They Thought They Were Free



Home
A Shocking Experiment
Boldness and Courage
A Daring Adventure
Dreams and Imagination
Creativity
Goals
Action
Hard Work
Persistence
Fail Your Way To The Top
Individuality
Fools and Madmen
Acres of Diamonds
Human Becomings
Consideration For Others
Strength Undefeatable
Anticipation
Release Your Brakes
Dare to Forgive
Destiny
Great Expectations
Bunker Bean
Freedom and Democracy
Knowledge
Think
Mind
Hush, little baby...
Mercola Newsletter
HEART'S MEMORY
THE GRIM SHADOW
"Downy"
"Spongy Monkey"
"The Brutal Butterfly"
"Shadow and Sunshine"
"Floating Skyward"
"Tinker's Toys"
"His Beloved's Heart"
It's All About Me
Talk To Me

What no one seemed to notice ...

was the ever widening gap ... between the government and the people ... And it became always wider ... the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway ... Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about ... and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated ... by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us ... Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted', that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' ...must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing ... Each act ... is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone... you don't want to go out of your way to make trouble ... And it is not just fear ... that restrains you, it is also genuine uncertainty ... And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it ... But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed... You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father ... could never have imagined."


Milton Sanford Mayer
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945"

wewarnedyou.jpg

Martin P. Seligman, author of Learned Optimism created a ground-breaking experiment which was first performed with dogs back in the sixties. Three dogs went through each experiment. The first dog was given mild electrical shocks which stopped whenever it pressed a panel with its nose. It got shocks, but had the power to stop them. The second dog got shocks whenever the first dog got them. This means that it received exactly the same amount and duration of electrical shocks as the first dog, but it had no chance to affect this. The third dog got no shocks. The next day each dog is placed in a special shuttlebox. Here the dog is given an electrical shock that it can easily escape by jumping over a low barrier. And the results were, that dog number one (who had krecieved shocks it could turn off itself) quickly jumped over the barrier. So did dog number three that had gotten no shocks. But dog number two just lay there whimpering, feeling powerless to change its conditions.

nevergiveup.jpg