The Rise of Anti-Government Bigots: Spitting, the N-Word, Anti-Gay/Lesbian Slurs

[dreadgeek]

I have not read that although it's now on my list. (If there had been a Kindle edition I would have bought it but alas, no) The last book on the period that I read was "Hitler's Willing Executioner's" by Daniel Goldhagen. It was a chilling book because it really brings home the reality of Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil".

Terry Pratchett , as usual, manages to describe it wonderfully:

"And what it means is this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes to work every day and has a job to do."

Cheers
Aj

Originally Posted by key

Have you read the book "They Thought They Were Free"
The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer

he interviews people (Non Jews) who lived through the Holocaust. Here is an excerpt:

"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.

Key: I think for the time being we have a fundamentally decent leader in the Whitehouse so we (hopefully) will not see any huge loss of rights, and we may even see some gaining of rights (DADT being repealed) but the scariest thing going on right now is the Supreme Court being so tilted towards corporate facism. This Fascism paired with these ignorant tea partiers is a dangerous combination indeed.

Perhaps in Germany, if the right people had done the right thing (hello, Christian Churches?) things would have been different.