They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer, an Excerpt
135 comments
·February 5, 2025noduerme
ookblah
i don't even want to give people that benefit at this point. used to think that it was education, circumstances, outside forces, culture, etc. like "if only" we had XYZ then we can prevent this.
at this point i just want to call it "stupidity". not even a left vs right thing. there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work. they will always be taken advantage of, scammed, etc. social media and tech just made this 10x more effective.
it's how you have populations repeatedly making the same damn mistakes century after century just in a different form. it's baked into our DNA i suppose.
maybe i'm just cynical have given up. it's a really jarring to thing to encounter people who refuse to even spend the min effort to attempt to question their own beliefs.
null
BiteCode_dev
I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis.
They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.
There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.
This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.
I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.
But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.
Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.
Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.
In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.
illwrks
I’ve not watched it yet, but a recent film called the Zone Of Interest sounds like it aligns to this.
It’s about the Hoss family that lived next to one of the Nazi concentration camps, the father/husband ran the camp.
Also, I recently watched The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and it again aligns to that point of view a bit.
subsistence234
sure, making the government smaller is basically the same as putting the government in control of everything.
palmotea
> sure, making the government smaller is basically the same as putting the government in control of everything.
Come on. A "hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy" is completely orthogonal to the size of government, before or after the takeover.
subsistence234
How do you clean up a corrupt organization?
LandoCalrissian
President is unilaterally shutting down federal agencies. If this goes on there really isn't a constitution anymore, not in practice anyway.
pwatsonwailes
You never have one except because everyone decides they do. The moment anyone with a modicum of power decides to say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.
Waterluvian
I think it’s important to clarify that in this case, having a “modicum of power” is in the form of being able to say it doesn’t exist without a riot and a beheading. It’s not in the form of money or command of an army, though those things definitely help.
isaacremuant
You can tell a republican is president because suddenly we care about the constitution and checks in power and other things we didn't care for for 4 years. It's like when Bush invades a country, that's bad, when Obama does it, that's justified or "don't bother me, I'm eating".
Now we get all these articles about evil and resistance and yet, most damaging US politics have continued regardless of red or blue but we have to try and pretend partisan fanatics are anything but.
Sorry but this time around, specially after the insane anti civil rights COVID policies and overreach, the hypocrisy is overflowing so much you'll get more backlash to your partisan narrative.
mjfl
The President has unitary power over the executive, within the bounds set by congress.
asdasdsddd
The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies? I think the only thing people have been habituated to is the enormity of the government; go back to any other point in history, was the government this big in terms of independent agencies, employee/contractor count, budget/debt as percentage of gdp?
Sure the spoils system was bad, but the current iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.
palmotea
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
asdasdsddd
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
etchalon
He's not shutting down agencies to relinquish governmental power.
He's shutting them down to strengthen his own power.
asdasdsddd
What power has he gained.
afiori
It is a weird concept for the libertarian mind, but sometimes the goverment power is used to protect people freedoms and rights.
asdasdsddd
Yes and we managed to do that for 150 years with a fraction of the current government size.
pagutierrezn
To make matters worse, this is not only "rehappening" in the US. It's global
michaelhoney
What's happening in the US is in a whole other league of fucked
blooalien
What a way to utterly waste the likely last few generations of "civilized" humanity on Earth... :(
hn_throwaway_99
I'm curious if what is happening in the US and what has happened in Britain with Brexit actually ends up slowing some of these marches towards illiberalism in other places. Like when people are upset at the direction of a country or current policies, they may take a "throw the bums out" attitude even if the alternative is far worse. But perhaps they're looking at the complete shit show in the US and how unproductive Brexit was and are thinking "OK, maybe not like that..."
I mean, it sounds like Canada is more united than it's been in a long time in its shared opposition to Trump.
CalRobert
Unfortunately, one key difference is that Britain didn't have a leader who wanted to expand their territory.
Europe is already weak, economically and militarily. I don't know how long our votes will matter when we have a belligerent and powerful neighbour.
ZeroGravitas
In the UK, the political party (which is a actually a privately owned company) owned by the guy who drove the initial wave of Brexit is apparently topping the polls now.
The only policy they talk about is getting rid of all the immigrants because that's what caused all the problems, not decades of right wing government culminating in Brexit.
But underdeath that is the usual US-style Turbo capitalism stuff like destroying the NHS and handing it over to American corporations.
morkalork
I don't think it changes anything on a base level for how humans behave en mass. Unfortunately it looks like we will always be susceptible to populism and propaganda. At best what you're seeing is a temporary inoculation against illibralism.
littlestymaar
In France at least, Brexit made the idea of leaving the EU obsolete in political discourse, both on the left and far right.
But at the same time French media just repeated the “it's a clumsy handwave from an autistic dude” narrative after Musk's Nazi salute so I'm not sure it will work this time.
throw310822
Notice that this benevolence and protection by the media is granted to Musk (and Trump) by their complete subservience to Israel's demands and wants. Trump just proposed ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip and cleaning up the rubble with American money and work so it can be handed over to Israel in a nice shape.
bigbacaloa
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Waterluvian
> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
I felt this for four years straight last time.
But what scares me far more is if very large, recklessly shocking occasions occur and the resisters are nowhere to be seen. I keep hoping to wake up to footage of mass protests and riots and fires and anger and aggressive intolerance of these shocking occasions.
ed
For those who want to do something, what is the 2025 version of Indivisible?
nycticorax
Indivisible still exists, and is still active: https://indivisible.org/
kzrdude
There are protests planned for today (Wednesday) across the US
tomohelix
Honestly, what would these protests do? Serious question.
Let say you manage to achieve the unthinkable and bring a huge amount of people on the street, heck let say you are so successful that you also get a full on national strike going, what then?
Do you think it would affect those in charge right now? He would not care. He is already ruining the US economy and alliances. Why would he care if some people he does not answer to get on the street and complain? In fact, it may even give him the excuse to declare an emergency and enact even worse acts.
And you know half the country support him. He has the army on his side. The court is on his side. And worst of all, the law is beneath him, literally. What would these protests do?
I swear, serious question. Help me understand. What do you hope to achieve?
samiwami
is your argument that protests do nothing, therefore people should stay home?
gtsop
The purpose of a protest in general should not be to affect the people in power, it should be for enpowering and bonding the people to further enact post-protest. A moralle boost, a conversation starter, an ignition to call more people to action. Having sayd that, a very successfull protest does affect the upper ones, only temprorarily and tactically. A policy maker will still want to make X move, but ever so slightly delay it or figure out a differnt narrative to bring it back some time later.
aqueueaqueue
Protest outside your senator's residence. Every day. Until Trump is impeached (again!) and removed.
cheesemonster
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hcfman
This part is interesting:
"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."
That has already happened here in the Netherlands. Except it was organised crime. It's so difficult to fight we can't just convict them in court anymore, we need to fight them extrajudicially". So the RIEC was formed "Regional information expertise centrum". And extra judicial actions called "interventions" do happen and they do commit crimes to innocent civilians not related to organised crime in anyway. And they get away with it. And the Dutch population is by and large blissfully unware of what has happened. Most have no idea what that organisation is, but that organisation controls the police, the council, the tax department and about 13 sub-parts of government and gives them orders to carry out as part of their "interventions".
The general population would not even know the name RIEC. All they know are recent advertisements on TV encouraging people to report any suspicious behaviour happening in their neighbourhoods. These people are stupid. They could report something they misinterpreted and unwittingly destroy some innocent persons lives with the extra-judicial interventions that followed.
But yeah, as someone below has said, what's now happening is on a whole other level.
RangerScience
> 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.
Welp.
panarky
Fascism took over Germany not by foreign attack, not by domestic civil war, not by subversion or trickery.
Fascism came with a whoop and a holler.
It was what most Germans wanted, or came to want under pressure from both reality and illusion.
They wanted it, they got it, and they liked it.
winrid
I recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third...
computerthings
No, that's a gross simplification, and leaves out all the violence and constant deception. This is a good primer on just how far off the pop culture understanding of the Nazis is: https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/
"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.
lucianbr
I really have no clue about history, and what you say sounds very reasonable. I guess it is true.
But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.
Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.
BytesAndGears
Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.
I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.
I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.
I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.
And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
tmpz22
You’re being gaslit.
Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.
What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.
The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.
They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.
BytesAndGears
Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
smaudet
Musk is a traitor per US legal definition and his actions highly resemble a hostile foreign national takeover, he deserves nothing less than the maxumim punishment under current US law...
rectang
> Because they feel the same way about your side.
Yes, this is surely true.
> So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.
Not necessarily.
Is Russian resentment of Ukraine equivalent to Ukrainian resentment of Russia merely because both citizenries feel their own resentments passionately?
BytesAndGears
I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.
I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.
Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.
a_puppy
Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
lelanthran
> Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.
This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.
The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.
BytesAndGears
Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.
handoflixue
> Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example.
I have never really understood this parallel. What laws got broken, there?
dontlaugh
I think you are correct precisely because both US major parties are on the same side, the side of capital.
michaelhoney
But they are not the same. One party is weaponizing racism and ignorance to illegally destroy institutions that have taken decades to build.
suraci
and the side of israel? which happen to be the solidest evidence to prove someone is a nazi
no matter who you voted for, no matter if you voted or don't vote, you can not change this, you have no power to change it
goos
I see what you're saying, but listening to partisan rhetoric on both sides here does not really get you any closer to the truth here.
If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?
While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.
On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.
These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.
nycticorax
And of course January 6, a literal coup attempt, was perpetrated by the Rs. Nothing remotely like that on the D side.
null
LarsDu88
HackerNews is suddenly getting political content at the very top, right after PG slams the "woke" agenda.
Is the HN crowd finally waking up to what a danger to the US the "most successful startup entrepreneur of all time" is?
9dev
…and the YC CEO defending the hostile takeover of government agencies by (smart, I give you that, but still) teenagers.
praptak
Trumpists may be against democracy but they seem pro capital or at least pro big tech capital.
rhinoceraptor
I think the greys are going to be disappointed that their weird death cult will fail to gain traction, it's not popular even here
etchalon
I was recommended this book a few months ago, by a friend's partner.
Reading it was difficult, and impossible not to see the parallels of what we were approaching.
This excerpt is phenomenal on its own, but the full book is worth your time.
groby_b
It is probably good to remember that this talks about the experience of a German, under Hitler's Nazi government.
This isn't a text that refers to current events. It talks about what happened. How things progressed. Why everybody just ambled along. How it was possible that so many just went along.
If you think there are parallels to current times, or if you feel this attacks you or your beliefs, there is value in thinking about "why". What is it about this story that reaches you? What are you willing to learn from it?
cyberlurker
I don’t see the call to action. It describes perfectly the feeling of hopelessness I’ve had for years now. The election was the last chance and everyone blew it.
UniverseHacker
There is still a lot we can do. Every demagogue and authoritarian regime collapses eventually, often quickly- and they haven't even succeeded in seizing total control yet. As long as we are alive, we can resist.
Moreover, even under the worst possible situations, individuals can find meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" on surviving concentration camps as well as James Stockdale's books on surviving as a POW in Vietnam show firsthand that it is possible.
"You have a right to make them hurt you, and they don't like to do it." -James Stockdale
smaudet
It is ironic that the most useful thing Musk and Trump will do is wake people up to the fact their house is on fire...
Intralexical
Vladimir Putin first took power in 2000, and never really gave it up. Russians were still holding large-scale pro-democracy protests over 10 years later.
Of course, that didn't go so hot for them. But Russian democratic culture was only 20 years old, and the fall of the Soviet Union had gutted their economy almost on the level of the Great Depression. They weren't really set up to win.
Poland has been doing comparatively better. PiS first took power in 2005 and then again in 2015, and began taking over the media, compromising the courts, and attacking the constitution. But even so, they lost their majority in parliament in 2023.
US democracy is as old as the country, and the US has the strongest economy in the world. You probably have at least one more chance in 2028, which will be shaped by how effectively the authoritarian movement can consolidate and how well opposition manages to mobilize.
Democracies, and countries in general, are big, lumbering, slow-moving things. They take a long time to die, and you never know if there's a surge of vitality that will shoot forth from somewhere hidden inside them.
whatever1
Τhe promise of the NRA+ folks is that guns in the hands of citizens will avert such a situation. Let's see if at least one of the things they claimed is not a lie.
frangfarang
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brigandish
There may be a tipping point, but as we can see by the comments here and elsewhere, and the intent behind writing and reading things like the shared article, being able to see it before it happens is the hard bit, maybe the impossible bit.
Certainly, I've heard the same apocalyptic messages about every big vote in the past 25 years, whether elections or referendums. Usually, not much changes, things happen in increments. Right now there's an incremental change going on in the opposite direction to the one that was happening, but the noise seems (to me) to outdo the reality.
As the dead (currently) sibling comment writes, it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, I hope you begin to feel some hope soon.
michaelhoney
I don't know what you would consider radical if you think what is happening now is incremental.
dr_dshiv
>"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
Terrifying. This anti-speech is anathema to all Americans. Let’s remember that. By recalling what all Americans have as a sacred self-belief (myth even), that America is anti-Nazi and anti-dictatorship and pro-freedom and pro-speech, we can effectively strengthen our ties.
What seems to drive Trump at his core is not ideology, but ego. On their path to power, both he and Musk could have been democrats, but they were rejected.
Together, they share the goal of creating the greatest presidency in American history. At some point, this may be a better scenario than the alternative.
The election is past: “winning” and defeating the opposition are less relevant now than creative strategies for generating positive outcomes from the current situation.
Outrage feeds the demons. There may be other, more effective (but less emotionally satisfying) paths to mutual-self-interest. In conflict with the very powerful, redirection often works better than direct opposition.
roenxi
Given their failure to resist Trump over the last 8 years and the apparent risk to their persons; should the Democratic party perhaps voluntarily disband?
"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's happened in American society, particularly the silence, confusion and cowering now of anyone who should oppose a hostile takeover and dismantling of our democracy and our laws, are striking. It should have been required reading in American schools, when there was still time to educate people against these dangers.