Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today
One reason for public docility in terrible circumstances is fear. In the last years of the war, a Berliner could be arrested and, often, executed for doubting the final German victory ... But there is something more insidious, something not unfamiliar to many of us today: the hope that things will turn out all right soon, that the political outrages are temporary or at least that they can’t get worse. One way of dealing with bad times is to pretend that they are normal ...
This is the problem when the destruction of moral norms and the rule of law is incremental ...
When Donald Trump refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election in 2016, people should have sensed the danger. And yet at the time, respected intellectuals told me that everything would be fine ...
Since then, one red line after another has been crossed ...
All this was incremental, too, but compared with 1934, everything goes much faster. And yet life continues as usual. What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time ...
But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst.
Ian Buruma
Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won't Be Better Than Today https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/opinion/history-hope-delusion.html
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