Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion

A provocative essay from nearly three quarters of a century ago, Who Goes Nazi? by Dorothy Thompson.

For whatever reason, and the trains of thought are often unbidden and unanticipated, I was thinking this morning about the oddity that, despite what you might think, most of the world's revolutionaries are out of the clerisy, rarely from the poverty stricken and not usually members of the elite, but people from the near-elite. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, bureaucrats (Lenin, Castro, Che Guevara, etc.). People who get close to power but don't actually control anything despite their desperate wishes. So when I came across this old Harper's essay from 1941, the closing paragraphs resonated.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.