interesting quote from 1955 – exactly 50 years ago:

May 24, 2005

" 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 . . . (it) 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. "

---From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans,

1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

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