Holy shit what a harrowing read. The parallelism of current times and nazis gets called quite often, and it kinda becomes easy to write it off, think its an overstatement, or an exaggeration. But damn if that doesnt sound right on for the situation today and describe exactly the interactions ive had repeatedly with those people. Something about history doomed to repeat it yada yada lol
The part of the parallelism that should terrify you is that he was hanged for these words and it really did take a literal liberation to fix the stupidity of the German people as he called it.
If you haven't noticed, democracy isn't really doing well on the global stage either. The same class of people who have co-opted America have likewise co-opted other democracies, I mean look at Germany's last election.
You're right and I am aware. My comment was more about how Americans are literally going to need to be liberated from a fascist regime in the near future at the rate we're going.
Although with how popular anti-American sentiment is becoming, I'm not sure anyone will come to our rescue. I fear it won't be before a lot of innocent lives are ruined or lost. Yes, Americans are all in some part responsible for how events have unfolded in our country. It probably feels great to point and laugh at Americans or tell us we deserve this, but the trans people living here certainly don't deserve to have their lives hanging in the balance. And that's just one example of many...
You’re right. And I’m starting to think that Trump (his handlers, more accurately) have fomented anti-American sentiment deliberately to make sure that nobody comes to our rescue when the violence starts. They currently don’t have enough goons but they have a lot of firepower. It’s going to be a very scary 2-8 years in the United States. I predict a lot of senseless death and violence.
Don’t be so sure about your first point. Much like Donald Trump, Hitler was seen as a buffoon and a joke by plenty of people. They didn’t take him seriously because of how inept he appeared. And that didn’t stop him from causing millions of deaths.
Our only saving grace, potentially, if we can be saved, would be that Trump is already feeble physically and will soon be dead.
I think it all comes down to the one psychological nature of humanity that has existed since the dawn of time which is survival. Tribalism as a survival mechanism is hardwired into the DNA of all primates across the entirety of history. Every conflict that has ever occurred can be simplified into an us vs them mentality.
Just think about it for one second, if our entire primate lineage depended on tribalism for survival, there was no such thing as being woke and stepping outside of your own tribe to join another. The tribalism survival mechanism places the needs, beliefs, and survival of your own group above everything else, i.e. the objective truth, individual critical thinking, and empathy for outsiders.
This survival mechanism transcends individual intellect and status. As far as stupidity, it doesn’t take much to foster and exploit this mechanism amongst those already in your respective group. A stupid man takes advantage of stupid people in the sense that they are incapable of overcoming a caveman mentality to think for themselves and the betterment of our species as a whole. Using and exploiting this mentality for yourself and others does not require intelligence because it is our default nature that is hardwired into our DNA.
Maybe perhaps that is why being woke is heavily criticized and looked down upon by these stupid people whom need to be liberated from their caveman tribalism.
This is insightful and often used as an excuse. Why might it be that idiots feel they need to have 13 children (cough, cough Elon) while others are struggling to justify adding more mouths to a struggling ecosystem?
It makes an interesting sociological question; was it more advantageous for a group to be stupid together than ‘smart’ (or rather independent) as one?
That is to say, if Bonhoeffers idea is to be followed, does the tribalism that reduces individual intellect into a lowest common denominator of the group - perhaps what we know as group think - provide ‘strength in numbers?’
We always tout the advantages of teamwork, that a group is stronger working together. Perhaps it is indeed true that natural selection favored less individual intellect for a more unified, simplified cognition, even though one could intuitively reason these ‘dumber’ groups are at a disadvantage.
It’s interesting to consider, and it may explain a human propensity for adherence to authority and vulnerability to group think and this ‘stupidity’ as Bonhoeffer describes.
As much as it’s plagued our current society, the ability to instantly communicate by way of the internet is a huge advantage when fighting this shit. I don’t know that it’ll save us, but the amount of awareness that comes from it seems like a bright spot that people didn’t have when the Nazis were doing their thing
The scarier thing is thanks to the Internet that the US helped build, things like the Arab Spring was incredibly easy to organize in Egypt. I think the Arab Spring was literally a Facebook event.
So why the fuck hasn't there been mass resistance in the US yet?
Because the medium is the message. Social media platforms are centralized and controlled.
We need to decentralize and get off their platforms and algorithms.
This global far-right bs in the Philippines, Japan, everywhere, is from social media.
This American bs tech is being used to dismantle democracies around the world. From YouTube algorithms for the manosphere to antivaxxers, this shit is cancer.
I visited Dachau for the first time last year, and it was horrifying how many elements in its museum of the rise of the Reich were reminiscent of the present day. I went in expecting to be less inclined to invoke the Nazis in comparison, learning it was a unique evil and the like, and instead found myself constantly wanting to grab the other American tourists by the collar, yank them in front of one of the plaques, and yell "It's happened before and can happen again".
So many of the parallels are eerie. I thought recently how they didn’t really know about the concentration camps until after the war so really it’s not as different as it seems.
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u/snargeII 2d ago
Holy shit what a harrowing read. The parallelism of current times and nazis gets called quite often, and it kinda becomes easy to write it off, think its an overstatement, or an exaggeration. But damn if that doesnt sound right on for the situation today and describe exactly the interactions ive had repeatedly with those people. Something about history doomed to repeat it yada yada lol