"History is a vast early warning system." -- Norman Cousins
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As you might have noticed, recently I've been talking up the fact that I've been at this keyboard now for 20 years, and t... -
To date, this is how the very few interactions I've had with Never Trumpers have gone, because I want to talk about the Befor...
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Thanks again for reading from “They Thought They Were Free” and for a very thoughtful interpretation of the words. And thanks for sharing what’s on your bookshelf in a recent post.
Another Nazi book worthy of a close read is Peter Frietzsche’s "Hitler’s First Hundred Days." I received it from a friend who left notes and exclamation marks on just about every page. There’s a small section about newspapers, which is straight out of a Driftglass post.
The newspapers of the conservative establishment—who really wanted their own dictatorship—were pros at sane washing Hitler and their SA. Here’s Frietzsche writing about one such paper:
“In other words, the newspaper came out against Nazi terror once it had been consigned to the past or to a corner. It was an odd position; although terror was bad, the newspaper had no principled equipment to combat it. The conservatives first denied violence, blaming Communists and not the SA. Then they made excuses by indicating that the victims had once been perpetrators not personally, but somehow collectively or they justified the violence as one of the onerous burdens of counterrevolutionary struggle.Then they ignored it. Law and order and accountability were not allowed to muddy what had to be clear … Conservatives, nationalists, and even Sebastian Haffner's [a "sophisticated" conservative kind of guy] friends did not speak up for the basic freedoms of civil society because they were too busy dancing alongside the Nazis.”
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