I used to think (a long, long time ago) that America was exceptional. That it couldn't happen here, where "it" was some atrocity or another that was perpetrated by another country in another time and place. Then I had to acknowledge that there were just too many exceptions to hold that naive thinking. Today I read two things that bring that point home, from two different eras in history.
The first is a quote making the rounds on social media:
Dear America: you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of your people would kill another one-third, while one-third watches.
There's no evidence that Werner Herzog ever said that. But that's not important here.
The second is a paragraph from a biography I'm reading ("Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman" by Robert K. Massie). Catherine found herself involved in Poland's domestic politics. Poland was ruled by a Roman Catholic majority that discriminated against Russian Orthodox and German Protestant minorities.
She realized that she had badly underestimated the strength of Polish Catholicism and national pride, and, to her surprise, she found herself enmeshed in a serious military campaign. The Poles were fighting, she wrote to Voltaire, “in order to prevent a quarter of their nation from enjoying civic rights.”
The percentages might be different in each case, but the danger is the same whether it's 18th century Poland, 20th century Germany, or 21st century America. We are not so different after all to be confident that "it" can't happen here. It already is.
“It can’t happen here” is usually said right before it does. When accountability evaporates, law enforcement becomes the mechanism of abuse. By the time it feels normal, it already is.
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