Thank you for this. One of the things I have found most frustrating the past several years is how eager people seem to be to dismiss comparisons of the US today to Hitler's rise to power. These comparisons are routinely rebuffed as hyperbolic and alarmist because, after all, the US is not currently anything like the Third Reich at its en…
Thank you for this. One of the things I have found most frustrating the past several years is how eager people seem to be to dismiss comparisons of the US today to Hitler's rise to power. These comparisons are routinely rebuffed as hyperbolic and alarmist because, after all, the US is not currently anything like the Third Reich at its end. As if the Nazi war machine just sprang up out of nothing, aggressively enacting full-scale genocide and war. That's never how these things happen. They always start like A.R.'s schoolyard bully, just seeing what they can get away with. The worst of the violence - the part of their history that is memorialized in collective cultural knowledge - isn't where it starts. It's what happens when the bully is confident that not only has their behavior been normalized, but they've gained enough favor and power that they can no longer be stopped.
Thank you for this. One of the things I have found most frustrating the past several years is how eager people seem to be to dismiss comparisons of the US today to Hitler's rise to power. These comparisons are routinely rebuffed as hyperbolic and alarmist because, after all, the US is not currently anything like the Third Reich at its end. As if the Nazi war machine just sprang up out of nothing, aggressively enacting full-scale genocide and war. That's never how these things happen. They always start like A.R.'s schoolyard bully, just seeing what they can get away with. The worst of the violence - the part of their history that is memorialized in collective cultural knowledge - isn't where it starts. It's what happens when the bully is confident that not only has their behavior been normalized, but they've gained enough favor and power that they can no longer be stopped.