemy of the people. Officials who try to ruin careers and personally destroy citizens or other officials who disagree.

[C Moon]

64. So true!

[jimlup]

69. I agree we are on a horrible path

Some parallels but in my opinion Trump is significantly stupider and even more reckless than Hitler. This is not something we can breath a sigh of relief about though. He's perhaps EVEN MORE DANGEROUS.

[ck4829]

71. Well, I see solutions and paths of resistance offered, but nobody seems to want to do them

* Cast off your "respect for the office"
* Don't listen to the "no no, we can't do that" crowd
* Defend those who are supposed to be targeted

[BSdetect]

72. We have the potential effects from a real prolonged nationwide strike if we can get organized.

The only way to bring the GOP to its knees. And force drumph's removal.

Don't wait for the DNC to do anything.

[INdemo]

73. Its all about Wealth. Its all about destroying the Middle Class

and destroying the Unions,and allowing the rich to become much more wealthier.
Its about destroying Soc Security and Medicare

People like the Koch Brothers,and other wealthy Republican contributors, don't give a damn about our Democracy. Its all about Greed.'The Koch Bros don't care if we become a country of fascism because its the Wealthy that support Fascism,and their wealth would be preserved.

Hitler would not have been been able to gain power except for a Wealthy few.The Generals and other key leaders were already Chosen when Hitler was appointed Chancellor.
see: German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v08/v08p369_Ries.htm


When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 one would have thought that it really meant that would be the end of racial discrimination.
But over the course of nearly 4 Generations with Trump is almost as bad as the 50s and 60s when I was a young man.Its shameful..So the only reason discrimination was not buried generations ago is because it is taught in the home,its taught in the states that still support the Confederate flag and even beyond.