I will bear witness.

Currently I'm reading a translated version of Victor Klemperer's personal diary of life in Nazi Germany. Of course the majority of the diary entries are constrained to personal influences of the Nazi regime it nevertheless provides sufficient broad details of the systematic choking of the Jewish people under Hitler's political machine. Klemperer was a literary professor at a technical institute in Germany who had an interest in the French enlightment particularly with famous writers such as Voltaire. It is no wonder then, that his diaries contain sufficient and often candid depictions of life as a Jew.

If read in the right frame of mind, one begins to live the life in situ of a Jewish citizen. Such a horrid existence, early on Klemperer knew from 1933 at the beginning of it all, that impending doom would come to him and his people. Einstein had the same insight and left Germany that year. The freedoms were taken quite suddenly actually. Jews in professorships were quickly removed of their posts within weeks of Hitler's rise to power. Jewish professors were not allowed to give examinations to students (one colleague of Klemperer's did and was subsequently removed from his post) Telephone calls and letters from Jews were monitered by state agencies. In this year Jewish people did not necessarily fear for their lives in so much as worry about their livelihoods. Klemperer however wrote of accounts of men within only a month of time wearing SA uniforms and swatiska's although still treating him politely the writing was on the wall.

... when you turn on the news and you hear someone was murdered, your heart feels for the victim and their family and rage builds against the aggressor. This is a very natural instinct, because one recognizes injustice based off an internally and externally grounded sense of morality and virtue. Men fight wars voluntarily based off their grounded ideals of virtue. Cultures across the world adopt laws protecting their people from crimes against humanity such as murder, rape, burglarly - these concepts of morality are not new to modern civilization it can be shown since Hammurabi's code and Roman and Greek as well as Egyptian law that men have shared common sense of virtue for millenia.

One thing that has always confounded me is that people can be programed so easily to turn against their long grounded and perhaps even natural belief in morality. When Stalin called his fellow communists to pillage and burn at the stake the Kulaks and other "rich" persons people of course followed his orders and slaughtered them. Hitler infected millions of Germans to share his hell borne ideas of Jews to the point where they willingly slaughtered them as if they were less than animals. Mao convinced the Chinese communists to purge each other in the great cultural revolution. All of these dictators were able to spread a message that was completely against what is the natural and grounded beliefs in morality.

But how? Psychologists describe the phenomenon known as group think and obviously this is what was going on in each of these tyrannies, however if the original group thought was inclined to morality - what change in that group think allowed the tyrants to gain power?

Clearly in Nazi Germany it was the fall of Germany in WWI, the treaty of Versailles, the French occupation of German territory, as well as the bout of hyperinflation these seemingly unrelated phenomena is what cracked the German people and allowed their normal equilibrium of thought and practice to be guided by..well Hitler.

It leaves one to wonder, that the true threat to freedom is not necessarily to tyrants themself for they exist indefinitely within a population. Rather the true threat to freedom is extreme environmental conditions to a culture. Like the financial collapse of 2008. Obama is too stupid to take advantage of the American people(well in the sense of becoming a dictator), but one must wonder what future hell can await modern civilization if America were to suffer a catastrophe similar to what happened in the 1920s to Germany.