“Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.
“Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You're the ones responsible for our country's misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders!
“And the accused responded: We didn’t know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!
“In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?” - Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Kundera wrote this novel about the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and life in its aftermath. He wrote it in 1982, in France, where in 1975 he had gone into exile.
Am I silly to suggest a connection between that European world and this American one? Yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Bill Galston wrote an excellent piece entitled “What if It Can Happen Here?” He writes, “For the first time, I’ve begun to understand the plight of German Jews in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Some concluded that this time was different and acted accordingly, often by leaving the country. But most could not take the worst case seriously, or even conceive of it.” While he notes that comparisons to Weimar Germany are always fraught given the enormity of what ensued, I would say that the enormity of what ensued lends greater credence to the possibility of our own American worst case scenario — some sort of overthrow or ideological autocracy. In other words, if Hitler and Nazism can brew without huge alarm from those who would soon lose everything, clearly, something less atrocious can also spring to life without good people having taken steps to kill it.
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