Incremental Suffering - Tumblr Posts

Trying to think how I can act with this consciousness now. Especially:

“You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.

I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men…Nazism 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. Who wants to think?“

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security…each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance.

You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.

I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men…Nazism 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. Who wants to think?

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle…

…one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.

[And] one day it is over his head.

How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?…

Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’

But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? And everyone counts on that might.

You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it.

And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy.

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, & you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end…..

…. It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it. So you wait, and you wait. But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

If the last & worst act of the regime had come immediately after the first & smallest, 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. Of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the 100s of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B…if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy… some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, & you see that everything has changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.

The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.

You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).

You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, but no one stood.

You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair… you learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame.”

-Milton Mayer, ‘They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945’