[Spagbol]

I had never heard of Enver Hoxha until I listened to the episodes about him on the Real Dictators podcast. Very wild stuff. I find it really fascinating and rather sobering that these invasive authoritarian governments can one day take root and control most or all of the rest of your life. I fear that people's complacency or thoughts that "surely it can't happen here" are part of what lets them rise in the first place, and I wonder just how quickly you can find yourself inside of one.

[frereubu]

The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great read on that subject. (It's very long, but the abridged versions are fine as long as you get a good translation). Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny is also great - a biography from a series of post-war interviews with the commandant at Treblinka concentration camp, who wasn't any evil genius, just someone who didn't have any particularly strong moral feelings and went with the zeitgeist. The Lives Of Others is a great film about the Stasi in East Germany too.

[Akasazh]

Into that darkness is pretty grim, to be honest. Great read but gut wrenching

[frereubu]

Totally grim, but it put to bed any queries in my mind of "how could anyone possibly end up doing that?" It was really clear how easily unremarkable people just go with the flow until they find themselves doing horrific things without batting an eyelid.

Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is really interesting (although pretty heavy going - I didn't finish it) on how bureacracy enabled the Holocaust by reducing it to a long line of people taking orders from their superiors and giving orders to their subordinates so they could compartmentalise their actions to inputs and outputs, until it got to the people who actually carried out the atrocities, which even the Nazis realised not everyone could do.

There's also a great book called transcript by Heimrad Bäcker, where he uses cut-up bits of the bureacracy (as it sounds like you'll know, the Nazis were sticklers for record-keeping) of the Holocaust in a kind of poetic form, where sometimes the things are identifiable, such as numbers of clothing items taken from people at the extermination camps, and others are just lists of numbers or words leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps.

[sitkack]

I think most large bureaucracies are susceptible to this. They form of an overlay psychosis.

[duxup]

I fear a lot of people are happy to look the other way when “my guy” is doing something, especially when it seems to be directed at whatever they fear.

That and I fear most people really don’t have any principles when push comes to shove.

[potato3732842]

Exactly. And that lack of principals is what we should be punishing as a society, not any particular position. The rest will work itself out in time.

[sitkack]

People with principles are dangerous precisely because they aren’t bending the rules in support of the body politic.

You want a boy scout that focuses more on the group than the ideals.

[tommiegannert]

Just keep voting for different parties/people. It's when they're able to say "I'll be in power for a long time" that the upper echelons and the army start backing their person rather than the people. Oh, and avoid having loop holes in the constitution.

[gpvos]

As long as you can, see Germany's 1938 "election": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_German_parliamentary_el...

I doubt that that was constitutional, but maybe it was, after all they got in power legally in 1933.

[smcin]

Interesting snippet:

> The recently completed Kraft durch Freude cruise ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was anchored in international waters near the United Kingdom to serve as a floating polling station for German and Austrian citizens living in the UK. On 10 April 1938, 1,978 voters (including 806 Austrians) were ferried from Tilbury, east of London.

[usefulcat]

That only works as long as fair elections are still a thing.

[ashoeafoot]

Also the suffering they cause remains abstract due to scale. Everyone of those bunkers financially ruined a few families and the future of their offspring.

[IncreasePosts]

Well, let's look at what was happening in Albania.

Since forever: Ruled by ottoman empire

...along comes the 20th century...

1912: We declare independence!

1914: Let's pick a king...

1925: Let's pick a new king...

1939: I guess the Italians are king now...

1944: Communism, we're all kings!

1946: Hoxha is the king of kings

[thih9]

1991: nope, let’s elect a parliament

1997: one more time and without pyramid schemes[1]

2009: nato

2014: official eu candidate

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania

[vasco]

The pyramid scheme one is scary, I wonder what will happen when crypto collapses. It's gotten so big that it infects the rest of the financial system in a big way already - globally.

[Yawrehto]

"Everyone is a king, but some kings are more kingly than others."

Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.

[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-los...

[2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them.

[3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.

[KptMarchewa]

>The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them

Wow, that was done by Poles in Poland? How did that happen? Certainly the whole nation had to be behind this? [0]

>some German-occupied country in World War Two

Ah, the bare minimum mention at the end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations#Nu...

[GJim]

> Fun fact about World War II Albania...... they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.

That is perhaps an interesting fact. But not really a fun one.

[Yawrehto]

Well, it was more fun than the one about Poland...and it wasn't all about death and dying and genocide, which is really as fun as Holocaust facts get.