Using your Weimar example, I would not argue that Germany or humanity is/are better off for having gone through the cataclysm of WW2. In terms of building context, you might find it helpful to read this dry but very detailed examination of the nazi administrative state, and how it delivered economic resources to its political clients through a combination of reorganization, financial engineering, and striaght-up theft:
https://archive.org/details/hitlersbeneficia00alyg
On a more abstract level, try 'The logic of political survival' by Smith & Bueno de Mesquita. both books will give you a useful framework within which to assess the contextual significance of ongoing news events.
I also think this is a good summary for those who had never heard of Weimar before: https://archive.is/xh2Ci
But like most summaries, it suffers a bit from focusing on the key events, and not capturing this sort of ... change in the ambient noise floor, and what relationship the average citizen had to what was going on, and what perception of events. I think it's the "Would you have been able to tell that it'd get this bad?" is kind of the more interesting part. A political weather forecasting model, if you will.
That sounds interesting. Wish it had been converted into a blogpost or something for more permanence.
I think trying to bar such a system simply would make the same things covert.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/
Also has a Patreon
The people have always turned to fascism when the harsh realities of human nature, economy, and democracy are manifest. It's our fallback. National chemotherapy.
Yes, please document it. Our great great grandchildren need to know the mess we are in and who is responsible.
I marvel at the project management task that Trump & crew are maintaining in this flood-the-zone period, just to prevent duplication of effort and running into each other. There's already been a lot done to the DoJ, but its just started at the FBI.
Follow the firings -- and just hope you can keep up with who they're being replaced with. That's the real encroachment. We could be on the edge of real abuse when our law enforcement agencies fall under fascist control like this.
Well, the German atrocities of the Third Reich are well-documented and we are probably just a few years behind the U.S.
The best documentary won't help to prevent backsliding into superstition and barbarism if people don't believe them.
On the other hand, the history of downfall is basically self-documenting itself in real-time and people still don't believe it because people simply don't care about things that don't fit into their ideological borders or their perception of reality.
Truth doesn't exist anymore and thus anything that relies on truth.
https://youtube.com/@legaleagle
They explain the laws in question (often with historical context of their creation), answer common procedural questions, separate the facts of the case from political rhetoric & misinformation, and give an objective analysis of possible outcomes. They are certainly not unbiased, but in the "we are biased against criminal behavior" way.
I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain the delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
A friend of mine did her master's in political science on crawling data in Islamic extremist social media cycles and trying to correlate activity there with a dataset on terrorist events, trying to find out if you could anticipate them somehow.
This is a loose collection of thoughts, but I think there's something there in the signal.