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Living in Nazi Canada, I finally understand something about Nazi Germany.
I used to wonder how ordinary Germans could possibly watch horrors being committed in their name and fail to stop them.
Now I understand.
Knowing is not power.
You can see it.
Name it.
Refuse it.
Protest it.
Withdraw your consent.
Spend every waking hour fighting it.
And the machinery can simply continue.
It takes your taxes, your flag, your institutions and your country's name and converts them into actions you never authorized.
Then comes the theft of agency:
The state acts.
You object.
The state continues.
History calls it something "we" did.
But coercion alone doesn't explain how these systems reproduce themselves.
Eventually they manufacture consent.
Look at Israel: 80% approval while children are being bombed.
That changes the question.
How does a society reach the point where enormous violence isn't merely tolerated by institutions but normalized among the population?
Start much earlier.
Control the political imagination.
Teach children one political vocabulary. Teach electoral politics as though it were synonymous with politics. Teach that legitimate power flows through the existing institutions. Reduce political possibility to competing authorized parties.
Don't ban every alternative.
Make alternatives culturally unintelligible.
By adulthood the menu has already been printed:
🔴 Red team.
🔵 Blue team.
Choose.
Then call the choice freedom.
It's remarkably close to the architecture of religion.
A child doesn't independently survey 4,000 religions and rationally discover that the religion surrounding their birthplace happens to contain ultimate truth.
They inherit it.
The rituals.
The vocabulary.
The authorities.
The sacred texts.
The permitted questions.
The promised salvation.
Political faith works remarkably well the same way.
🗳️ Vote.
🏛️ Trust the institutions.
📺 Listen to the authorized interpreters.
🙏 Wait.
✨ Change is coming.
Red disappoints you?
Believe harder in Blue.
Blue disappoints you?
Salvation returns to Red.
The institution itself remains outside the argument.
That's the part I didn't understand about Nazi Germany.
I imagined millions of people consciously examining every possible political arrangement and deliberately selecting the horror.
But human beings don't enter politics from some neutral intellectual wilderness.
They inherit systems.
They inherit categories.
They inherit the boundaries of what their society considers imaginable.
And once those boundaries become common sense, tremendous violence can occur without everyone experiencing themselves as its author.
Meanwhile, our institutions have built an entire prestige economy around their supposed civilization.
Nobel Prizes.
Honorary doctorates.
Human-rights awards.
Commemorative days.
Conferences.
Declarations.
Medals.
Institutes.
Foundations.
An enormous machinery for certifying our goodness.
And they couldn't stop a fucking genocide.
Perhaps that's the lesson.
The frightening political system isn't merely the one that prevents you from saying NO.
It's the one that can hear millions of people saying NO, continue anyway, call the result democratic consent, and then hand itself an award for defending human rights.
The perfect cage doesn't need everyone to love it.
It needs enough people to believe there is nothing outside it. 🏴