<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">In fact, the answer is not police repression so much as the regime's rhetoric of "hope and change" - even more successful than our current version. <div><br></div><div>Milton Mayer's classic study, *They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45* (Chicago UP: 1955, 1966) shows how the National Socialists manufactured consent. Mayer quotes a professor, that the government (and what we would call today the media) "gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that 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..."</div><div><br></div><div>One reviewer summarizes as follows:</div><div><br></div><div>"The true value of this book and hence Mayer's most valuable contribution has been to draw a graphic conceptual picture of how the system of Nazism worked as seen at ground level by ten ordinary Germans and from the interior of German society: To a man, they all agreed that it brought them untold economic success, bound them patriotically and politically into a coherent cultural unit, restored the nation's pride and gave all Germans renewed reasons for hope in the future.<br><br>"Given this rosy and very much interior and insulated backdrop, it is no wonder there was no basis for ordinary Germans to see (or even to be able to perceive) Nazi excesses, or to see Nazism itself, as an inherently evil system until it was too late.<br><br>"This was true in part because all Germans already had community permission to hate Jews. The excesses, reserved mostly for Jews, thus seemed normal and in any case were always introduced in carefully orchestrated, slowly escalating, but easily digestible bites. This was done specifically to stay below the radar of the everyday German conscience -- so as to never assault German sensibilities too abruptly. Even the most alert of Germans and the least anti-Semitic Germans were lulled to sleep by this strategy.<br><br>"But more importantly, because all Germans were wedded to the Nazi worldview thorough its benefits, both tangible and intangible, there were few incentives for them to rock the boat by pointing to its excesses. Dissension was left for victims and outsiders to engage in. However, being identified as an outsider or as a dissenter, at a minimum, could ensure social exclusion and a slow social death; and if one were very unlucky, it could mean disappearance into a concentration camp, or even a swift bullet to the temple.<br><br>"Ordinary Germans thus were willing contributors to their own self-imposed trap: They needed the community's approval on its own terms. Sometimes this meant turning a blind eye to community sanctioned criminal activity, such as was the case in the event that set off a cascading sequence of pogroms against Jews, Krystalnacht. Ordinary Germans did not want to approve of the criminal behavior involved, but was it not the community to which they were bound that decided what was criminal and who should be rewarded and punished for community-defined criminal behavior? It is easy enough for outsiders to exaggerate the actual relationship between man and state under tyranny, but from the inside, it is always made to seem normal and seamless.<br><br>"Like a thief in the night, tyranny always descends upon sleeping societies in a cloak of patriotic conformity. It attacks when one is unguarded psychologically and least wary of an assault. By the time the citizen is prepared to raise a dissenting voice, in the name of state security, his throat (and presumably his vocal cords) have already been cut and he has been rendered mute. Once the national conscience has been drugged, sedated, or put to sleep, it is difficult to reawaken it...<br><br></div><div>Today we have Obama's indefinite detention, the explosion of the use of Wilson's Espionage Act (which has nothing to do with espionage) and the persecution of Wikileaks. We should denounce what our government is doing rather than simply deplore war - which after all hasn't much of a constituency at large (if a strong, silent one among the 1%). --CGE</div><div><div><br></div></div><div><br></div><div><div>On Jun 21, 2012, at 9:16 AM, Michael Weissman wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 3:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cge@shout.net" target="_blank">cge@shout.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Suppose there was demonstration in Berlin in 1942 with banners reading WAR IS NOT GOOD FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS and WAR DESTROYS FAMILIES.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div style="">Oddly enough, there were no such demonstrations. </div> <div style=""><br></div><div style="">Which may suggest an answer to your next question:</div><div><img class="ajT" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif" style="line-height: 6px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-image: url(https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/ellipsis.png); height: 8px; opacity: 0.3; width: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; "> </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <br> Would the authorities suppress it? </blockquote></div> _______________________________________________<br>Peace-discuss mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net">Peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net</a><br>http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss<br></blockquote></div><br></body></html>