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Comment by gentleman11 | Hacker News Reader

The further we get from wwii, and the Cold War to some extent, the harder it is to remind the public how scary it is to live without freedoms. How do we remind them? Could China and Russia act as cautionary tales that voters would respond to?

Putin jailing and murdering his political opposition, Chinese concentration camps for muslims - why do so many people assume it can’t happen here? Nazi germany wasnt some backwater nation, it was a strong, extremely cultured, advanced nation that was going through some very hard times. Germans didn’t like what happened - there were countless assassination attempts against hitler, but it was just eventually too late

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Even you have forgotten that it's already happening in the US: you only need to look at the horrendous human conditions and the industrialization of the prison and justice system, which targets minorities for the pettiest offenses to be able to fill the prisons and make profits for their owners. Or look at the concentration camps at the border, where migrants are treated worse than we would treat any animal. Or look at the disproportionate treatment of minorities by police force: they are _scared_ of the police force, to the point the advice is to not trust the police. Is that something a citizen from a free country should face ?

It _is_ happening already, and despite the few vocal people talking about it the news cycle is spinning so fast that it goes out of the discussion in a matter of days and people seem to forget it.

You will always find that one social media post that will prolong any sentence.

> why do so many people assume it can’t happen here?

Is that actually the assumption? I'm pretty sure everyone already assumes that the government already has all of your messages, browsing history, transactions, etc, and they can come for you if they want.

Between the massive surveillance state that already exists and the judicial miracle of "parallel construction", it's already very much a problem. The only thing left to do is scale up.

There is something worse than gulags.

Telescreens, watched by "AI".

They can arrest you on trumped up charges, but it's not really feasible to do that to everybody, and extreme heavy-handedness promotes resistance.

Once they reach inside your device, they don't have to murder or imprison you, they can just give you a little slap whenever you try to stray from the garden path. Let you know that they're watching so they don't even have to censor you, and can claim that they don't, because you censor yourself.

Crimethink. Doubleplus ungood.

They can arrest you on trumped up charges, but it's not really feasible to do that to everybody

No, but I would imagine there would soon be some way of removing your liberty and keep you under house arrest for a set period. Imagine if they made sure your banking and cards were frozen for the period to stop you going anywhere...

Or a social credit system that prevented you from using public transit

A while ago there was a "north korean browser" that kept track of everything one did online. At the time people were saying how dystopic that was, but I'd always thought it must have been an elaborate troll, an in-your-face reminder of what could easily be done today, at multiple layers of the stack, with one's digital exhaust.

(On the sibling thread: by my calculation at most 13% of the 1984 society had telescreens, so at roughly 60% global internet usage we're well ahead of Orwell for staring into Palantirs.

Someone in the non-aligned movement ought to produce networking gear, so we aren't necessarily beholden to suppliers approved by one of the two[0] largest economies. Then again, seeing what happened to the former "leader of the third world" after the Cold War, maybe it's best not to draw attention to oneself in that way. "None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.")

[0] China, US, would you all please reflect that "one to embody power the other to crave it" is a philosophy attributed to the "bad guys" in that particular mythos?

I would dare say it’s already happened here to a segment of our population. The War on Drugs, secret prisons, National Security Letters, extraordinary renditions, and “signature strikes.”

> Germans didn’t like what happened - there were countless assassination attempts against hitler, but it was just eventually too late.

That myth has to die - there was no real opposition against Hitler for as long as he was successful. He was probably the most popular political leader of all the time. German people did not have a problem with his hatred against Jews, on the contrary, that's what gave him his popularity. It never was "Bad Nazis vs Good Germans" - Nazis and Germans were one and the same.

Yes, initially, in 1933 Nazis did slauther some of their political opponents, but for the years after that they really didn't need to terrorize the nation. Gestapo in 1937 was just 7000 people, inlcuding secretaries and other support stuff, and that was enough to keep 60 million nation in check. Compare that to 200k members of STASI in communist East Germany after war.

As for assasination attempts - if you look at Wikipedia list [0] you'll notice two things:

1. Most of them are pathetic, with zero chance of succeeding

2. None of them are attempted by common "good Germans" - some are by members of competing radical groups, some by citizens of countries conquered by Hitler, then, starting in 1940s there are attempts by generals that realize Germany is going to lose the war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassination_attempts...

I’ll read more about it before I post the idea again, thanks for the correction

> He was probably the most popular political leader of all the time.

Worth noting that their first major win was in response to the stock market crash, but his popularity really only soared after they took power and imposed censorship.

Free speech not such a virtue in Nazi Germany. Much easier to be popular when nobody is allowed to say anything against you.

People hat Nazi spies within their own homes that made sure nobodY said anything wrong. Have a diary about such a couple. They made 200 people careful about what to say. Of course free speech was pretty much non-existent.

Most dissent was from somewhat popular leftist movements, that were directly targeted by any anti-free speech actions.

If you weren't, as americans would say, a "commie"? You felt like you won.

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