General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Never again ask "How did Germans let it hapen?" [View all]calimary
(81,126 posts)And I didnt speak up, because I wasnt 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.
Lets 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 theres no problem anymore. Problems? WHAT problems? There arent 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 (Im 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.