Defiance

NYTimes movie review:

"Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" conveys what it must have been like to be a young, smart, idealistic dissenter in Nazi Germany, where no dissent was tolerated. This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances. Would you risk your life the way Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and a tiny group of fellow students at Munich University did to spread antigovernment leaflets? How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it? In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?

It can happen here--in fact, the slide started long ago.  The question really is, can we resist any better than the Germans?  I put Defying Hitler on my Amazon Wishlist a while back, but I might just end up getting it for myself.  The book by Sebastian Haffner examines:

[The] social and cultural conditions that made Germany ill-equipped for democracy and ripe for totalitarianism. Among these, Haffner writes, were a generational war between an apathetic adult population and a youth "familiar with nothing but political clamor, sensation, anarchy, and the dangerous lure of irresponsible numbers games"; a fatal fondness for the winner-and-loser dichotomy of sports and a rage for spectacle and entertainment; a resignation through which ordinary people came to "adapt to living with clenched teeth, in a manner of speaking," rather than stand up in protest. In that climate, Haffner--who left Germany just before World War II broke out--suggests, Nazism was almost an inevitability, against which he, too, tried to withdraw into "a small, secure, private domain," like so many others of his time and place.

I never have believed in American exceptionalism.  We can just as easily be a tyranny as any other nation because in the end, laws and constitutions and nice ideals don't survive unless people work and fight for them. 

What we have right now is a clear erosion of rights happening before our eyes, and yet instead of major demonstrations against it, we have apologists saying it's all for our own good, apathy from the electorate, etc.  I include myself in that, as I have also withdrawn into "a small, secure, private domain."  To bad I don't have a lot of courage--if I and others did, we might be able to reverse the tide before we actually need the Sophie Scholls of the world.

ntodd