Americans no longer have to guess how the Germans "allowed" H and Nazis

[RandomAccess]

45. Here's an excerpt, and a link -- the author is Milton Mayer

Milton Friedman was an economist, a not very nice one. But that's a different subject entirely.

The details outlined by Mayer are quite different from what we're experiencing now, of course (or at least for now), but I think this should be required reading for every American nonetheless. The whole thing is riveting, and important.

They Thought They Were Free The Germans, 1933-45

"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.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

also see https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/8/29/1125588/-German-s-Thought-They-Were-Free-and-So-do-You