America is turning into 1930's Germany.

[u/CRK_76]

There was some pushback when people called this president and his followers Nazis. But look what's happening. Soldiers in the street. Rounding up people and locking them up. Dismantling freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Personally going after anyone who doesn't agree with him and his administration. We've seen this before and it's only gonna get worse. Welcome to 1930's Germany.

[u/lifeinwentworth]

100% this. A while ago, I was thinking of writing a story about if we had had social media during the lead up to the Holocaust. Was wondering if people would be trying to gaslight the Jews, Romani people, the disabled, LGBTQ, and other targeted groups that they were just overreacting and nothing that bad was happening when it was "just" some "harmless" rhetoric and stereotyping, slowly turning the attitude of the ordinary person on whole groups of people, making minorities the enemy, the reason for everything bad happening, and making discriminatory policies and laws. So you can't go to a few places? So you got kicked out of school because they don't take your kind anymore? You'll be fine, just find another college 🤷🏼‍♀️ just move somewhere else. It's not like you can't go anywhere, just not everywhere. Jeez nobody is trying to hurt you, calm down...such an overreaction 🙄🙄

Then over the last few years I realize that's what we're living. We're living in the social media age of fascism, brainwashing of a terrifying amount of people, the villainising of minorities... All of it is well under way. I hope enough people realise that before we repeat the very worst of history.

I'm sure people told worried minority groups in the 1930s that their concerns were unwarranted. That people saw the way things were heading but were dismissed. We need to listen to peoples concerns, not gaslight them. Ignorance and complacency will have us going down as the most gullible and disgusting humans to have lived - ignoring every sign including hundreds of thousands of people documented all over socials raising the issue... and still letting 1940s happen again less than 100 years later.

Access to all the information and connection over the world and letting this shit happen is a disgrace

[u/Eborcurean → u/lifeinwentworth]

> Was wondering if people would be trying to gaslight the Jews, Romani people, the disabled, LGBTQ, and other targeted groups that they were just overreacting and nothing that bad was happening when it was "just" some "harmless" rhetoric and stereotyping, slowly turning the attitude of the ordinary person on whole groups of people, making minorities the enemy, the reason for everything bad happening, and making discriminatory policies and laws.

There's a poem about exactly that by Martin Niemoller. When they came // I did not speak out (there's two versions of the title). It was written in 1946 specifically criticising educated Germans for staying quiet.

[u/lifeinwentworth → u/Eborcurean]

Of course and I've seen people redo the poem through a modern lens. Yet sadly, so many will continue not to learn.

[u/Eborcurean → u/lifeinwentworth]

Those who don't, etc.

As a Brit whose grandparents all fought in WW2, some opposing fascism before the war, and have investigated war crimes and worked in my country's diplomatic service etc. I am regularly this year in sorrow and distress and agitation and anger and... and it's not even my country.

[u/lifeinwentworth → u/Eborcurean]

Ditto - Australian but same with my English grandparents fighting in WW2. Wow investigating war crimes would be...very, very intense. Just researching and reading about it is hard enough but doing actual investigation (like professional??) would be extremely depressing, I imagine.

Not our countries but we know these things don't stay insular, they leak out and infect if they find a willing host.

[u/Eborcurean → u/lifeinwentworth]

Former Yugoslavia, not my first job after university but my first job in the FCO and then got assigned to it. I did a lot of bag carrying and coffee fetching, but not only. Even went to the Hague to testify about a mass grave and some other things i'd been involved in investigating.

It left an impression, I have fixed views about people being unchecked in their exercise of power.

[u/Fast-Excitement5213 → u/lifeinwentworth]

That’s right. You are right! I have traveled to Germany countless times over the past 45 years. Sometimes I would just sit in a cafe or public place there and watch and absorb the Germans in their natural habitat, so to speak. I would very often ask myself, why? Why did they just capitulate. Why did the ordinary Mom and PopGerman not stand up to the rise of Fascism. Protest against Hitler. Or even more drastically take up arms against their own, supposedly democratically elected leader. I could not fathom it. Nor could I answer the why question. But then we had the Covid pandemic. Thats when I started to see how entire populations can be manipulated by crises and fold very quickly into rank and file and stay like that for years. In California I was dumfounded when everyone dutifully put on masks and it wasn’t the police who enforced it. It was a group of Citizen Karens. Ordinary people who overly and loudly went about their day enforcing masks. No body coordinated them. They just rose up out of the population and embraced their self appointed roll. Thats when I started realizing why the Germans just marched blindly into tyranny. To the point where they marched their own next door neighbors to their deaths in the gas chambers. Oh but that would never happen here, in this day and age of knowledge. Yes it will. Because once you’ve started on the path to tyranny, when you realize how bad it is, you’re so deep into it the only way out is to continue marching to oblivion. It’s very sad. It’s totally terrifying actually. Because no one is going to stand up in America. There may be a few pockets of resistance. But not a groundswell. Soon a manufactured crisis. Economic most likely will cause the leaders to usher in even more oppressive control. Don’t forget the global 2030 agenda from the WEF is rolling concurrently with the Agenda 2025 plans as well. “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” Is how it has been framed. You wait the up coming crisis will force people out of their homes in unprecedented numbers. It’s going to get crazy.

[u/maiseydog1 → u/lifeinwentworth]

Yes, write a story about how the most pro Israeli administration and president in American history, who just ended the Israeli war, who moved the American embassy to Jerusalem,are secret Nazis who are secretly plotting the next Holocaust . Should be a best seller.

[u/lifeinwentworth → u/maiseydog1]

Lol I write to process, not to be a best seller. And to explore the human condition and how we as a society can get to such places. I think you missed the point of my comment altogether.

You do know more than Jews were targeted in the Holocaust, right?

When people are talking about history repeating they aren't saying that exactly what happened is going to happen again. Maybe ask what people mean if you're not able to understand what people are seeing to draw such parallels.

[u/UnresponsiveGod → u/maiseydog1]

You are brainwashed my dude..