The ever widening gap, after 2010, between the government and the people, is a direct imitation of what happened in Germany in 1933, and it is a deliberate emulation.
When Milton Mayer first released his book “They Thought They Were Free” in 1955, he knew exactly what he was talking about. His examination of the lives of ten ordinary Germans and what led them into being Nazi’s is a fascinating, alarming, terrible indictment of the human condition. So it is that we can reflect upon his vital warning, and view through his lens, what is happening here today in the UK.
They aren’t!
Be well.
@Algux
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
By Milton Mayer
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of
mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the
government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with,
here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people
close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true
democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defence, or even to vote. All this has
little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the
people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions
deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that
the government had to act on information which the people could not understand,
or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not
be released because of national security. And their sense of identification
with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured
those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"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.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German
was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then,
suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn
into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and,
above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists,
questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the
things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been
there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it
consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do.
You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One
had no time."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the
baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"
"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague.
"The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was
above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not
want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so
on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did
not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to.
Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent
people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so
fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’
without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things
that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose,
we were grateful. Who wants to think?
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to
notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of
political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion,
‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the
beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what
all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some
day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his
field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly
educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many,
many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims,
Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the
end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the
beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to
be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And
everyone counts on that might.
"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against
National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater
offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but
because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and
thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that,
when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all,
he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the
Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist,
and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and
he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the
Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too
late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see
exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each
occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the
next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that
others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You
don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way
to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it
is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also
genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of
decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general
community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none.
You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government
painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps,
there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you
speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but
what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or
‘You’re an alarmist.’
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead
to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you
know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even
surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the
Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic
or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally,
people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off
somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as
you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance
drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither.
Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking
to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens
your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It
is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an
occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and
you wait.
"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.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a
continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has
flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part.
On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day,
with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have
accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany,
could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you
are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that
was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember
those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had
stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a
matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You
remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised
beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or
‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I,
however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is
the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans
became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or
cares to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man
in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly
wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it
was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally,
relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party
was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had
the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an
ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’
which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and
death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s
opinion, and so, as an honourable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party
seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."
"And the judge?"
"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his
conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He
thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how
could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more,
and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then
to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they
arrested him. After that, I don’t know."
I said nothing.
"Once the war began," my colleague continued,
"resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a
multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or
failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were
lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was
very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care
of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And
he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to
all uncertainty.
"Once the war began, the government could do anything
‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish
problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not
even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that
they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against
Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the
war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were
betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."
