“This is what we call self-mobilization of society”
Wingnuts create a “Summer Hell” – NJ 12th CD event. It can happen here.
[Update 2: 10/17/10 – could the press finally be figuring out that Christie is a wing nut? See: Bergen Record: Signs of N.J. Gov. Christie’s emerging social agenda
Update 1: 10/17/10 – Tom Moran of Star Ledger nails it: Tea Party candidate Anna Little taking wild swings – end update]
A New York Times story today – provides an historical lesson for our current Tea Party politics (dominated at the State level in NJ by an authoritarian governor who won a recent Tea Party straw poll for President 2012):
Hitler Exhibit Explores a Wider Circle of Guilt
“This is what we call self-mobilization of society”, said Hans-Ulrich Thamer, one of three curators to assemble the exhibit at the German Historical Museum. “As a person, Hitler was a very ordinary man. He was nothing without the people.”
This show, “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime” opened Friday. It was billed as the first in Germany since the end of World War II to focus exclusively on Adolf Hitler. Germany outlaws public displays of some Nazi symbols, and the curators took care to avoid showing items that appeared to glorify Hitler. His uniforms, for example, remained in storage.
Instead, the show focuses on the society that nurtured and empowered him. It is not the first time historians have argued that Hitler did not corral the Germans as much as the Germans elevated Hitler. But one curator said the message was arguably more vital for Germany now than at any time in the past six decades, as rising nationalism, more open hostility to immigrants and a generational disconnect from the events of the Nazi era have older Germans concerned about repeating the past.
“The only hope for stopping extremists is to isolate them from society so that they are separated, so they do not have a relationship with the bourgeoisie and the other classes,” Mr. Thamer said. “The Nazis were members of high society. This was the dangerous moment. …
“This exhibition is about Hitler and the Germans” meaning the social and political and individual processes by which much of the German people became enablers, colluders, co-criminals in the Holocaust, said Constanze Stelzenaller, a senior trans-Atlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin. “That this was so is now a mainstream view, rejected only by a small minority of very elderly and deluded people, or the German extreme right-wing fringe. But it took us a while to get there.”
the roots of the Tea Party – “Summer Hells” 2009