>The question before the world is not whether to appease the
>Russians. The question is whether to appease the U.S. You
>have your place in time and space confused, Margaret. If
>you want to bring in clumsy historical comparisons, ask
>what you would have done had you been a citizen of the
>Third Reich in 1938. You are. Do you want to be a
>good German?
Your question is an important one, Carrol. And i'm somewhat at a loss to know how to answer it. It's not clear to me that the situation wrt protests is the same today in the US as it was in 1938 Germany, for one thing. Today the establishment can and do ignore us, because we are so marginal and marginalised. The Capitalist propaganda machine has been very successful in making us seem to be failed utopians at best, hopeless kooks at worst. We're just not a threat to them, and they know it.
In 1938 Germany, it was different. Post-war, many Germans claimed that they hadn't known about the death camps. My landlord in Berlin (this was in the mid-'60s) snorted at that. He said that anyone who lived anywhere near the camps knew about them, and that most folk were at least uneasy if not altogether horrified by what was going on. Many had had jewish friends. But as he put it: 'To whom were we to complain? It was the police and government doing it!' People who complained, as was the case in the USSR, tended to get a final midnight knock on the door afterward.
That doesn't happen in the US, today. We're considerably safer in important ways. Our scapegoated group -- drug users -- are identifiable by their actions, not their ethnicity. We 'solid citizens' can comfort ourselves that we are safe because we don't do crime. And there are no actual cattle cars, 'showers' or ovens involved today, even for drug users.
But in 1938 Germany? A different story.
So no, much as i would like to believe that i would have stood up and protested publicly against the nazi depredations, i'm sure that i would not have done. Because it would have got me carted off and killed, und damit basta. I might have tried to hide a Jew or 2 from the SS, because that would have been Real. So to that extent i wouldn't have been a Good German. But to speak out publicly? No. It wouldn't be worth my life.
That's one of the reasons it seems to me better for the leftie community to club together and articulate a different, believable politicoeconomic vision for the US et al. That's where Capitalism is vulnerable -- they are the defenders of privilege, and their only hope is to maintain the fiction that people who aren't doing well have only themselves to blame.
So long as all we're doing is standing on the sidelines complaining bitterly about the US bombing some thugs over on the other side of the world, we're just a bunch of kooks. It will only be when we can say to our own 'Good Germans' 'Here, look at what's happening to you today, and _you_ can have this kind of a better life if we do it this way instead, and here are the numbers if you want to check it out, how about it?' that we will have a chance to actually _do_ something Real and changeful rather than sit around wringing our hands and congratulating ourselves on how much more Evolved we are than the Lumpenproletariat.
le meas, =margaret