Read
They Thought They Were Free and you'll understand. Here are a couple of relevant passages:
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
"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 the 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 "Jew 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 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."
You want to know what a future step is? Having a GPS chip planted in your arm. We're already giving them to our pets and the next thing you know we'll be giving them to kids (we may already be doing that). Won't you feel safer with a GPS chip in your arm? If you get lost, you can be found; if you are in trouble, you can be helped. Oh, sure Big Brother will always know where you are (not to mention your boss and your wife) but will you still need a better answer than "I just don't like it?" Have you not noticed how much life has changed in this country in the past few years? Even before 9/11 it had started, the events of that day have just sped it up. It's happened slowly, with little steps: airport searches, no-fly lists, orange alerts, new powers to the government, hoaxes and warnings cooked up to keep the population on edge. And the big one: the abolition of Habeus Corpus. Do you believe Habeus Corpus could have been done away with so easily without all those little steps leading up to it? How many steps do we take before we object? At what point do we say "Enough!" and tell Big Brother to get stuffed? If we don't do it now, we won't be able to do it later.
http://thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free.html
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