This is a good article, but it's very difficult reading.
We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change.
Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary.
Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.
Another way to look at it is that we're a budding new form of life that seems rather distinct from what came before (consciousness, reason/science, etc.), and we're still very young and foolish and unable to fully utilize these new abilities.
Of course, there's a real risk that we'll destroy ourselves, or that we'll remain stuck in some kind of local optimum, doomed to repeat ourselves and constantly wage ware against our evolutionary 'legacy code'.
But as someone who can get quite depressed or cynical about all the bad things that are happening (over and over again, it seems), it helps me to focus on the amazing ways in which we did overcome our more brutal past.
Humans - educated, modern people like us - did these things. A whole society provided all the services, political support, leadership, funding, engineering, manual labor, management, project management, architecture, transportation infrastructure and operations, IT (look up what IBM did), etc. etc. Imagine the scale of that project. Other whole societies helped or looked the other way; the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees from its shores, IIRC; the Roman Catholic church kept its head down, at best. (And others resisted, such as Denmark and, IIRC, the Eastern Orthodox church.)
The human genetic code hasn't changed; we're biologically exactly the same as the Nazis, and millennia of humanity before that. Unless you believe in a supernatural power (and what good did that do?), nothing prevents the same (or other evils) from happening again except us. It doesn't happen randomly or instantly; we have societal norms and institutions. But we need to protect those norms and institutions and make sure we don't get to the point of doing evil; it's too late to stop by then.
Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good. I think of the people who built those institutions of freedom in the generations before us - in the U.S., for example, from Washington to Lincoln to MLK - making the world a better place. I think of the people who died in WWII - many 18 year old kids who died in pain - to give us the freedom we have today from Nazis, fascists, and religious oppression. What are we giving the next generation?
(Sorry I got a bit carried away, but I don't mean it as a lecture; I feel pretty strongly about it.)
There is a risk it will happen again, but we are not there yet. We are far from that levels of dysfunction. (Same goes for French revolution and communist uprising in Russia.)
"By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constant additions to its territory.
There thus arose quite artificially a state born of no popular force nor even of an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolute power of the ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his bidding and by a ruthlessly disciplined army. Two thirds and sometimes as much as five sixths of the annual state revenue was expended on the Army, which became, under the King, the state itself. “Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, “is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.”
And the state, which was run with the efficiency and soullessness of a factory, became all; the people were little more than cogs in the machinery. Individuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants but by the philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work, sacrifice and duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression of human feeling, and the Prussian poet Willibald Alexis gloried in the enslavement of the people under the Hohenzollerns. To Lessing, who did not like it, “Prussia was the most slavish country of Europe.”
This is what I see when I like at the US. It may not be third reich levels, but compared tot he rest of the western world it is very militaristic and democratically dysfunctional.
* Despite the military's lack of success in Afghanistan and extreme recklessness and failure in Iraq, the public trusts the military more than most other institutions.
* Politicians must say 'the greatest military in the world'; the military is glorified at sporting events and elsewhere. I attended a small college's graduation in a rural area. A few students were ROTC members;[0] the audience gave them a standing ovation for several minutes; no other graduates received anything like it.
* Politicians on the right, and to some extent the left, must openly demonstrate hyper-aggression and an embrace of war and violence in foreign policy. Diplomacy is mocked by some (and Trump is neutering the State Department). When is the last time you heard a U.S. politician mention "peace" as a goal and priority, or speak of the horrors of war?
* Trump has appointed members of the military as Secretary of Defense (which hasn't happened since WWII), Homeland Security, and as National Security Advisor. All are almost always civilian jobs, to maintain civilian control of the national security apparatus. Now people seek the military to run the government.
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[0] ROTC: Reserve Officers Training Corp: In return for scholarships, college students undergo military training in college and serve for a few years afterward (IIRC the details).
> Germany had strongly militaristic culture long before
The U.S. has had a strong culture of racial discrimination for its entire history. I don't mean that in an exaggerated sense like "everyone is racist", but I think that rationally it's hard to escape the fact that such a culture has always been prominent.
Fundamentally I share that optimism. However, I am a bit worried that the main 'solution' that I hear about is some variation of 'remembering the past' and 'education'. The reason why this worries me is that 'remembering and learning from the past' is probably exactly what people have said throughout history and yet we still had WW2/the holocaust, relatively recently. What do we do when 'never again!' keeps happening?
I don't think the lesson is that learning from our past or being educated is not effective. So far at least in some regards we seem to be moving 'forward', however vague that statement is. I'm just worried that it's not effective enough.