“Giant concerns like Mannesmann, Krupp, Thyssen, Flick, and IG-Farben, and leading banks such as the Deutsche Bank and the Dresdner Bank, were the major beneficiaries, while a variety of business consortia, corrupt party functionaries, and untold numbers of small commercial enterprises grabbed what they could.
‘Aryan’ pillars of the establishment like doctors and lawyers were equally welcoming of the economic advantages that could come their way with the expulsion of Jews from the medical and legal professions.
University professors turned their skills, without prompting, to defining alleged negative characteristics of the Jewish character and psychology.
And all the time, civil servants worked like beavers to hone the legislation that turned Jews into outcasts and pariahs, their lives into torment and misery.
The police, particularly the Gestapo – helped as always by eager citizens anxious to denounce Jews or those seen as ‘friends of Jews’ – served as a proactive enforcement agency, deploying their ‘rational’ methods of arrest and internment in concentration camps rather than the crude violence of the party hotheads, though with the same objective.”
‘Hitler’, by Professor Ian Kershaw
Steve trickler April 20, 2024 1:27 am Looking at the date of the new OT, shouldn’t it be 20th? It…
Careful, you might find your gig on The Mandalorian and the lead role in a spin off series cancelled, along with yourself, if you draw those kinds of comparisons.
Godwin’s Law is going to become the new ‘shut up’ term just at the time when the comparison is so incredibly apt.
My husband is reading aloud, ‘The Good Germans’ by Catrine Clay. We’re 40 odd pages in, and feel overwhelmed with the rhyme of history.
You cannot comply your way out of tyranny.
I’m really hesitant to draw too many comparisons to that particular horror, mainly out of respect for those who endured it.
Marginalisation of “unwanted” groups is nothing new in the course of human history. It had usually been localised, because that’s how societies have existed up until the world became open to exploration and colonisation. Even after that push to annex foreign lands and the adoption, by and large, of western ways and laws, marginalisation and even extermination has been localised.
This is something new. Like it or not, we are part of a global society now, and the forces that seek to control us are global. Sure, we have our own sovereign states, but governing bodies outside them have been directing responses to this and that for a long time. And now we see the results of one of them, the WHO. Regardless of whether you see them as benign or malignant, they have been pulling the strings and government has responded.
The resultant chaos, unlike the events of 90 years ago, is the result of weak local leadership. Nothing our politicians have done or seek to do is the product of inner drive or strength. As we saw last November, anyone who exhibits these qualities is removed.
About a year ago I remarked that it beginning to feel like the 30s,but my thoughts were focussed on the geopolitical rather the local with China taking the part of Germany.
Calli,
They are using that respect to ensure you don’t draw comparisons, because it might be undesirable for them.
We are reluctant to compare because of how it ended. That is the very reason we should trace it back to examine how it started, and avoid a repeat.
We owe it to their memories to do so.
If they could speak to you now, what do you think they’d want?
I understand that, Mater. Ellen touched upon the pivot point – “Godwin’s Law”, so shut up.
My comment was to highlight some of the historical differences, but also the terrible danger we find ourselves in. The Holocaust, like other past “exterminations”, was localised. The cancer was cut out and removed.
The cells remain because they’ve always been there. And now they seem to be metastasising on a global scale. Our weak politicians are another iteration of Weimar, ripe for trampling and replacing.
Dr Katy Barnett on blind trusts
I did the rise of fascism as part of a course at University. Back in the days when a degree meant something. Yes I am that old.
Old enough to know many people who went through World War 2.
The abuses of the Government we are enduring and the rise of fascism in Europe have many parallels. Most stark is making brutality and inhumanity legal. Disarming the populace another. I could go on. But not tforget the forced vaccination as trials.
To anyone overly touchy, I am in no way comparing the rise of fascism here with the holocaust. Considering the time , effort and blood my family members invested in the defeat of the fascists (then) that sort of arguememt is fascile.
Well said Miss Anthropist.
We are experiencing what I call “soft totalitarianism” . . . Most people are conditioned to totalitarian being the crude jackboot oppression which we saw with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union/Eastern Bloc.
The fascism “soft totalitarianism” which is creeping up on us, is a bit subtler and nuanced, which the general populace, in their ignorance, is simply not seeing (or can’t be bothered). After all the general populace are still being amply fed, can watch Netflix and still have their smart phones.
I am greatly alarmed by it, as it appears all the major political parties here in Oz seem to be endorsing it, in one way or another.
PS I’m feeling a lot better today !
Mater,
I think the comparison is timely.
It’s not being raised over a shadow. It’s been raised after nearly 2 years of shit with a clearly worsening trajectory.
Yes Mater.
If you do the things that authoritarians do you are an authoritarian.
These bloodless goons voted themselves these absolutist powers they now wield against us, for our own good, allegedly.
The threat of Sars Covid is not so great as to justify the extreme health mandates enacted at the expense of basic human, civil and Constitutional rights.
Fortunately, we know what many of those who endured and managed to survive the horrors in Germany, USSR, China etc. would feel about the comparisons, because they’ve been telling us, warning us, trying to wake us up to see how it all begins.
“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”
? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
WolfmanOz,
Good to hear that.
I’m not happy. Out and about today around the Cross and Potts Point. Received another stiff ignoring by the Government’s police farce. Maybe I should dress like someone from the Levant.
and the other fallacious beliefs:
It’s OK because it’s now been made law
It’s OK these are untermench
It’s OK, I’m an authorised officer
It’s OK, because it’s for their own good
It’s OK, because it’s for the greater good