I’ve always been curious how fascism takes hold, and how people like Hitler, Stalin. etc rise to power. Do people not see what is happening? Shouldn’t hindsight, foresight and common sense kick in at some point? I used t think they were like mob bosses early on - anyone disagreeing with them ends up in a barrel, but surely were civilized and educated by now?
It seems the people don’t want to jeopardize their comfortable livelihoods and individual lives so expect the ‘powerful elected officials’ to do their bidding. After all, the public gave them the power to do just that. Otoh, the politicians don’t want to jeopardize their cushy jobs and accumulated power by challenging the majority, so are waiting for the public to start a jan6 situation so they can point and say, ‘see, the people are unhappy so we should act’.
It’s a shitstorm of no consequences and a man child hacking away at the country and no one seems to be doing anything meaningful. I’m literally watching fascism take place.
History/ psychology/ sociology majors care to chime in?
As I’m sure many have already told you Stalin was not a Fascist. I’m not sure if you’re asking about fascists in specific and used a wrong example or about totalitarianism in general and used the wrong word.
For fascism in specific it’s usually about a common enemy and economic crisis that can be pinned on that enemy. But there are other stuff as well, there’s a great movie called “Die Welle” (The Wave) which is based on an actual scientific experiment called The Third Wave in which a teacher showed how fascism is able to take root.
For totalitarianism in general the answer is a lot more complex, each dictator grew to power their own way, but populism and fear mongering are common practices.
I asked about fascism in particular in the title, but certainly welcome input about other types of authoratarianism/ totalitarianism. It’s the psychology of how they slip though the public view and entrenches itself that I’m most interested in, because of what is happening around us atm.
During psychology class, we were taught about the authority figure dilemma, in that normal, decent people proceeded to inflict (acted) pain on another just because some person in a lab coat asked them to. Just trying to form my understanding from the myriad inputs, as to why the public and elected joes seem so unable/ unwilling to act.
I…. Love/Hate the fact that a lot of people complained that the ending of the book and the movie differed so much, and only few of those people actually understood the meaning of the book