Pacific Views

Recommended Reading: They Thought They Were Free

Buzzflash has a review by Thom Hartman about Milton Mayer's book: They Thought They Were Free. When looking at what was done in Germany, one of the worst thoughts is how do you stop the slow and pervasive evil that overtakes ordinary people just trying to get along with their lives?

I preface this review of Milton Mayer's book with all this personal and historical/reference information by way of hopefully establishing enough credibility in your mind to make a simple statement:

It could happen here, too.

This was also Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination, after he got to know real Nazis. An American Jew of German ancestry, and a brilliant reporter, Mayer went to Germany 7 years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 Nazis. This book is, in large part, his story of that experience. Intertwined through it -- written in 1955 -- are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans -- us, today.

Mayer opens the book by noting that he was prepared to hate the Nazis he would meet. But, he wrote, he discovered they were just as human as the rest of us:

I liked them. I couldn't help it. Again and again, as I sat or walked with one or another of my ten [Nazi] friends, I was overcome by the same sensation that had got in the way of my newspaper reporting in Chicago years before [in the 1930s]. I liked Al Capone. I liked the way he treated his mother. He treated her better than I treated mine.

He writes about how if he were to die tonight, at least he could look back on some good he had done. But his Nazi friends would never be able to die in peace, knowing the evil they had participated in, if even by acts of omission, could never be wiped clean. And he dreaded that Americans would ever feel the same for the acts we may one day commit as a nation.

Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany - not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.

I came home a little bit afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under combined pressure of reality and illusion. I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.

If I - and my countrymen - ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm.

What does living in a paranoid, authoritarian state which justifies torture and disappearing people do to the character, indeed, the soul of a people? Those are the questions we must start to face here in our own country.

Go read the rest and then go buy the book.

Posted by Mary at November 6, 2005 04:22 PM | Recommended Reading | Technorati links |