




Monday, June 17, 2013

America Will Be The Next Nation To Be Destroyed By Collective Indifference

Here's the Nonsense America is going through some difficult times, but we shouldn't get all concerned and upset about it.  Don't get caught up in the nonsense of people who cry out that the future is at stake.  Just keep doing what you're doing and things will be fine.

Here's the Horse Sense:  Americans have put their heads in the sand and are acting as proverbial ostriches.  This has happened before in history.  We need to learn the lessons from history and make sure it doesn't happen again.

In 1942 millions of Germans relied on collective indifference to endure the horrors of brutal tyranny.  This was their attempt to maintain "normal" lives while hoping that they could get past it and life would return to normal. But it didn't work then and it won't work now.

A young German girl's wartime diary has just been published and reveals a side of life in Nazi Germany rarely ever seen.  Brigitte Eicke (known as "Gitti") was a 15 year old girl in 1942 when she started keeping a diary of life in Berlin during the war.  The diary has just been published and is a remarkable account of indifference to all that was going on.  While her writings began just shortly before those of Anne Frank, they are markedly different.  Instead of suffering, hiding, and fear, they reveal a German girl who not only went on with life, but reacted to awful events with complete indifference.  Clearly this was her method of dealing with the horrors and atrocities going on around her.

Der Spiegel Magazine describes her by saying, "She is a young woman skilled in the art of blotting out ugliness, willing to believe what she's told and, ultimately, one of the lucky ones."

As Britain's Independent reports:

       Here is Gitti's entry for 1 February 1944: "The school had been bombed when we arrived this morning. Waltraud, Melitta and I went back to Gisela's and danced to gramophone records." In another raid on her Berlin neighbourhood in March 1943, two people are killed, 34 are injured and more than 1,000 are made homeless. Gitti writes: "It took place in the middle of the night, horrible, I was half asleep".
       In November 1944, Hitler is trying to cripple the advances made after the D-Day landings by planning an offensive in the Ardennes, but Gitti – by now a member of the Nazi Party – is more concerned about her hairdo. She writes that she has just been given a "disastrous" perm by her hairdresser and is worried about going to work "looking a fright".
       Then on 2 March 1945, while Hitler's troops are trying to halt the Red Army's advance just 60 miles east of Berlin, Gitti, now 18, goes to the cinema. She writes: "Margot and I went to the Admiralspalast cinema to see Meine Herren Söhne. It was such a lovely film, but there was a power cut in the middle. How annoying!"
All this indifference in an attempt to ignore and avoid dealing with what was going on.  She is now 86 and lives in the same area she lived during the war.  She says her son has asked her how she could be so oblivious.  But she says she never saw anything.  In fact, she says that until she visited Buchenwald in 1970, that's 25 years after the war, and saw the pictures of what happened in the concentration camps she didn't realize what had happened.  She says, "We just muddled through, we had no choice."
So she spent all those years during and after the war ignoring and denying what happened around her as a way to "cope" with what happened in the very world in which she lived.  That's what we see happening today.
Now before anyone says that I'm saying that we are living in a modern Nazi Germany, let me make it clear that I'm not.  But I am saying that when we ignore what goes on around us and do nothing, that opens the door for things to get worse.  Do you really think the Nazis were at their worst from the start?  Of course not.  They became worse and worse as time went on and no one stopped them.  Had there been a limit put on their actions from the start things never would have gotten as bad as they did.  But people ignored what was happening so they could maintain their lives.  
Lack of involvement was the mindset of the day.  And that's what allowed a tyrannical power to take hold and get out of control.  
Today in America we see most Americans ignoring what's going on.  From actions by politicians to government agencies to courts we see things moving further and further out of control.  And Americans continue on living their lives ignoring things hoping problems will go away.  Many don't even realize what's happening.  They are forsaking their God-given rights and allowing freedom to slip away.  It's exactly what has happened elsewhere throughout the world in history.
If we really want our nation to be what it was created to be, then we have to be willing to speak up and stand up.  That's what it's going to take.  You can't be Brigitte Eicke and expect to retain your freedoms.  There's a price to pay and if we don't, we'll lose what was given to us.