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The most chilling part is "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If th

• mmastrac 6y ago
  Exactly. Consider the erosion of long-standing norms in the west over the last four years and how far society has slipped. These are the first, strong, signs that things are starting to go off the rails.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • the-dude 6y ago
    Which west? Which norms?
    • slg 6y ago
      Just one recent example, this past presidential election was a resounding victory for Joe Biden. He has 306 electoral votes and is expected to win the popular vote by some 6 million people. Leaders around the world have all recognized this however the number of Republicans in federal office that have publicly acknowledged this can seemingly be counted on your fingers. A simple norm of acknowledging an electoral defeat is apparently out the window. EDIT: The downvotes on this post are truly bizarre. Any downvoters want to explain the problem with this comment? I was answering a direct question with what most the of the world agrees are inarguable facts.
      • confidantlake 6y ago
        Any non fascist post is being brigaded by the fascists in the thread.
        • dang 6y ago
          Please don't use HN for ideological flamewar, regardless of which ideology you favor. We ban this sort of account because it destroys the intended use of the site (curious conversation). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
          • deleted 6y ago
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      • bleepblorp 6y ago
        Posting the accepted-by-the-rest-of-the-world reality about Trump, Trumpism, what the ideology stands for, and what the people who voted for it are endorsing is very much a taboo subject on HN. Indeed, as your experience demonstrates, posting the version of the electoral reality--namely, that Trump lost--that's accepted by all but 30% of Republicans is now taboo. Posts that touch on these issues will be censored either through downvoting or bad-faith flagging. I'm not entirely convinced this is organic behavior, but it is what happens to posts that speak too clearly about the dangers of Trumpism. Some people may try to frame this as a 'no politics' position, but this is at best inaccurate. Trumpist disinformation does not get downvoted or flagged with any regularity. If the HN staff don't want to preside over yet another (quasi) social media echo-chamber, they need to do something about Trump loyalists bullying fact-based posts regarding Trump off the platform. The current staff viewpoint, however, seems to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. To quote Edmund Burke, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Giving Trumpists a platform to corrode the foundations of American democracy while shouting down the viewpoint accepted by most of the planet--again, that Trump lost the election--is, at this point, very much an evil.
        • dang 6y ago
    • Digory 6y ago
      1. It's fair to say the President was outmatched by the job. If he wanted to be a dictator, he was incompetent. But the damage to the immediate office of the president is worth considering. No honest person wants to work close to this man, and that's new. 2. The media, in new and unusual ways, has abandoned the goal of neutrality in reporting. 3. The university and corporate culture is overwhelmed with demands for every discipline to consider the "Whiteness problem." What does this description remind you of in American life right now? "Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." 4. The restriction on liberties during the pandemic is new in its breadth and uniformity. It was one thing for un-modern medicine to act regionally in 1918. It's another thing to shut down a Country along the same lines in 2020. We're writing off two years of education for most kids, taking on huge amounts of debt, and shuttering small businesses -- based on a testing regime that seems little better than reading entrails. We are a tired, angry, debt-laden people unable to agree on the facts. We distrust our formerly-shared institutions. We distrust science if it contradicts political norms. It's been a bad year.
      • deleted 6y ago
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      • mullingitover 6y ago
        > 2. The media, in new and unusual ways, has abandoned the goal of neutrality in reporting. Which media are we talking about? There have always been left, neutral, and right-leaning media, but in the last four years the neutral media was painted as being biased against the president because they reported the facts. The facts, they're very unflattering. The president has brought the pro wrestling 'heel' character into national politics and reporting on that reality is not bias. > It's another thing to shut down a Country along the same lines in 2020. The actual mandated shutdowns were pretty weak and pretty temporary. The real damage to the economy has come from people being rational actors and voluntarily practicing social distancing, resulting in heavily stifled demand. See: Sweden. Famously not mandating lockdowns but their economy suffered nonetheless.
  • drilldrive 6y ago
    Last year has had a greater loss of norms of Western thought than we have seen since the dawn of the modern world in almost every Western country. Say what you want about the virus response, but powers that be don't give up newly founded power after they seized it once (the lockdowns never will truly end).
    • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      >the lockdowns never will truly end unless, somehow, it should turn out they were really bad for business in which case out they go once no longer needed. on edit: clarification at end.
    • elipsey 6y ago
      They did last time, and in the middle of the Palmer Raids at that. The necessary and proper use of pulic health orders during pandemics has been thourougly adjuticed in the US, and has a basis in precedent centuries old. This is hardly a regression. Why don't you worry instead about whether we get a trial before we get shot or locked up?
      • drilldrive 6y ago
        The difference of today is our world's global businesses look up to the major Communist force of our world today instead of seeing it as a competitor, they have noted the methods of censorship and totalitarianism and have taken notes back-home.
        • devenblake 6y ago
          China is Communist the same way the third reich was Socialist: in name only.
          • drilldrive 6y ago
            Just taken a bit off guard: do you not dispute the other claim?
  • drewcoo 6y ago
    That is easily perceptible change. Consider instead the last 20 years. The US now has "papers please" air travel, the police are much more highly militarized, we're under constant electronic scrutiny of all kinds, and we the people have even less of a common understanding of the world, making us less likely to band together to defend ourselves. That is frightening.
• bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
  And of course no one bothers to ask what precipitate(d/s) the first steps, what gets the ball rolling down the slippery slope in the first place, because it's unacceptable to ask such questions. We had better start asking those questions soon if we want to avoid the most tragic trajectories ahead but sadly I don't see that happening anytime soon.
• pmachinery 6y ago
  Unfortunately if/when people do speak out or rise up about abuses of/from authority they are countered by bootlickers, or people who genuinely believe 'it could never happen here'.
  • svrb 6y ago
    Or people who believe 'my side could never do it'.
  • distherapy 6y ago
    the nationalists and statists are more dangerous than the footsoldiers themselves. the gestapo are like the ori on stargate. the only power they have they get from the submission and worship by their followers.
• ip26 6y ago
  If 2016-2020 gave us a window into what it's like, I would say your last bit isn't quite right: Authoritarianism rises gradually and relies on people looking away from it, unable to confront inconvenient truths. I feel like many people paid a lot of attention, and confronted truths, and spoke out about it. Yet, Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not risk being shot in the streets at Step B, why should you finally take arms & march at Step C? And so on to Step D. (Unless in your statement, "relies on people looking away..." refers to a subset of people, not the nation as a whole)
  • panax 6y ago
    I was not referring to any specific group of people. And you are right, there has been a great deal of attention and action. I think it is a healthy sign and may be a reason for cautious optimism, but this is a continuous effort and we need to remain vigilant.
    • ip26 6y ago
      Mostly I'm reflecting on how I had understood this document previously. I'd read portions before 2016, and I'm now thinking it was not quite precise enough. Maybe I'd revise your statement like this: Authoritarianism rises gradually and relies on [a critical mass of] people looking away from it, unable to confront inconvenient truths. The story of Germany paints a picture where no one speaks up. Yet, as we've seen it can still happen with less than universal complicity. As a result I think the lesson shifts.
      • deleted 6y ago
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  • davrosthedalek 6y ago
    Assume Covid didn't happen. Are you absolutely sure the voting outcome would have been the same?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• lisper 6y ago
  I was also struck by this: "Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." I was reminded of the gradual but seemingly inexorable shift of control in the digital world away from the user and towards the provider: EULAs. Register for this. Sign in for that. Do you want to upgrade now or be nagged again tomorrow? (Not upgrading is not an available option.) Also, for the last three years I was working for a startup which was recently acquired by a huge multinational corporation which I will not name. The sudden onslaught of bureaucracy was a real shock. Before, if there was a technical problem, I could either fix it myself or, at worst, talk to a sysadmin who would take care of it, often in a matter of minutes. Now progress is measured in days. And some problems just can't be fixed. They are the result of some policy instituted by someone -- no one knows who -- and the policies are immutable. That some of these policies result in egregious inefficiencies or even security vulnerabilities doesn't matter. No one cares. There isn't even the pretense of a "suggestion box" whose contents gets dumped into the trash. They are not even trying to hide the fact that no one in power gives a flying fuck what anyone on the ground thinks.
  • nickff 6y ago
    I work at a (very) small electronics manufacturer (in a low-regulation industry), and the amount of regulatory compliance we have to do is almost crushing. Everything from having to report our company's ownership in a 30-page form, to having to fill out another 25-page mandatory 'industry survey' that has nothing to do with us, to having to answer impossible questions about conflict minerals... it just never ends, and the governments keep adding requirements that I'm sure nobody is actually reading.
  • imichael 6y ago
    When I read that I immediately thought of social media and how it sucks up everyone's time and energy.
• throwawayxyz123 6y ago
  > ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33 Racially charged ownership stickers. Many added to protect from racially charged vandalism. A familiar sight in 2020 USA. On the streets and online. Does your favorite open source project sport an out of place racial banner? True, the confidence of those in power in their ability to harm their targets increases gradually. But make no mistake, using blatant injustice and naked violence to silence inconvenient voices is there from the beginning. Only the scale grows over time. We could wax poetically about the effects of new communication technologies, mass radio in 1930s or mass social media in 2010s. The effects are chillingly similar, and that's what matters.
  • joeberon 6y ago
    > an out of place racial banner Are you talking about black lives matter here? If so that is the total opposite of what they meant. That is literally anti-authoritarian, anti-police killing innocent black people.
    • throwawayabc456 6y ago
      > Are you talking about black lives matter here? The trouble is, in each individual case, it's possible to know if 'Black Lives Matter' is meant to be taken at face value, or whether it connotes the (well-documented) Marxist ideology from which it was born, and with which it is often associated. Authoritarianism comes in many flavors.
      • wnkrshm 6y ago
        People fighting for their rights always seems like an attack on the comfortable majority. At one point in history people were fighting to have two days off per week, or to not have to work 17h a day, or to not have children working on machines or in mines. These moves we regard as proper and justified today were just as much an affront to the social norms as you feel this may be now.
    • jshevek 6y ago
      The literal meaning of any political slogan rarely reflects the meaning that various people ascribe to the phrase, both among supporters and detractors. Is it your position that there are no authoritarian agendas represented in the movement?
• samizdis 6y ago
  There's an introspective journal written about the run-up to WWII, which although personal also takes in societal and political observations, by Louis MacNeice, called Autumn Journal. In it, he writes: And the individual, powerless, has to exert the Powers of will and choice And choose between enormous evils, either Of which depends on somebody else’s voice. It's, maybe, 80 or so pages of poetry, but imo well worth reading. It's available, among other places, at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.184237 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.184237