I’ve always been curious how fascism takes hold, and how people like Hitler, Stalin. etc rise to power. Do people not see what is happening? Shouldn’t hindsight, foresight and common sense kick in at some point? I used t think they were like mob bosses early on - anyone disagreeing with them ends up in a barrel, but surely were civilized and educated by now?
It seems the people don’t want to jeopardize their comfortable livelihoods and individual lives so expect the ‘powerful elected officials’ to do their bidding. After all, the public gave them the power to do just that. Otoh, the politicians don’t want to jeopardize their cushy jobs and accumulated power by challenging the majority, so are waiting for the public to start a jan6 situation so they can point and say, ‘see, the people are unhappy so we should act’.
It’s a shitstorm of no consequences and a man child hacking away at the country and no one seems to be doing anything meaningful. I’m literally watching fascism take place.
History/ psychology/ sociology majors care to chime in?
That gives him too much credit. Stalin was relatively inconsequential in the rise and initial rule of the Bolsheviks, which happened under Lenin with Trotsky as a strong second in command. He just managed to palace intrigue his way to the top after Lenin died.
He did keep his power by purging everyone all the time, which is another thing that seems to work better on humans than pure rationality would suggest it should. People were never risk-tolerant enough to stop him, but also never risk-averse enough to avoid working for him, probably out of hubris.
I’m going to recommend Ordinary Men, which is a book cataloging and analysing accounts of members of one of the battalions responsible for machine gunning people into ditches.
A random German won’t necessarily be super into history. A random Israeli is liable to say it had nothing to do with fascism and everyone is always against the Jews specifically. History is still going on there, and there’s no objectivity.