Why worry about small changes? Because radical shifts occur millimeter by millimeter.

I know that a good number of people -- on the left as well as the right -- get pissed at comparisons between the Bush administration and the Nazis. But, that's probably because people can't divorce in their minds the horrors of the holocaust from Nazism. There was more to Nazism than the death camps. And there are other things to fear from a government that emulates some of the Nazis' early tactics and actions.

The changes in German society that made it possible for Hitler to rise in power happened millimeter by millimeter, as is documented in an excerpt from a book by Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 1945," a German who lived through it. A longish excerpt of that book is posted here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/20/12819/467

Read it, please. And pass it on.

Here's a tiny portion:
>>The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.<<