Blogs Answer Questions

16:18 Sunday, 15 February 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 40.39°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 3.31mph
Words: 506

I don't recall exactly when I got seriously interested in the rise of National Socialism in Germany. I suppose I could search my email archive for Amazon books, but it's not that important. One of the questions that troubled me, which probably couldn't be answered in a book, was, "What was daily life like in Germany when all these things were taking place?"

And now I know the answer. I guess until their sons began dying in large numbers on the Eastern Front, or when German cities began being seriously targeted by "strategic" bombing, it was pretty much like life is today. I'm sure at first there was a lot of excitement about all the victories, and the war booty their fathers and sons were sending home from France and Holland and so on. Good times. Good times.

It probably started to feel off when those fathers and sons began dying in large numbers, and fire storms began consuming cities.

Their Jewish neighbors disappearing? Maybe a topic of conversation for a day or so. Some inconvenience when a particular favorite shop closed. But, well, what can you do?

But during the rise of National Socialism, I think that life was pretty "normal." Better, even. People didn't like the political chaos of the Weimar Republic. The street violence, the inflation, the Red Menace. Hitler promised to Make Germany Great Again, and for most Germans, it probably felt he did. And life went on.

Following blogs as I do, I read about what people are doing, what they care about, what movies they're watching, what they're tired of hearing or reading about. It's "a slice of life." To read nearly all of my feed (I have a folder called "Crisis" that contains all the "political" blogs, which are mostly semi-professional or professional outlets.) you'd never know that America was sliding into authoritarianism, or that corruption on a staggering scale was a daily occurence in Washington. ICE murdering a couple of American citizens in the streets kind of captured everyone's attention for a few days, but we're back to movie reviews, blogging platforms, cameras, how markdown changed my life, AI fatigue, how I coded up a masterpiece with Claude just "vibe coding."

Cool. Cool.

Hannah Arendt caught a shitload of grief for framing Eichmann as a portrait of "the banality of evil." She didn't deserve it. We look for monsters to blame, and so we needed Eichmann to be a monster. It wasn't "us." It was "the monsters."

We're building a network of concentration camps in America, under the guise of deportation "detention centers." Nothing to see here. ICE is developing the processes, infrastructure and logistics to "disappear people," using "illegal immigrants" as the test subjects. Pay no attention.

But have I told you about the list of books I read in 2025? And I have some cool pictures of our new cat. (We don't have a new cat.)

And I no longer wonder what it felt like for the average German during the rise of National Socialism.

✍️ Reply by email