Do you remember when Presidents disclosed their finances and avoided things that could look like gifts/bribes? When they didn't fire prosecutors for getting too close to their business? When trial-balloons about becoming "President For Life" were taboo? When their lawyers didn't argue they had presumptive immunity to literally assassinate the other candidate?
This news item is just one more previously-unthinkable line crossed in an unambiguous trend towards more-crazy.
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> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next."
-- They Thought They Were Free: The Germans The Germans, 1933-45* by Milton Meyer, published 1955.
I want to add here that the Holocaust required a war (the Wannsee conference was in 1942), massive censorship (easy during a war) and misdirection like model concentration camps (Theresienstadt), where international agencies could look around and see how "humane" everyone was treated.
There was no Internet, only official propaganda. Sometimes the truth leaked via the Swedish embassy or railway workers, but it cannot spread far if those who spread it are killed themselves.
But I agree that people all over the world have been docile and compliant since 2020 on all sorts of issues, so the danger is there even if it should be harder today.
> Do you remember when Presidents disclosed their finances and avoided things that could look like gifts/bribes?
So quaint. Now bribes are out in the open and no one even bats an eye. Trump coin, Trump media, never released anything about tax returns, selling merch, etc... It's comical to me that his followers think he's dismantling the deep state grifters, when he is a deep state grifter.
I have to give some credit to Trump and the media around him for being masters at the narrative. Hillary's emails and Hunter on a board of a company requires investigations and congressional involvement, but Trump and his family casually take 100's of millions if not billions in bribes and no one thinks twice.
This news item is just one more previously-unthinkable line crossed in an unambiguous trend towards more-crazy.
___________
> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next."
-- They Thought They Were Free: The Germans The Germans, 1933-45* by Milton Meyer, published 1955.