Like I know not everyone is a political commentator and won’t touch politics for fear of ostracizing their audience.
But sometimes seeing most creators not expressing any shock at these unprecedented times makes me think “damn this seems dystopian”.
I imagine what would the world be like if streaming was available during Hitlers rise.
Would people just be living in their bubble of “thanks for watching, hit like and subscribe, and if you use this code on simplisafe you’ll get 20 percent off!” winky face
Idk if I could do it, never talk about it or taking a stand. Its just too big to ignore. At least imo.
What do you guys think? Also lemmy wanted me to add a picture so here’s a picture of my dog.
Almost certainly. The majority of people just kept living their normal lives in Hitler’s Germany as well. Until the war at least.
They weren’t their “normal lives”. People were affected by the rule of the nazi party since it very quickly installed a new social order in the country. We shouldn’t think that the move of the country towards violent totalitarianism happened without people noticing.
But just like now, the future wasn’t obvious. If you could have convinced people in 1932 that the nazi party world start WW2, they wouldn’t have voted for it. If you could have convinced them in 1935 that not only will they be anther world war, but their nation would try and almost succeed in exterminating various peoples from their own country, people world have violently rebelled and deposed the nazis, but that wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t obvious even in 1938 - “peace for our time”, eh? So people did grudgingly accepted what was happening while completely misunderstanding the seriousness of the situation.
There is no way around this. It will happen again and again and there is no way to prevent it because this shift from a strong democracy to authoritarianism is so impossible to believe that people will rather go by their preconceptions rather than the evidence in front of them and simply refuse to think something like this can actually happen.
This is why it isn’t reasonable to expect the people to simply take to the streets. We need leadership
You’re right.
They’ll Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 is the best book I’ve read for understanding the rise of reactionary dictatorships.
From the reasons why people buy in to why they look the other way when atrocities are committed.
Definitely recommend people read this except from the book in its entirety here: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
But here’s a piece of it:
"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.”