I never imagined

 

Part 3

It is crucial to realize that those who have lived through the rise of oppressive governments have seldom realized the perilous situation they were in until it was too late. Consider a riveting and ominous chapter from the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is a provocative examination of the development of Germany’s one-party system. The book’s author, Milton Mayer (1908-1986), a conscientious objector during World War II who traveled to Germany after the war and lived with and interviewed German families, explains the gradual process by which Germans relinquished their freedom. The experience transformed Mayer’s assumptions.

Mayer claimed those he interviewed were decent, hard-working, ordinary intelligent and honest individuals who did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil…”and they lived under it, served it, and indeed, made it.”

Consider these excerpts from They Thought They Were Free; Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”:

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand …

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow-motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time …we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

“You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me …Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must someday lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.

“One day it is over his head…”

«One day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

“Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember everything now, and your heart breaks.

“Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”

With history serving as our enlightened teacher, we now know Nazism “was naked, total tyranny which degraded its adherents and enslaved its opponents and adherents alike; terrorism and terror in daily life, private and public; brute personal and mob injustice at every level of association; a flank attack upon God and a frontal attack upon the worth of the human person and the rights which that worth implies.

“I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did,” concluded Mayer.

Do not Mayer’s sobering words reverberate today?

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”— Mark Twain