Thinking About

03/13/2025

News sources will disappear or be radically altered.

As the White House kicks AP out of its press pool, and Jeff Bezos declares that Washington Post editorials will be in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”, it’s good to remember what Sebastian Haffner wrote about Hitler’s first year: “Many newspapers and magazine disappeared from the kiosks—but what happened to those that continued in circulation was even more disturbing. You could not recognize them anymore. In a way a newspaper is like an old friend; you instinctively know how it will react to certain events, what it will say about them and how it will express its views. If it suddenly says the opposite of what it said yesterday, denies its own past, distorting its features, you cannot avoid feeling that you are in a madhouse. That happened.”

At first The Munich Post, which had closely covered Hitler since the beer hall putsch in November 1923, continued its reporting, running headlines such as “Nazi Party Hands Dripping with Blood,” “Germany Under Hitler: Political Murder and Terror,” and “Outlaws and Murderers in Power.” On March 9, 1933, five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor and eleven days after the Reichstag fire, the SA gutted the newspaper’s offices while the police stood by. Its journalists went into hiding. At least one ended up in Dachau, others simply “disappeared.”

MAGA will continue to believe what the leader says up until the very brink of disaster.

In the summer of 1939, three months after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Robert Jamieson, a British English teacher living in Essen, wrote to Lord Londonderry, who had recently acted as a go-between British and Nazi leaders: “[The Germans] really believe that the Czech government had voluntarily sought Hitler’s protection and that they would all starve if they do not get this lebensraum and colonies.

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The debate about whether or not we should bring Hitler or Nazism or fascism into a contemporary political debate is obsolete. Now it is crucial that we take seriously the warnings gathered for us by survivors and writers. When you look at a photo of a Jew about to be arrested or shot and he or she is staring straight into the camera, remember that it is you they are looking at.