To wonder if Nazi Germany felt like the UK does now, when they were creeping into power?

[oneggshellsforever]

Transformations in the justice system are happening, stacking the odds against disabled people having a fair hearing when they appeal sanctions or having disability benefits turned down.

They're getting rid of in person tribunals, and getting rid of expert panel members.

Disabled people are often successful when it goes to appeal, so the government seem to be systematically stripping the legal system of a fair trial?

Will start happening in October. What the government is doing to disabled people, and people with very little money in general, is chilling me to the bone. I honestly wonder if the feeling in the atmosphere was like this in 1930's Germany.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/12/online-benefits-appeals-tribunals-disabled

If you had any historical culture and a smidge of sense, you would not even ask this question. What emotive and exagerated bullshit.

Hitting godwins law in the op leaves this thread with nowhere to go

I visited the Topography of Terror in Berlin recently, that's what has put it in mind.

I have no idea, but I do think it is worthwhile remembering that before there was 'Nazi Germany' there was simply 'Germany'.
And I think the principles behind boiling a frog apply - gradual changes are often not perceived as dangerous until it's too late.

Crikey

The Aktion T4 poster, outlining the cost of a disabled man in a wheelchair, really made me shiver.

I dunno, I think it is a question worth pondering.

I don't think that people in Germany after WW1 anticipated the wholesale slaughter of millions a short few decades later.

Either way the changes to legislation wrt disability are shocking and morally wrong IMO.

Agree with pacific. People are always very keen to act cynical and superior on these threads. I do wonder if they actually think or just spot an opportunity

I actually think this is an interesting question if you rephrase it as "At what point did people start to voice questions and fears about the direction of right-wing travel in Germany and Austria from about 1890 to the Second World War?"

The answer, as always, is that there were a complex range of responses, from those who rushed to embrace the right as the solution to all evils to those who recognised the danger early on the left. In any culture, there are always many positions to take; there are always cracks for resistance and always people who go along with power.

However, I also think it's important to remember how flawed the simplistic idea that we can 'learn from the past' really is. History doesn't repeat itself. There are continuities, but circumstances change so much that you don't get straight repetition. The one thing that is consistent is the importance of not being apathetic and taking a political stance, with an awareness what is going on in the world around you. I do think selfishness and greed and an unwillingness to see any kind of wider, public good are rising rapidly right now, and that is worrying.

Are you frightened of communists?
Do you go to the shops with your money in a wheelbarrow?
Do you blame the rest of Europe for the above?
Are your children in fascist after school clubs?

If so, then maybe. If not, then no.

Yes, I think they are too. They have already caused so much misery to the disabled and chronically ill in this country.

Yesterday, I caught a headline which said something like - it's not that the surge in child poverty, hunger and foodbank usage is the only shocking thing; it's that a large proportion of people don't seem to be reacting with anger to that, they are accepting it, and that compounds how disgraceful it all is.

These remoaners are getting more and more nutty with each passing day.

Cross posted, I was agreeing with Pacific!

The Guardian......

And on it goes.

I don't know why you've come in for such flak here, OP.

I think you're right.

I was thinking about this the other day - what would have done if I'd been around back then. Rather chillingly, the conclusion I came to was "what could I have done?" Nothing. It's impossible to overthrow a despotic leader. We can't unseat Trump. We can't change legislation, or even stop it from being passed.

It's fucking terrifying.

Oh, and Topography of Terror is BRILLIANT! I actually did a thing on Facebook where I took the propaganda posters from that Berlin exhibition and I compared them absolutely directly with fairly headlines from the Daily Mail. You can see SO many resonances across the two. That does NOT mean that Britain now is 'like' Germany of the 30s/40s BUT it is cause for very significant concern nonetheless.

Not sure about this applying to the treatment of disabled people, as I haven't heard anything much about that and don't know details, but it is certainly what is happening to women right now.

There's a whole ideology and all behind the new attack on women's rights, too, and I definitely see parallels.

Boiling frog principle definitely applies to lots of things going on.

I do feel that the west has started to pivot into a new direction (or, more accurately, backslide). Nationalism, fascism, this cult of personality that we see in Trump. Isolationism and nationalism are on the rise in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago. And we don't really know where that will lead us to.

I definitely feel like the proverbial frog. And the scariest part is, there doesn't seem to be a single thing we can do about it. We seem to keep voting ourselves further onto the margins of Europe. We won't have the ECHR to turn to if our own government turns against us.

We're sleepwalking into a world I definitely didn't anticipate my children growing up in.

So yeah, you could sneer at the wording of the question, or you could have a real conversation about where we are in history.

Cao - I actually think the idea that "we can do nothing" is a very despairing one, and not borne out by the facts. If you look at Nazi Germany, even in the darkest days, people resisted in small and big ways. When you look at, for example, the French Resistance and the risks run it is shameful - absolutely shameful - how apathetic and unengaged the vast majority of people are with basic, riskfree political activism over, for example, climate change, nowadays.

My grandparents were brought up in nazi germany. Came to the uk married and have lived a full life.

I only hope they never have anyone make such an disrespectful ignorant comment as that to them.

They can tell you tales that would make even the hardest persons toes curl, really excruciatingly awful stuff.

We have no idea we are even born.

I'm now wondering if I visited the same Topography of Terror exhibition when I was Berlin as you lot

I think it is (or should be) possible to make a case against the current changes without hyperbolic historic comparisons which don't really stack up.

And I'm an avid remainer.

Perhaps I should have been more clear in my OP.

I don't think the UK would ever mirror Nazi Germany in exact detail; it is more the shift in attitudes, accepting a certain demographic are "less than", a cognitive dissonance that it's okay for horrible things to happen to particular people.

Because that is already happening, without a doubt, if you check out attitudes towards people on benefits. Some of whom are very vulnerable.

bullying but that sort of sentiment shouldn't stop us from having debates about how such phenomenons arise.