They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

The following is from a page that has an except of a book written decades ago, on how the German people were slowly pacified and manipulated into complying with the, then new, Third Reich. To those who are already aware of the state of current events, this is woefully familiar. To those who've fallen prey to the propaganda that we hear on a daily basis, denial will persist, since "this is America, it couldn't happen here."

But it is happening here. The evidence is all around, but is considered "unpatriotic" to look at too closely, and to be "with the terrorists", if one makes any objections. Within a very short period of time, you have accepted an eternal war against an ideology with accompanying omnipotent powers granted to the State, condoned unprovoked war based on lies, welcomed measures that effectively removes all your Constitutional rights without really "making you safe", allowed the establishment of a culture of fear, designed to make you even more susceptible and complacent to further abuses by your government towards yourselves and the peoples of the world. You gladly promote and encourage the complete reversal of all the American ideals you claim to hold so dear.

"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, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. 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 some day 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."

Some of us do see, but we can't correct it alone.