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Sometimes, among your readings, there are sentences that just seem to stick to your mind even a long time after you first read them.One of those enduring sentences as far as I'm concerned, come from a history book that I probably got ahold of around the age of 12. It was the opening title of a quite consequent part of the book, spanning over several chapters.
It read: "The Rise of Nazism".
I remember that when I read these simple words and felt the sinister threat they diffuse, they did not evoke images of the tragedy that was yet to come when Nazism was just rising.
Even now, they do not summon to my mind pictures of kids walking hands up before a German soldier or the vision of baleful gates at the terminal of a railway.
The first things I envision at the evocation of this sentence, are the National-Socialist rallies, flags and banners bearing eerie and powerful symbols, crowds of thousands of semi-hysterical people communicant in hatred, already caught in the nihilist spiral that would ultimately destroy them but so full of inability that they willingly and heartily joined the death cult.
To me, the rise of Nazism will always evoke gatherings of Socialists and Nationalists, putting aside their differences to unite the forces of their hates of individual liberties at large and the global ambiance of a dark sun rising over a murky dawn: no clearly defined threat - not yet - but a sheaf of gloomy harbingers that makes you wonder what the day will bring.
The rise of Nazism, as seen when it happened, was probably nothing more than uproarious crowds assembling and revolving around negative concepts, and cheering at the harangues of populist speakers. A bit theatrical, a bit violent but so many people found their deceptive ideas so appealing, that the visible violence was probably disregarded or minimized.
What's a bit of violence, in acts, words or thoughts, compared to the power that the last of the individuals in the crowd could wield - or for most of them, just feel - at the cost of renouncing to what makes his own identity and thank to the blind and decerebrated collective action, anyway?
When I read the chapters that followed, when the images of a kid walking hands up before a German soldier or the brutal vision of what happened behind the gates at the terminal of the railway, eventually struck me and propelled my young learning mind to a point of non return, I started to wonder how it could have happened.
How, not why.
The why being awfully simple to understand, I therefore wondered, and still wonder, if there were some to foresee the disaster. I wonder if, beyond the apparently peaceful gatherings, accepted as such by a credulous majority, somebody beheld the speakers and saw clearly what was at stake. I wonder if, when the worst of the SA activity was to polish their shoes and parade in their brown shirts while their leaders were screaming in microphones, someone wrote, maybe to the Mayor of Nuremberg, something like this.
I'm fairly certain someone did, and I wonder why it was ignored.
Because the how is awfully simple to understand now.
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997 - Peter
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998 - Papertiger the Californian
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