As I read about Europe and Asia’s vast experiments with totalitarian socialism in the 20th century, I am struck by how the various governments of Germany, Italy, China, and the Soviet Union did NOT overtly use their militaries upon their populations. Instead, through propaganda, secret police, and a large group of informants the godless governments turned neighbors against one another, and eventually removed whole groups of people who found themselves ostracized from the central government.
When I read about something as horrible as Auschwitz, I notice that it was not the standard German Army (the Wermacht) that marched people to the gas chambers. Yes, the SS guarded the camps, and the Wermacht rounded people up and committed their own atrocities elsewhere in Europe, but it was not German soldiers who by and large led people to the gas chambers. The Nazis were aided and abetted by thousands upon thousands of French, Ukrainians, Dutch, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Croatians, Belgians, and other nationalities…even people of the Jewish faith! How could that be?
For the Jews who aided the Nazis, they more than likely believed that they were buying time for themselves. Probably many of the collaborators of the other groups felt the same way. Others, however, were true believers, and informed on their politically incorrect neighbors, harassed/attacked them, rounded them up, and led them or pushed them to their doom.
The Soviets did the same thing to the Tatars, Poles, Ukrainians, “Kulaks”, and all who would not accept their new way of seeing things. The mobs in Germany, Russia, or China would surround those the all-powerful, unrestrained government disliked, denounce them, find them guilty without trial or evidence, and dispatch them.
They had no shortage of people who would gladly turn on their neighbors, all for the sake of pleasing the government who defined reality for all and decreed that some/many people just were not “essential.”
And that is what socialist tyrants do: they turn government into god, turn government by consent of the governed into rule by decree, and turn citizens into snitches and slaves…or worse.