"Cant happen here"?

Hannah Arendt warned that one of the things that aids
the advance of totalitarianism / authoritarian governance, is that
liberal thinkers “indulge in wishful thinking and shirk reality
in the face of real insanity.” :

The lesson of the success of the crimes against humanity
in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union is that
“‘normal people’ refuse to believe” that crimes such as
the death by starvation of 11 million Ukrainian Soviet citizens
in the early 1930’s
could be a result of government policy.

The idea that this kind of atrocity could happen went against
what “common sense” taught, and notions of Germany and the Soviet
Union as expressions of “civilized” societies.
Six million Jews couldn’t be killed in the concentration camps,
many said at the close of World War II.
After all, Germany was an “advanced society.”

...Hannah Arendt warned readers
“… it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of
what we commonly call human dignity.”

fra omtale ved Ray McGinnis

se også Goodreads-omtaler

Totalitarianism 101