"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.

William Lindsey :toad:

“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

Kim Scheinberg

@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

William Lindsey :toad:

“[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

Martin Vermeer FCD

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

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Harper's Magazine (harpers.org)

Pamela

@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!!!

William Lindsey :toad:

@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.

William Lindsey :toad:

@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.

Markus Sugarhill :breadpats:

@wdlindsy published on substack. oh irony...

Scotty Trees

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

William Lindsey :toad:

@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.

William Lindsey :toad:

@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?

Jennifer Kayla | Theogrin 🦊

@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.

Kim Scheinberg

@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..."

Pamela

@wdlindsy I've also noted those hurling the "Woke" label as an insult are really wanting US not to be "aware"! They've co opted our Media into scrubbing clean Trumpie 's 'hate speak' into palatable sound bites his uninformed cultists can blare out without getting the overt retaliation it deserves!!!

Peet Tetteroo

@wdlindsy How many students in the past have paid attention to the 1930 - 1945 period in their schoolbooks .. how many of them are aware of the holocaust, the Nazi culture and the unscrupulous behavior of the Germans during that period .. not interesting for them .. Only 48.6% of USA citizens have a passport to travel internationally

Not many have visited the former concentration camps in Germany Poland etc.. Read project 2025 or a summary of it and you will know..

How Many Americans Own Passport? The Percentages, State by State

This map shows percentage of population has passports in each state of the United States. Percentage of population has passports in the United States: 48.36% Total number of passports in the United States: 149,359,051

ChartsBin (chartsbin.com)

William Lindsey :toad:

@luv_wins Yes, you're exactly right.

William Lindsey :toad:

@kims I understand. Same for me. It's more a matter of asking, "Which of my neighbors may turn out to be very different from the person I think he/she is, in either a shocking or a consoling sense?" It's a matter of remembering that people can turn out to be not at all who we imagine them to be. I think this has been a central feature of the Trump era for many us, the unmasking of people (as they unmask themselves), and the recognition that many people we thought we knew are now alien to us.

William Lindsey :toad:

@theogrin Surprising, no. Interesting, yes.

William Lindsey :toad:

@scottytrees I fear. And I try to maintain hope.

William Lindsey :toad:

@MSugarhill Perhaps. I'll take the imperfect and ironic in an imperfect and ironic world, as long as the message that needs to be heard is heard.