I am so grateful for the beautiful human culture here in the Fediverse. Always creative, weird, sensitive, curious, earnest.

Harold Marcuse: "Right after the war in 1946 he wanted his German audiences to admit that they had failed morally, to accept their responsibility for the mass atrocities committed by their Nazi government in their name."

Niemöller, origin of famous quotation "First they came for the Communists..."

This page pursues the origin of the quotation 'First they came for the communists, but I wasn't a communist, ...', by Martin Niemoeller. It was compiled by Harold Marcuse, a professor of German history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

(marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu)

Adapted from "First They Came" by Martin Niemöller.

First They Came - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

First they came for the undocumented
And I did not speak out
Because I had my papers
Then they came for legal migrants
But I was not a migrant...
Then they came for naturalized citizens
But I was born here...
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Does any of this look familiar? Fascists use fear and ignorance to divide people who have more in common with each other than with those in power. The US Department of War made this film about it in 1945 called "Don't Be A Sucker." https://catalog.archives.gov/id/24376

You can find closed captioning on the C-SPAN video: https://www.c-span.org/program/reel-america/dont-be-a-sucker/484892

Phrases like "great again," "invasion," "criminals," and "right to defend itself" don’t at all mean what they appear to mean.

They are rhetorical weapons used to justify fascism, state violence, and war.

That’s what Newspeak actually looks like.

From the outside, Orwell’s Newspeak reads like an obvious and legible system inside a work of fiction. A system of language manipulation and ideology we imagine everyone would easily recognize for what it is.

But the real version is harder to see when you’re inside it.