How to Stop Fascism: Five Lessons of the Nazi Takeover

From Timothy Snyder again, this time on what lessons we can draw on to prevent America’s collapse into fascism.

4. Big business should support democracy. In the Germany of the 1930s, business leaders were not necessarily enthusiastic about Hitler as a person. But they associated democracy with labor unions and wanted to break them. Seeing Hitler as an instrument of their own profit, business leaders enabled the Nazi regime. This was, in the end, very bad for business. Although the circumstances today are different, the general lesson is the same: whether they like it or not, business leaders bear responsibility for whether a republic endures or is destroyed.

I loved his succinct conclusion:

It’s simple: recalling history, we act in the present, for a future that can and will be much better.

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