Oh the hubris
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I’ve seen worse.
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I mean, at the end of the day, he passed inspection, so isn’t that what matters…
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I wonder if it’s still standing or if the swamp swallowed it…
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Historians alarmed but not surprised as Trump seeks to rewrite US story because they’re historians and they know how this goes.
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Yeah, this is Fascism 101. Again.
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What’s so tragic is that there’s only one 250 year anniversary. This should have been a year of celebration. Yes, also of introspection and context, but that sort of thing can be a part of celebration among grown-ups. There will never be another 250 year anniversary of the American Revolution, and you will have to celebrate it under that guy. Or rather not celebrate it, because it hasn’t turned out so well
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It was a good run, at least.
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I am reminded of being taught that propaganda is historically important, even if every word in it is a lie. The lies can still tell us about what was happening when it was made.
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There’s a tendency to make comparisons between what is happening now in the United States and what occurred in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. I believe we should learn from history but also be cautious in drawing parallels. After spending so much time researching what happened in Vienna, which was a liberal and cosmopolitan city where Jews had become well established in the highest reaches of society, do you see anything from that period relevant for Americans today?
Several things. One is that among these well-established Jewish families was a conviction that it couldn’t possibly happen here. The Nazis could come in, but it couldn’t last too long, because we are too civilized, and Vienna is too civilized. In that situation, it was the pessimists who survived and the optimists who were killed. Similarly, it was the wealthy Jews who were killed. They had more to lose by leaving, so they stayed.
The second thing I found notable was the overnight transformation of the Viennese people. The people who my family, my father, my grandparents saw as schoolmates, neighbors, and friends turned on them overnight when the Nazis arrived. When my grandfather was on his hands and knees with the other Jews being forced to clean the sidewalks, he was spat on and jeered by the people in his district. Many of them he knew. This is a reminder of how fragile are the things that we take for granted in terms of civilization and how quickly it can change—and how there are, without doubt, among us people who would enthusiastically take part in atrocities against their neighbors. There are potential psychopaths among us. What matters is how permissive the environment is. That’s a lesson we learned in Vienna, but also in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda—how fragile is this idea of civilized society.
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Readings from people’s diary entries from the first years of the Third Reich.
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You know, I just had a knee-jerk reaction to the title of that video, because of the whole problem with modern headlines now a days (SEE SHOCKING CLAPBACK FROM THE ONE PERSON YOU’D NEVER EXPECT IT FROM or SEE MAGA POL GET SILENCED)… But it’s an accurate headline, of course. Because it was legitimately shocking. I sort of feel like we’re not really shocked by this sorts of mass crimes anymore, and have become shockingly desensitized to it. 
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Sometimes, not often, I answer people who downplay or make light of the holocaust online that I want them to sit down, and just think through what happened. To just physically sit down and stare into space and imagine.
To think through what it meant for everyday people, shopkeepers and accountants, housewives and craftsmen, who were like you and me. Not something alien. Not invaders. Just citizens and neighbours living ordinary lives in the villages and towns where their parents and their parents’ parents had lived before them. Living with their joys and their heartbreaks, with first loves and marriages and mortgages and that annoying pain in your left toe that keeps coming back.
What it meant for them to be at first vilified. To laugh it off. To realise that this isn’t politics as usual. That it isn’t going away. To realise this is serious. To see people disappear. Friends, loved ones, community leaders. To be taken away from your home. From where you live and where you keep that letter you just can’t throw away, although you know she’s married now, and happy, you hope. To be taken away to
And there I have to stop, because it’s just too horrid. Too real. Too incredibly inhuman. Too industrial. Too bureaucratic.
We have gotten so used to hearing about the holocaust that we don’t really think anymore how apocalyptically horrible it was. We think we do. We hear the big numbers, we see the pictures, but imagining the individual stories, that’s where it becomes overwhelming for me.
I don’t think anyone I have asked to do this has ever followed the advice but I wish they would. Because you’re right. It’s shocking in the original sense of the word and we have lost the ability to be shocked by it. That’s why people vote AfD and Trump, Reform and RN
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