Having just read a bit about the impact of the "business as usual" bias among German Jews in the runup to WW2 and the lack of meaningful resistance that it led to, is pretty terrifying watching the same bias today.
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@dymaxion It's especially dismaying that many people take away nothing more than "look how foolish and shortsighted those people were" rather than "human nature can lead you to make fatally dangerous decisions".
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@dymaxion I think the only reason humans bother learning history is so that they can learn to repeat it better.
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@drwho @dymaxion No. Those who learned history are cursed to watch in agony as it repeats itself, powerless to do anything against it.
Despite modern industrial agriculture Malthus called it: too many people means famine and war.
Global population has doubled in half a century, 'we' are royally screwed and authoritarianism is not going to fix that.
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@dymaxion I keep wondering about the class dimension of this when I wander around Berlin. No idea if the Stolpersteine are representative of the actual numbers, but whenever I see one that reads something like “Escape, 1938”, it’s in an area of the city that was affluent back then.
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@li5a
But why keep going quietly after the borders were closed and they knew about the camps?
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@dymaxion @li5a maybe because keeping quiet affords at least the hope of living another day/week/month/maybe even year, and something changing in that additional day. Also to protect others from retribution. Which, yes, in hindsight seems absurd, but was a real concern at least for some.
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@dymaxion @li5a I am thinking of a situation described in Etty Hillesum's posthumously published journals where a boy in Westerbork is scheduled to leave on a train, and hides, and a much larger number of people are made to board that train that day in retaliation for him hiding.
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@dymaxion @li5a Generally I feel that reading memoirs of the people who lived through it (or died, like Hillesum did in Auschwitz) is possibly more helpful for understanding such things than reading about them.
And also, I am feeling the urge to make a lot more of my friends read more of such memoirs. Also of people who did resist. We need to calibrate away from business as usual.
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@dymaxion @li5a And by "friends" I also mean "me". I kinda started on that 10 years ago with reading Hillesum, Frankl, Katzetnik & Klemperer, but have flagged in the meantime. Will take it up again. Possibly in an organized form with others this time.
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@playinprogress Oh if you've got a specific recommendation there, I'd be interested in it for the anthology
@li5a
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@dymaxion @li5a The names in that list are all recommendations, Hillesum the most, starts out slow when life in Amsterdam is still worried-but-normal, then goes through German invasion, life in Westerbork, ends with a letter she managed to throw out of the train to Auschwitz.
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@dymaxion @li5a The first three are all with a somewhat psychological bent, Hillesum was into Psychotherapy, Frankl obviously used this as starting point for his approach to therapy, Katzetnik writes about his experience with LSD assisted therapy (without which he would not have been able to write about his experience at all).
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@dymaxion @li5a Klemperer chronicles the slowly changing language in the Third Reich, maybe the most obvious one for drawing comparisons right now. His full chronicle is long and unwieldy but excerpts exist, alas only in German. I think in English I would read the first translated volume, covering the time until 1941 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer#Work
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@playinprogress that one is even available in the electronic media collection of the VÖBB <3
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@playinprogress
Oh yeah, the logic is very clear, especially with respect to retribution, and I get that it's a hard call to make. Most people find it very hard to look at a risk model and take a publicly visible choice that defies group norms and leads to a very chance of survival — as we've seen with covid.
@li5a
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@dymaxion @li5a I guess once the war started there was the impicit hope that the nazis might lose before killing oneself, ot the allies might finally bomb somewhere close enough that would allow escape, or...
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@li5a
(Although this is a long and complex conversation that I definitely do not know enough about, in some places. The attitude overall, though...)
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@dymaxion i’m thoroughly devoid of answers, even though I’m probably approaching being in an uncomfortably similar position.
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@li5a
Well, one can learn from history and try to be differently prepared.
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@li5a
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@li5a @dymaxion I would love to have more data about this. It makes perfect sense to me that having the means to pay for transport, food and accommodation elsewhere, at least for a while, would make leaving immeasurably easier than well, not having that.
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@playinprogress
Yeah, likewise. I'm not sure this speaks to that, but I'll chase up the reference that was quoted here.
@li5a
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@playinprogress
The passage quoted in the photo is from Bettelheim's forward to Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account.
@li5a
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@dymaxion That. Exactly that.
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