I guess whole books could and have been written about who knew what and when in terms of the Nazi concentration camps. But we know each of those millions of narratives must have passed through three stages at varying times:
- “Hitler? Who’s that?”
- “I’m starting to suspect [or should suspect] that what’s happening is worse than I can justify”
- [Nuremberg trials]
If you’re willing to blow up government buildings at stage 1, you’re Tim McVeigh. If you’re not willing to blow up government buildings at stage 3, you’re Adolf Eichmann. So, clearly, we all need to be paying a lot of attention to stage 2. Especially if you’re in the “can’t happen here” camp, because the longer you hold onto that idea, the faster you will have to rethink your worldview if you want to stay on the right side of history.
If the TGOP regime does end as badly as many of us fear, we are well past the point where anyone can claim not to have seen the warning signs. Even if you still think it’s OK to be a Republican voter, it’s definitely not OK to dismiss the danger out of hand. The stakes are high enough that yes, you can fucking afford to spend half an hour thinking about questions that make you uncomfortable. If, like @Loudoun_hillbilly, your argument is “these camps aren’t actual death camps [yet]”, well, by the time you learn that there are death camps, people will be dead, and it’s extremely unlikely you will be able to do anything to stop it. It’s like saying “there’s no need to slow down, we haven’t even hit the tree yet”.
We still don’t know for certain that America will ever reach the Nuremberg stage. That it’s even a serious question ought to rule out anyone voting Republican for a generation; we’ll see how that goes. But with the current direction of travel, any vaguely ethical person needs to be on alert. What will it look like, from your point of view, if the line is crossed? Fox News will not tell you, and neither will CNN. They’ll report some atrocity, and try to frame it like this is a normal thing that happens, and it will be down to you to say “no, this is not ok”. Don’t wait for it to be gas chambers or journalists pushed out of helicopters; that will be too late.
Protip: If the regime is putting children in cages, and overtly gloating about it, that is as clear a signpost as you are going to get before this road reaches a destination you don’t want to see.
