MD

@fnanook

Sainte-Thérèse

Joined August 2008

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fnanook retweeted

Kathleen Winchell ❤️🤍💙🇺🇸🇺🇸

@KathleenWinche3

about 9 hours ago

I thought this was funny 😄🤣!

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fnanook retweeted

Dave W Plummer

@davepl1968

about 17 hours ago

I want to convince you to read a book with a scary cover. Everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, not because it is the last word on Nazis, but because it remains one of the most powerful demonstrations ever written of how civilization can fail while still believing itself to be civilized. That is the terrifying genius of Shirer’s book. It does not present the Third Reich as some meteor that struck Europe from outer space, nor does it comfort us with the childish notion that Germany was magically populated by millions of uniquely evil people. It shows something far more useful, and therefore far more disturbing: a modern, educated, technically sophisticated nation can be captured by lies, grievance, bureaucracy, fear, opportunism, and the small daily surrender of moral judgment. The machinery of barbarism does not require a population of monsters. It requires enough believers, enough cowards, enough careerists, enough cynics, and enough ordinary people who decide that keeping their heads down is safer than saying no. One argument I’ve heard is that all humans contain engrams that encode for certain group behaviors. When a local resource or abundance runs out, you invade a neighbor and take theirs. Or worse, you identify a group within your own population as the source of the problem and attack yourself, like an autoimmune disease. But it happens repeatedly throughout history. And the most important lesson is not that Hitler won Germany in a landslide. He did not. The Nazis became the largest party, but they never won a free majority mandate. In July 1932 they won 37.3% of the vote; in November 1932 they fell to 33.1%; and even in March 1933, after Hitler was already chancellor and political violence had warped the field, they reached 43.9%, still short of a majority. That is the chilling part. A country does not need 90% of its people to vote for madness in order for madness to govern it. It needs a militant minority, a fractured opposition, institutional weakness, elite miscalculation, and a public exhausted enough to mistake brutality for order. Shirer makes you understand that dictatorship doesn’t happen when people vote to abolish freedom. More often, it arrives wrapped in emergency powers, procedural legality, patriotic language, porous constitutions, and the promise that the unpleasant parts are “temporary”. People do not wake up one morning and decide to live in a police state. They accept one exception, then another. They tolerate one class of people being degraded because it is not yet them. They watch one newspaper silenced, one judge intimidated, one civil servant replaced, one neighbor denounced, and each time the mind performs its little act of self-preservation: surely this is not the REAL turning point; surely someone ELSE will stop it; surely it is better NOT to get involved. That is why the book is not merely history. It is a “systems manual” for democratic collapse. Shirer shows the inputs and outputs. Economic humiliation goes in. Conspiracy thinking comes out. Parliamentary paralysis goes in. The hunger for a strongman comes out. Propaganda goes in. Moral permission comes out. Career incentives go in. Obedience comes out. The horrifying thing is how much of it looks less like a thunderclap than like an old programming flowchart. Forms are stamped. Orders are routed. Promotions are granted. The trains run on time. Men like Asperger who would never personally murder a child learn to serve a system that does. And that is the second great reason to read it: it destroys the comfortable distance between “them” and “us.” Most people contain the engrams necessary to fall in line under the right pressure. That does not mean everyone is secretly a Nazi. It means human beings are exquisitely vulnerable to belonging, fear, status, obedience, resentment, and the narcotic-like relief of not having to think too hard when a leader offers a complete explanation for every pain or problem. Shirer forces the reader to confront evil not as a rare substance found only in supervillains, but as a set of ordinary human capacities intentionally reorganized by ideology and power. The book also matters because Shirer wrote with the eye of a witness. He was nor a historian, he was a journalist. As someone with ASD, I don’t fall prey to books like “A People’s History of the United States” because they are, at their core, emotional tracts. Shirer’s book is not. It’s journalism. It’s like reading a newspaper of events written by someone who was there and who had time to think about them. That’s because he had lived in Germany as a correspondent and watched the Nazi state harden around him. His great advantage is not academic distance but proximity. You feel the sequence of events as something unfolding in real time, not as a museum exhibit safely sealed behind glass. That gives the book its momentum. It reads less like a textbook than like a slow-motion systems crash, where every warning light is blinking and the operators keep insisting the reactor is fine. Yes, modern historians have refined, corrected, and complicated parts of Shirer’s interpretation. They should. No serious reader should stop with one book, especially one first published before I was even born. But that is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to start there and then keep going. Shirer gives the reader the great brutal architecture of the thing: the rise, the consolidation, the war, the crimes, the delusions, the collapse. Later scholarship can add wiring, plumbing, and better load-bearing analysis. Shirer gives you the building. And just when you start to feel comfortable there, he sets it on fire while you are still inside. What makes the book indispensable is that it turns “never again” from a slogan into a diagnostic skill. After reading it, you become less impressed by uniforms, slogans, rallies, and certainty. You become more suspicious of people who explain every problem by pointing at a hated internal enemy. You recognize the danger of elites who think they can harness extremists for their own purposes. You notice when law becomes a weapon instead of a restraint. You understand that institutions do not defend themselves; PEOPLE defend them, or they become scenery. And perhaps most importantly, you learn that moral catastrophe is usually incrementalbefore it is total. The abyss does not always announce itself. Sometimes it is approached by reasonable men making “practical compromises”, by citizens tired of chaos, by newspapers chasing access, by judges respecting technicalities, by businessmen preferring stability, by soldiers obeying oaths, and by neighbors deciding that silence is not approval exactly, just prudence. That’s the part that scared me the most – wondering where the “pragmatic me” would yield to the “moral me”, and just how sure I was that it would. That is why everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Not to congratulate themselves again for being unlike the people in it, but to understand how much like them we might become if the incentives, fears, and pressures were arranged badly enough. The book is essentially a warning against human weakness under industrialized conditions. It teaches that civilization is not a possession. It is a behavior. It must be renewed, defended, and practiced, especially when doing so is extremely inconvenient. And if a thousand pages of Shirer leaves you with anything, it is this: the machine is built by people, staffed by people, obeyed by people, and stopped, when it is stopped at all, by people who finally decide not to fall in line. One final “pragmatic” note – there’s a chapter or two on the elections that go through the returns in a lot of detail. That part is a bit of a slog – you have my permission to fast-forward. But the rest of it is incredible. PS: I would have just written this as an episode if YouTube were amenable to creators working outside of their channel's comfort zone, but alas... no. Amazon: https://t.co/ODNWm2U8s5

$davepl1968's tweet photo. I want to convince you to read a book with a scary cover. Everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, not because it is the last word on Nazis, but because it remains one of the most powerful demonstrations ever written of how civilization can fail while still believing itself to be civilized. That is the terrifying genius of Shirer’s book. It does not present the Third Reich as some meteor that struck Europe from outer space, nor does it comfort us with the childish notion that Germany was magically populated by millions of uniquely evil people. It shows something far more useful, and therefore far more disturbing: a modern, educated, technically sophisticated nation can be captured by lies, grievance, bureaucracy, fear, opportunism, and the small daily surrender of moral judgment. The machinery of barbarism does not require a population of monsters. It requires enough believers, enough cowards, enough careerists, enough cynics, and enough ordinary people who decide that keeping their heads down is safer than saying no. One argument I’ve heard is that all humans contain engrams that encode for certain group behaviors. When a local resource or abundance runs out, you invade a neighbor and take theirs. Or worse, you identify a group within your own population as the source of the problem and attack yourself, like an autoimmune disease. But it happens repeatedly throughout history. And the most important lesson is not that Hitler won Germany in a landslide. He did not. The Nazis became the largest party, but they never won a free majority mandate. In July 1932 they won 37.3% of the vote; in November 1932 they fell to 33.1%; and even in March 1933, after Hitler was already chancellor and political violence had warped the field, they reached 43.9%, still short of a majority. That is the chilling part. A country does not need 90% of its people to vote for madness in order for madness to govern it. It needs a militant minority, a fractured opposition, institutional weakness, elite miscalculation, and a public exhausted enough to mistake brutality for order. Shirer makes you understand that dictatorship doesn’t happen when people vote to abolish freedom. More often, it arrives wrapped in emergency powers, procedural legality, patriotic language, porous constitutions, and the promise that the unpleasant parts are “temporary”. People do not wake up one morning and decide to live in a police state. They accept one exception, then another. They tolerate one class of people being degraded because it is not yet them. They watch one newspaper silenced, one judge intimidated, one civil servant replaced, one neighbor denounced, and each time the mind performs its little act of self-preservation: surely this is not the REAL turning point; surely someone ELSE will stop it; surely it is better NOT to get involved. That is why the book is not merely history. It is a “systems manual” for democratic collapse. Shirer shows the inputs and outputs. Economic humiliation goes in. Conspiracy thinking comes out. Parliamentary paralysis goes in. The hunger for a strongman comes out. Propaganda goes in. Moral permission comes out. Career incentives go in. Obedience comes out. The horrifying thing is how much of it looks less like a thunderclap than like an old programming flowchart. Forms are stamped. Orders are routed. Promotions are granted. The trains run on time. Men like Asperger who would never personally murder a child learn to serve a system that does. And that is the second great reason to read it: it destroys the comfortable distance between “them” and “us.” Most people contain the engrams necessary to fall in line under the right pressure. That does not mean everyone is secretly a Nazi. It means human beings are exquisitely vulnerable to belonging, fear, status, obedience, resentment, and the narcotic-like relief of not having to think too hard when a leader offers a complete explanation for every pain or problem. Shirer forces the reader to confront evil not as a rare substance found only in supervillains, but as a set of ordinary human capacities intentionally reorganized by ideology and power. The book also matters because Shirer wrote with the eye of a witness. He was nor a historian, he was a journalist. As someone with ASD, I don’t fall prey to books like “A People’s History of the United States” because they are, at their core, emotional tracts. Shirer’s book is not. It’s journalism. It’s like reading a newspaper of events written by someone who was there and who had time to think about them. That’s because he had lived in Germany as a correspondent and watched the Nazi state harden around him. His great advantage is not academic distance but proximity. You feel the sequence of events as something unfolding in real time, not as a museum exhibit safely sealed behind glass. That gives the book its momentum. It reads less like a textbook than like a slow-motion systems crash, where every warning light is blinking and the operators keep insisting the reactor is fine. Yes, modern historians have refined, corrected, and complicated parts of Shirer’s interpretation. They should. No serious reader should stop with one book, especially one first published before I was even born. But that is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to start there and then keep going. Shirer gives the reader the great brutal architecture of the thing: the rise, the consolidation, the war, the crimes, the delusions, the collapse. Later scholarship can add wiring, plumbing, and better load-bearing analysis. Shirer gives you the building. And just when you start to feel comfortable there, he sets it on fire while you are still inside. What makes the book indispensable is that it turns “never again” from a slogan into a diagnostic skill. After reading it, you become less impressed by uniforms, slogans, rallies, and certainty. You become more suspicious of people who explain every problem by pointing at a hated internal enemy. You recognize the danger of elites who think they can harness extremists for their own purposes. You notice when law becomes a weapon instead of a restraint. You understand that institutions do not defend themselves; PEOPLE defend them, or they become scenery. And perhaps most importantly, you learn that moral catastrophe is usually incrementalbefore it is total. The abyss does not always announce itself. Sometimes it is approached by reasonable men making “practical compromises”, by citizens tired of chaos, by newspapers chasing access, by judges respecting technicalities, by businessmen preferring stability, by soldiers obeying oaths, and by neighbors deciding that silence is not approval exactly, just prudence. That’s the part that scared me the most – wondering where the “pragmatic me” would yield to the “moral me”, and just how sure I was that it would. That is why everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Not to congratulate themselves again for being unlike the people in it, but to understand how much like them we might become if the incentives, fears, and pressures were arranged badly enough. The book is essentially a warning against human weakness under industrialized conditions. It teaches that civilization is not a possession. It is a behavior. It must be renewed, defended, and practiced, especially when doing so is extremely inconvenient. And if a thousand pages of Shirer leaves you with anything, it is this: the machine is built by people, staffed by people, obeyed by people, and stopped, when it is stopped at all, by people who finally decide not to fall in line. One final “pragmatic” note – there’s a chapter or two on the elections that go through the returns in a lot of detail. That part is a bit of a slog – you have my permission to fast-forward. But the rest of it is incredible. PS: I would have just written this as an episode if YouTube were amenable to creators working outside of their channel's comfort zone, but alas... no. Amazon: https://t.co/ODNWm2U8s5$

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