| "Those are probably not the people who compare themselves with Sophie Scholl on protests or something like that. They know the difference." Are there many of those? Here in Germany we had one case I am aware of, and while I didn't follow it closely, it seems very likely that she has some kind of mental health issue. "Really? I think this only makes sense when you have a rosy idea about how totalitarianism looks like." Nobody claims what we are experiencing right now feels the same as life under fascism. Just that it feels like the prelude to it. I don't think it is far fetched at all. We've seen major changes of our way of life and people's attitude over a short amount of time, and major divide in society, driven by fear. The hate is real - people fear for their lives and the lives of their parents, and they are ready to blame whoever comes in handy. And the hate is murderous, especially because people fear about their own lives. I think if you enter a shop without a mask, you can well except violence from some people. And it can get worse if people refuse to get vaccinated. Already businesses promise not to do businesses with such people anymore. How can you NOT see analogies? You could say not getting vaccinated is voluntary, being Jewish is not. Nevertheless, there are parallels. Nobody claims the exact same thing is happening. It seems likely to me that fear for their lives was also what drove people to adopt fascism. The rosy view is to look back and think it was just stupidity or "evilness". I think people also feared for their lives. Here in Germany they had just witnessed an extremely murderous war (at a scale we can not imagine anymore), murderous insurrections, stuff like that. |