Are you willing to die for your beliefs? Seriously, you willing to watch your wife die? Your husband? Your parents? Your children?

We'll end to see them tortured and killed because you refused to succumb to the demands of an insane and violent tyrannical dictatorship.

That was the situation many Germans in the mid 1930s found themselves in.

And the pressure to conform increased year after year until suddenly it was virtually impossible to resist.

It's easy to look back and say you'd stand up for the Jewish people. Easy to say that you wouldn't look the other way when human beings were rounded up like cattle to be slaughtered and taken to concentration camps.

But eventually it became apparent during the 1930s that to stand up to Hitler regardless of your social or even political status resulted in your complete and total destruction.

By the time most people realized how dangerous he truly was, he'd solidified his stranglehold on Germany and then Europe soon after that.

But during the infancy of his rise to power and the ascent of the Nazi party in general could he have been stopped when he's ranked and raven in little beer halls in Germany in the 20s.

A minor player and a new minor political party. Would you have stopped him then or would you as most Germans, you know, who disagreed with them or saw him then just ignored him.

Could he been stopped sure hindsight 20 20 you could have been stopped pretty easily back in the mid 20s, you know, even in the late 1920s.

He could have been stopped in the mid 1930s by other countries who knew what he was up to countries like America. So why do we wait? Why did so many people have to die before we stepped in?

Well, as is usually the case, it's fucking complicated.

And now what's done is done long since done we can't go back 1925 and shut Hitler down, but we can learn from what he did.

How he got to the place where he was able to do what he did the warning signs the red flags. They were all there for those who chose to pay attention and we can study them.

So we can recognize new warning signs as they show up.

Other blood thirsty dangerously ambitious zealots will come along. They always do history does truly repeat itself.

Now, you know, the words Hitler and Nazi get thrown around a lot of these days during my adult lifetime every new president every time they take office.

I've listened to the comparison state. You know, he's trying to disarm the general population. I just like Hitler. That's like the Nazis.

He's trying to control the media. That's Hitler. That's just like Hitler. The police had no right to trespass on that guy's property. They just went up to like a like a stop oh, just like a bunch of Nazis.

Now, maybe I've heard this kind of stuff so much because I'm from Northern Idaho.

Where belief that the government is out to get you and take away your freedom and fundamental rights is as ingrained in the local culture for some reason.

It's firmly as a desire to fish and camp and hunt. I have and just have no contact with the outside world whatsoever possible. I don't know why that is, but it does seem to be the case.

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