Monday 12 February 2007

The creeping tide

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

- from the excellent Information Clearing House daily bulletin.

2 comments:

Richard W. Symonds said...

If you put a frog straight into boiling water it will jump out.

If you put a frog in water and slowly heat it up, it will stay there and boil to death.

Jose said...

Excellent, Anticant. It is curious but I've observed that leaders who were totalitarians in the past normally watched their subjects' reactions, they kept agents infiltrated to sound feelings. Their regimes were based on the support of a great part of the population, those with a brainwashed mentality, who were majority.

But that was a relatively long time ago, today they seem to forget that people "think", that they are better informed, that brainwashing is no longer so easy as it used to be. Totalitarianism today is valid for countries with a low educational level.

Western leaders, however, such as Bush and Blair and other minor puppets very easily forget their positions and sooner or later will fall in their own trap.

Or so at least I expect.