Reply #153: This is exactly the case ... [View All]

[RoyGBiv]

I guess the subconscious took hold a few weeks back because I don't know why precisely I started rummaging through books I had in storage about the early parts of the Nazi empire, but I did. I found myself quickly in the midst of a reading frenzy of things I'd already read, so I started looking for new things and consumed that as well.

The long and short of it was I guess I was re-familiarizing myself with the process by which mass groups of people transition into a society that without much in the way of dissent countenances wholesale slaughter. The answer is obvious but all too often ignored.

Wholesale slaughter doesn't just happen. It's a process, even amongst those who originally instigate it.

There is no way to form a logical, rational direct comparison between Nazi Germany and the United States today, but there are lessons to be learned from studying the origins of Nazi Germany that are applicable to our circumstances today. Not even Hitler began without outright extermination of Jews and other groups. A question remains whether what happened was, strictly speaking, his original intent, and it is certain that his plans for it were not formulated clearly upon his rise to power. Too many people forget that the Nazis were in power for 6-7 years before wholesale slaughter began, the assembly line version of it being initiated only after the initial, halting stages had been taking place for some time. The time before was one of an almost unconscious march into extremity.

First the Jews were just bankers and traitors who had brought financial and military ruin on the German people as a whole via a vast, worldwide conspiracy. Then they were vermin. Then they were dead. First they were ostracized, then had their legal rights removed, then herded together and marked, then expelled, then murdered. All that was a long process, and it began with smaller steps and no one questioning those steps, mostly because (and this is the important point) they just didn't care all that much.

Best to sweep that nasty business under the rug; it's just Jews, and they are responsible for all our ills.

Even as late as 1938, complaints arose about the treatment of Jews and others when the authorities seemed to go to far, so it was toned down, then secreted away even deeper so that while everyone knew it was happening, they didn't *see* it happening. Thus, it didn't affect them. Out of site, out of mind, to borrow a phrase.

Our leaders know this all too well, which is why torture pictures and, more broadly, any depictions of battlefield atrocity are kept as much as possible from the eyes of the public. It's a lot easier not to care if you don't see it, even if you know it is happening, and when enough people don't care, you can become ever more brutal without fear of popular sanction.