Progressive Politics

In highschool my German teacher's first memory was her train that was headed to a concentration camp being attacked and they were able to run into the woods.

Her family had belonged to one of the Christian churches that originally didn't say anything but eventually spoke up against the Holocaust.

So the congregation was either killed or in the process of getting sent to the same camps they didn't speak out against first.

It's not enough to eventually do the right thing, you have to stand up for shit immediately, hesitate and it's too late. If everyone stands up at once, it's enough people.

People forget that less than half the people killed in the Holocaust was because they were Jewish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims

There were 6 million for being Jewish. And 11 million more for other reasons, which is really close to 1/3 than half.

Because when it started with Jewish people, not everybody stood up at once.

The same was said about the siege of Stalingrad. No "nice people" survived.

They were eaten.

"I don't get into politics" is a fancy way of saying, "My rights aren't up for debate every few years."

For those that don’t know how they’re privileged.

As a Trans person I don't have the privilege of being apolitical, my very life has been politicized and I therefore must be political as a result.

For people with money to spare maybe, but being apolitical is the default state of working class people (aka the majority of voters). You don't have time to get involved in activism when it's taking all you can do to just put food on the table.

Fascism is just authoritarian capitalism, and then as now its main base of support is the middle class, meaning people with something to lose. Like, the main electoral constituency of Donald Trump is not disgruntled rust belt workers but small business owners- car dealerships, construction companies, realtors. Just like in Germany back in the day.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/family-capitalism-and-the-small-business-insurrection/

Exactly

Banned

It's a shame so many people are straight brainwashed into thinking 'this is good enough' and my favorite 'it could be worse' as a justification for ignoring problems.

All too often, I see folks making the noise described as "the problem" rather than "the symptoms".

Occasionally, I get to hear how the folks making the noise are dupes of Iranian fifth columnist terror cells who have been embedded in US universities to spread Marxism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism.

White moderate*

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

• MLK Jr "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

The quote that someone else posted below doesn't exactly say what you wrote. Are you referring to something else? Well, the below quote was from a letter, not from a speech, so perhaps you have something else in mind.

Sophie Scholl is the ultimate badass, and a quote of hers motivates me to more and more political action. The ovaries on this woman, the guts, just before she is killed at twenty-one.

"How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?"

-Sophie Scholl, 22 February, 1942.

Actual patriots and heroes

For the impetus of the idea, yes. But bystanders play a crucial role in letting fascism proliferate.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.