Where Do We Go From Here?
Have you ever wondered how Germany came to despise the Jews so much in the first third of the 1900s? That's one of a whole quiver of questions that never got answered to my own satisfaction in my own education.
Was it just out of fear? Fear that a militant government would ascribe anything short of hating them to be treasonous?
Was it pent up rage on an individual level, where one could find an outlet in his own private anger against how the world treated him unfairly...by hating the Jews?
Was it simply the loss of one's own sense of joy, where despair had won and peopled settled for being not-as-bad-as instead of outright happy?
Was it nationalism that allowed acceptance of the elimination of Jews from the Fatherland on the basis of Germans Rightfully Possess Germany?
Were the Germans in need of a 'cure' from the multicultural urban reality?
Did the Germans need an Opposing Evil in order to accept the mantle of Good?
Was it really a drive to bring the entire populace into line with what was thought to be the purely-normal?
I know it didn't happen overnight, but I also know it happened fairly quickly. But how?
Where was the self-doubt? Was it first an attack on Germans themselves, instilling fear and subsequently punishing those who doubted themselves, doubted the rightness of the German Cause?
Was the tyranny of the German government simply the tyranny of the majority?
How does a country start the process of treating those who don't buy the party line as less than human? And does that process always end in 'cleansing'?
And weren't a lot of the Jews Germans themselves?