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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s fine; doesn’t affect me.[/quote]

Classic example of then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak up for me

Atlantic had an article about a Jewish lawyer who fled Germany in 1938 (he did as much as he could to represent other Jews for as long as he could) and wrote a book about how dictatorships develop.

What happens is the development of a dual society. On one side, things work normally. People work, court systems handle the usual business disputes and other civil litigation, normal criminal courts work. Banks function. Stores are open.

Some excerpts from the article--

Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply.

The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers.

Yet, Fraenkel insisted, it was a mistake to think that even the Nazis would entirely dispense with normal laws. After all, they had a complex, broadly capitalist economy to maintain. “A nation of 80 million people,” he noted, needs stable rules. [b]The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.[/b][/quote]

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