"They are husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, children, uncles, nephews, all gathered at a ticker-tape parade on a brilliant, sunny day celebrating what we know to be a horror….

It was two years past Kristallnacht. They knew that Jewish friends and neighbors had been rounded up, publicly humiliated, taken away, never seen again. And the people in the crowd were smiling and happy."

~ Ibid.

#fascism #Nazis #cruelty
/2

"Everything that happened to the Jews of Europe, to African-Americans during the lynching terrors of Jim Crow, to Native Americans as their land was plundered & their numbers decimated, to Dalits considered so low that their very shadow polluted those deemed above them — happened because a big enough majority had been persuaded & had been open to being persuaded, centuries ago or in the recent past, that these groups were ordained by God as beneath them, subhuman, deserving of their fate.”

/3

“Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth — that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say: if we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise. If we could just wait until the bigots die away."

~ Ibid., p. 267

#fascism #Nazis #cruelty
/4

"It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations."

~ Ibid.

#fascism #Nazis #cruelty
/5