2011-10-07-0623Z


I'm reading Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, a story of ten average Germans during Nazism. Its lessons clearly apply to present-day USians (from page 56):
So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.

It is actual resistance which worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point which the tyrant must always approach and never pass. If his calculation is too far behind the people's temper, he faces a palace Putsch; if it is too far ahead, a popular revolution.

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