Thread by @drvolts

Christ, reading anything about the rise of Hitler is so unsettling these days. The key thing is that there was nothing inevitable about it -- he rose to power thanks to a few thoughtless decisions by the small, feckless men around him. Sound familiar?

nybooks.com/articles/2024/…

Goebbels, 1928: "The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction."

It's also chilling to read how many times the Nazis failed before they succeeded -- they were broke & unpopular in the early 1930s -- and how many times they were written off. Hitler dismissed all these press reports as a "witch hunt." Sound familiar?

Conservatives were less concerned about Hitler -- they thought they had boxed him in & could use him to their own ends -- than they were about the (wildly overestimated) threat from the left. The center-left joined them in this asymmetric obsession. Hmm. 🧐

The Nazis organized their street thugs into semi-legitimate vigilante enforcers that engaged in (at first scattered & inconsistent) street violence against the Nazi's opponents, especially around elections. That street violence *increased* their public support.

Nazis began as a minority, but their opponents were too busy infighting to unite against them. They seized power with violence & lawlessness. And their support among Germans *grew* in the wake of seizing power. Repression did not spark resistance, not for a long while.

This is morbid, I'll stop. Just this final quote from the story, about the prominent figures of German society in the '30s: "All too often they were small men in a situation that required more; grave times do not always call forth great men to meet the occasion."

Yeah.

"Small men in a situation that required more" is an excellent summary of US politics over the last decade. Let's hope our experience -- which is following all the same beats as '30s Germany, with the same dynamics & personalities -- does not end in the same place.

One final thing. People say "never again." But if you take that seriously, it doesn't mean "say no when someone asks to genocide 40 million people." It's easy to say no to that. What's hard is saying no to one of the small steps that incrementally leads there.

If you put your foot down & say no to one of the incremental steps, you'll be surrounded by people saying, "oh, it's just a small thing, why make a big deal about it, you're overreacting." That's *why it's hard*. But that's where you need courage, not at the very end.