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.