"January 30th 1933 dawned cold and clear in Berlin as Adolph Hitler took his oath of office and promised Germans he would uphold the constitution.

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

@mloxton Yes, and I think that's Rachel Bitcofer's point, as well as Heather Cox Richardson's, Sinclair Lewis', and Dorothy Thompson's.

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

“Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth — that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal."

~ Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (NY: Random House, 2020), p. 267

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/4

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653196/caste-by-isabel-wilkerson/

[theogrin@chaosfem.tw]

@wdlindsy

Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here remains a stunning portrayal of just how it can, and is in the public domain in Canada, so I can happily push this link, though of course do not visit or view the site if you're not in Canada, for Reasons. We can't go about having books about the rise of fascism distributed freely, after all.

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiss-itcanthappenhere/lewiss-itcanthappenhere-00-h.html

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

“Foreign visitors who concerned themselves with the plight of the Jews — and the majority did not — had to deal with an unanswerable question. How is it possible for these warm-hearted, genial people, noted for their work ethic and devotion to family values, to treat so many of their fellow Germans, with such contempt and cruelty?”

~ Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich, The Rise of Fascism (NY: Pegasus, 2018), p. 372

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/5

http://pegasusbooks.com/books/travelers-in-the-third-reich-9781681777825-hardcover

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

“People voted for Hitler as they voted for Putin and Trump, because they didn’t want to give up their own privileges. This isn’t a matter of ignorance. They understand exactly the price of enlightenment: that the equality of humankind means the equality of humankind, and not only after I’ve secured my own comfort."

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), p. 56, citing Bettina Stangneth

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/6

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

“What had come out on top in Germany might occur in darkest Russia or the Balkans, but surely not in their law-abiding country. What had happened? That was the question raised on all sides, but no one had an answer."

~ Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Martin Chalmers (NY: Other Press, 2012), p. 100

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/7

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

“A nation, they said, that had produced Goethe, Schiller and Lessing, Bach, Mozart, and so many others, would simply be incapable of barbarism. Griping at the Jews, prejudice, there had always been that, they thought. But not violent persecution.”

~ Ibid., p. 181

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/8

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

~ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Tolitarianism, p. 474

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #lies #disinformation
/9

[kims@mas.to]

@wdlindsy
I've reread 'Who Goes Nazi' every year for the last decade. It says something (not flattering) about me that I knew nothing about the context in which it was written. (I'd also watched Casablanca a dozen times before noticing it was made in 1942. It's a very different film knowing it was written before anyone knew how the war would end.)

Thanks for sharing this. It's probably a good time to revisit my two lists:

1. Who will hide me in an attic
2. Who will gleefully turn me in

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

“[Bettina Stangneth is] not convinced that Germans have faced the worst fact about the Nazi period: not the ignorant masses, but the educated elites were the driving forces behind the regime. ...

Ir wasn’t an unwashed, unlettered mob, but hundreds of well-off and well-read students, and their professors, who gleefully followed the Nazis’ first orders."

~ Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), pp. 55, 274

#Trump #fascism
/10

[martinvermeer@fediscience.org]

@wdlindsy @mloxton Thompson's 'Who goes Nazi?' is longish, but really worth reading.

https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

[luv_wins@mstdn.social]

@wdlindsy This indifference is like a societal cancer. Today we see our society in a relapse with the 33%+ percent we witness daily supporting a platform that targets "others" for hate, rounding up, and deporting or extermination. We can defeat this but we MUST acknowledge there are those among US that would happily participate in this atrocity. Where are you in this, your vote will tell US!!!

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

@luv_wins Yes, I very much agree. This is good analysis. And the apathy has been deliberately cultivated by a hard-right movement that wants us to feel helpless and hopeless and to opt out of democratic participation.

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

@martinvermeer @mloxton Thank you. I must confess that I have never read it — and need to do so. Have read much about it and excerpts from it, but have not read the book itself.

[msugarhill@chaos.social]

@wdlindsy published on substack. oh irony...

[scottytrees@mastodon.social]

@wdlindsy my God we are about to be so fucked.

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

@kims It's heinous that we have to ask those questions, isn't it? That we have to live in fear that our own neighbors or family members might turn us in? And have to wonder who will shelter us? I go through these questions, too, as an openly gay man who has tried to make his voice heard against political and religious oppression, who knows full well from what was done to the Jewish people in the Nazi period that things can turn on a dime.

[wdlindsy@toad.social]

@theogrin Thank you. Isn't it interesting how attacks on free circulation of books and libraries — and now Internet Archive — are with us all over again as fascism marches everywhere?

[theogrin@chaosfem.tw]

@wdlindsy

Interesting, yes. Surprising, no.

I swear, every single godsbedamned politician yelling their lungs out about 'free speech' is working, openly or otherwise, to shut down every library in the world.

[kims@mas.to]

@wdlindsy
I don't keep that list out of fear. I keep it as a means of updating my address book. It has cost me more than a few friends of many years, and brought me closer to those I once thought of as acquaintances

The fear that keeps me awake at night isn't about wondering who will hide me in an attic. It's the worry that my attic is too small for all the people — friends and strangers alike — that I am prepared to hide

With apologies to Spielberg, "We're gonna need a bigger attic..."