[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] sleepwalking into the drone age - "I Met a 16-Year-Old Kid. 3 Days Later Obama Killed Him"

[C. G. Estabrook]

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.

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..."

One reviewer summarizes as follows:

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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...

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


On Jun 21, 2012, at 9:16 AM, Michael Weissman wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 3:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook <cge at shout.net>  
> wrote:
> 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.
>
> Oddly enough, there were no such demonstrations.
>
> Which may suggest an answer to your next question:
>
>
> Would the authorities suppress it?
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