A warning for our times…

Thought I would drop this here….it seems very relevant in the current times we live in. It’s from Benjamin Carter Hett’s book “The Death of Democracy”.

‘Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years
was an incongruous innocence; few people could imagine the worst
possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had
thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as we as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland even as things got worse and worse. “I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere,” Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary—he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.
Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass
shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second
World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet
their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.’

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