I think it's that, after a fascist government is ousted via violence, people spend so much time and effort to demonize them, that Joe Blow on the street doesn't see them as 'Us' anymore.
We would never make decisions like They made, so We don't have to worry if Our leader is a fascist. Our leader is nothing like Their leader was, other than in absolute power. Our leader has our best interests in mind. Their leader was just a power hungry madman.
When we remove the humanity from the monsters, we fail to remember that we could be monsters, too.
Why did so many turn a blind eye to the Holocaust? Why did so many ignore the Holodomor? Why did no one stand against great evil?
Presently, there is debate about whether there is true Evil, as well as some absolute Truth. And if there's no foundation on which to build a case of "this is evil", then why would anyone act? Couple that with the fact that -- at least in the United States -- it is legal for the government to propagandize (re lie) the American peoples, and you have a perfect storm of stress and lies that leads to "I'm alone and there's nothing I can do in face of all that is terrible".
What is one man to do?
The one man at Tianeman Square became an emblem of standing up to tyranny. What if there had been another with him? Or ten more?
Solzhenitsyn claims that a little resistance would have completely disabled the Russian Communists.
And was never seen again. :/
I'm not sure where the line in the sand is.
The Russian civil war lasted six years, was a bit more than 'a little resistance', killed ten million people, and it didn't quite achieve the desired effect.
If anything, it grew and encouraged the winners' paranoia, and put them on a permanent war footing.
> When we remove the humanity from the monsters, we fail to remember that we could be monsters, too.
I could not agree more.
If that holds true the next fews years are going to be interesting
It usually starts with lack of representation, then coercion and then compulsion. I'd say its probably closer to 60 years, all you really need is one bad large generational cohort to get the snowball rolling, and then it becomes almost impossible to reverse, 2 generations down; with the standard generational time period being 20 years.
unless ofcourse we get WWIII early due to Russia....
I remember growing up reading Harrison Bergeron (in school) and always thinking there's no way such a system would ever come about by the will of the people... yet SF proves people are all too happy to implement such a system (tearing down gifted students for the perceived benefit of everyone else). SSDD.
And on top of it they claimed it was a success as failure rates went down. The failure rate went down because nobody was being tested.
https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-...
> The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.