I had the privilege and pleasure of attending graduate school for international relations in Washington, D.C. under the instruction of old school professors. They had lived through the cold war, and were children or young adults during World War II.
My experience under their instruction piqued my interest about my own family history. Both of my parents were children in Germany during WW II. While my mother was a very young child, my father was a teenager and my maternal grandparents were young adults at the time. I knew that they remembered well what happened in their midst and I was interested in understanding what seems to be the obvious question that occurs to many people who think about that era. Why didn’t anyone stop Hitler from doing what he did? Or how could people stay silent or turn a blind eye to such egregious crimes against humanity? And so… I asked them about it and this is what I found out.
Me: When Hitler was rounding up Jews, didn’t you notice what was happening? Did you see them? Were they in your town?” Oma (my grandmother) said “no, we didn’t know any Jews.” In her town there didn’t live any that she knew of. Then I thought, how could it be possible that she would not have known what was happening? Wouldn’t that be impossible? It was happening throughout the country – that Jews were being rounded up and sent to
concentration aka “work camps”. Millions of them. “Wasn’t it in the news, I asked?”
Oma said, “Well, no – we listened to the radio and there was only one radio station that we ‘dared’ to listen to.” “One radio station? Only one” I exclaimed. She thought about it and then said, “there were other radio stations, but we didn’t ‘dare’ listen to them.” Me: “WHAT? You didn’t dare listen to them?” I was incredulous. “What do you mean? Why?” Oma: “Because someone might overhear it [on in our apartment] and tell on us?” Me: “Why on earth would
they tell on you for listening to a dang radio station???”
Perhaps I was thick, but this made no sense to me. “Because there was only one station that was approved by the government and we were only allowed to listen to that one. If we listened to another and someone heard us, we would get in to big trouble.” In other words, – they were too scared someone would “snitch” on them. The alternative news sources had been made illegal. If you happened to take in an alternative news source and someone found out, you would be considered dangerous to the government for holding differing views and perhaps views that would be a challenge to the group think philosophies and alternative facts that were being promulgated by the press. The freedom of expression and belief were simply not to be had.
Der Fuhrer was of the mindset that we needed to have total adherence to the same ideals. His. And after enough threats and being mistreated, nobody felt safe to express their thoughts and interests openly. You could not be sure that your friends or neighbors would protect you and not “snitch” on you. So you kept to yourself and you kept your lips sealed. So the thinking would go, ‘even if something is wrong with the very fact that that I cannot listen to an alternative radio station— I will not speak about it. It would not be safe to do so. Best that I just keep my nose clean and take care of my children, keep my tiny income, and just stay safe.’
There were a few other points of view – namely expressed by my dad. My father, who was a young teenager expressed his rage filled memories in loud volume. “Nobody had a choice.” It’s not like you had a choice to retreat to your home or not do what the government asked of you. The choice looked like this: A knock at the door by men in uniform who would ask “Are you with us? And “will you serve?” The only response was “yes.” Any hesitation or negative response brought death by bullet to the head in front of your family. My father’s exact words were –“there was no negotiation. If you said no, you were dead – right then and there.” Although it’s hard for our minds to fathom, this same story has been recounted so many times in history books and by others that I know it’s true. There existed no freedom of choice or expression of conscience or speech under the authoritarian/totalitarian regime of the Third Reich.
What does this have to do with now? And how does it relate to Big Tech?
Parlor was the new alternative to Facebook that sprung up in response to the fact that “Facebook” started to censor, delete, and or place detractions under opinions they thought did not go along with their group think – ie it did not fit the Facebook narrative. A couple of months ago, when Amazon and Apple dropped “Parlor” as an app, it caused a lot of people including European Prime Ministers, Chancellors and Presidents to pipe up and admonish the dangers of such sanctimonious sanctions, even saying that the sanctions are inciting an era of violence.
During the election season, my husband and noticed time and again that anyone who said anything about the election had a box placed under their post that said something like … ‘the election results are real and this is incorrect information.’ A similar thing happened to a retired Mexican Cardinal when the Archdiocese posted a video of the cardinal denouncing the imposition of a new world order. Facebook censored the Cardinal saying that this was false information about Covid.
In this case, the disciplined messaging is coming from Big Tech giants and social media – and their discipline for censorship seems to extend to match the messaging of the mainstream media. The sense that there is only one correct viewpoint to consider. Therefore, if you should have the gall to express an alternative, you might be a Trump supporter, and therefore dangerous to the main stream media’s group think. You ‘should be sent to ‘re-education’ camps,’ says main stream media’s Katie Couric.
Twitter also censored, not just President Trump, but also promised to censor a “number” of Republicans. “Why would that be?” you may be inclined to ask? But then, maybe you do not need to ask. The answer is more clearly emerging that these people have expressed views that do not fit the main stream left leaning media narrative, that an ‘alternative’ aka differing or conservative point of view is obviously wrong. So, it must be censored because it does not fit.
It is interesting that totalitarianism comes to us now – in this format- now that there is such adherence to all these bit tech giants. It’s not the Third Reich this time. This time, it is globalist big tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and a few others that all seem to promulgate the same group think and world view.
