Never Again Is Now

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4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2025

⏱️ 88 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 156 How in the world did people become Nazis? How could it have happened? These are questions we grew up with and, maybe, always hoped against hope we wouldn't be able to answer. There's a comfort in them remaining mysterious, but in that comfort we're vulnerable. How can we possibly make good on "Never Again" if we do not know how it happened? Sadly, today we're threatened with the same menace. Sadly, today, we're learning not how it could have happened, but exactly how it happened because it's happening again around us. More and more of us know, with our stomachs sunken, that it is now time to speak up, but that raises another question: how? We don't even know how it happened, much less what could have stopped it. Enter Melita Maschmann, former Nazi, and her admirable book (at least so far as I've read!), Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (https://amzn.to/42rimB2) (1964). In this book, written in the form of a long letter to her teenage best friend, who was Jewish, she endeavors to explain how it could have happened to a good, respectable, well-off, conservative girl like her who went on to join the Hitler Youth and become a Nazi. She wrote it so we can know how it happened. She wrote it because "Never Again" means never. She wrote it in case "Never Again" ever again becomes now. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay introduces the book and reads a few poignant excerpts with ominous parallels to today. Join him, just in case "Never Again" really is now. New book! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Nazis

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody. This is James Lindsay. You are listening to the New Discourses podcast.
0:23.6	And we've got a kind of important one to do today. I think that you're going to find this very interesting. I've stumbled across a book.
0:31.6	And I want to share that with you. I'm kind of taking a little bit of a risk here, maybe more than one, but that risk is that I have not finished this book, but I'm eager to share some of it with you. I've read about a quarter of it, and I don't know if it's going to go sideways further in. I don't think it will, but nonetheless, I think the message that I'm going to try to give to you out of this book today is
0:55.0	worth taking that risk. So this book is a very interesting book. I think that unless it goes
1:03.5	sideways, and I don't know if it will before it gets to the end, that I'll probably be recommending
1:07.5	that this book be required reading for high school students in
1:13.6	our country. I think that if you homeschool your kids or even if you don't, this might be a really good one.
1:21.6	Again, supposing it doesn't go sideways, stay tuned, I'll update you later. But so far as I can tell, this might be a really
1:29.4	good one to have them read. So this book, just to give you the context of it before we kind of dive in,
1:34.9	is called account rendered. That's the title. Account rendered. A dossier on my former self.
1:42.1	And it was written by a German woman named Melita Moschman and published in 1964.
1:47.5	So the idea of this book is very interesting.
1:51.0	Let me just tell you a little bit of the history here, although it'll kind of get repeated as I read some of it to you.
1:56.5	Melita Moschman was a 15-year-old girl in Berlin in 1933, when at the end of January, January 30th in particular, the Nazi party took Germany over.
2:14.1	And so when the Nazis rose to power, she was a 15-year-old girl and her best friend was a 15-year-old Jewish girl.
2:21.3	And Malita Moshman joined the Hitler youth, the girls division, the BDM, of the Hitler youth.
2:32.3	So she became a Nazi, even though her best friend was Jewish. And in 1945,
2:39.2	of course, Hitler loses the war, kills himself. And most of the people that were involved in the
2:47.3	Nazi party were rounded up and put into United States military internment camps
2:52.8	and attempted to be deprogrammed. And then eventually she gets out of internment and she tries to
2:59.3	write a letter to her former best friend, this Jewish girl. Now, of course, this is 12 years
3:06.6	is how long Hitler was in power. So add in the time
	...

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