If you think this is a moment to stand on the side, cover your ears and eyes and let heroes save you, I’m here to tell you that nobody is coming to save you. The only heroes who can save us are us. We are in an all hands on deck moment here in the free world. Whatever you personally can do in this fight, you need to do. The fight is against a determined, well-funded, tightly organized movement that believes destruction of all enemies is the will of God Almighty.

This moment is not the same as any other historical moment, except perhaps the eve of a cataclysm like World War Two. The overpopulation of the planet, the rising heat, rising oceans, mass extinction, disappearing water, historically savage inequality, restless armies of enraged grievants serving the will of our most psychopathic citizens, authoritarians ruling most of the planet — a recipe for mass murder if there ever was one.

It’s unpleasant to be reminded that a group like the Nazis started in a room, arguing among themselves, until the proper organizational and promotional geniuses arrived. Within a decade you had a potent, violent political force, organized under a rousing banner, indomitably roiling the most civilized nation in Europe. Before the next decade was over you had an unrivaled military power, with a Nazi as the commander in chief, declaring its right to unlimited living space. The rest, as they say, is history.

Once there is sufficient momentum for this kind of movement of true believers, and the voices of reason are silenced, this impulse to dominate the “weak” turns into an avalanche. People at one time merely supremely opportunistic, ambitious, competitive, greedy, superior become the defenders of death camps as necessary to the maintenance of the status quo, the protection of decency and godliness itself.

The Nazis didn’t open a series of death camps in their first year, or their fifth, or even their tenth. Opening mass killing centers is a process that marches step by step, inexorably, carried out by rabidly loyal partisans who ask no questions along the way and echo whatever the leader says, no matter how otherwise insane it might be.

This is what we are looking at right now, boys and girls. You can choose to ignore it, of course, the same way you can ignore history or any other cause and effect in your life. It may not be a wise choice, in the long run, or even in the short run, but it is certainly a popular one.