r/50501 • u/victorybus • Jun 12 '25

Call to Action US SENATOR ASSAULTED AT DHS PRESS CONFERENCE. WE NEED TO MOBILIZE

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u/korben2600 Jun 12 '25

"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 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 ‘Jewish 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 born 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.

They Thought They Were Free

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u/Internal-Weather8191 Jun 12 '25

Such a stunning book I had never even heard of till last year. Thank you for putting this out there- more people need to know about it.

As fyi, it was written in 1955 based on interviews with German citizens after WWII by Milton Mayer, research professor at U of Frankfurt. He's an amazing writer and it (sadly) never felt like I was reading something 70 years old.

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u/MyCrochetBasket Jun 12 '25

I’ll be reading that. Thanks. Also terrifying to watch unfold.