> a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history

Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).

> Politicians ignore most people's opinions

Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.

> Face it: democracy is a sham.

Face it, that does not excuse looking away. You seem to be saying looking away isn't making a difference anyway, so it's not actually looking away. Or maybe that if someone might lose their life when standing up for themselves or someone else, they do not have the option of standing up. Despite many people having proven that wrong.

And you say even those little acts of courage didn't change history, but how you can even know how much worse it would be without those? I'm not accepting that, even though it's an additional discussion to original point, which is that these acts change all of the history of the person doing or not doing them.

Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting. I mean sure, Europe was pretty fucked up, fascists and communists were being ugly either way, I'm not saying it would have been great, but it's still not like that there is some sort of historic force outside of human actions and humans just "align" with it, and it's not as if history selects or even creates a vessel for something it would "do" anyway.

I'm not trying to put these words in your mouth, but as something that is essential to totalitarianism (this pseudo-scientific view of history and spooky forces greater than the individuals) I just want to drive it home. Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.

> Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

-- Hannah Arendt

That totalitarianism book is thick, but it's worth it. In an interview 1964 she said:

> When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.

This is kinda of what "democracy is a sham, history rolls on" means in practice, ultimately. There's a lot of video footage of the Eichmann trial on YouTube last time I checked, it's very depressing. All it takes for a person to lose themselves is to look away, and all it takes for that to happen is to not think. Not think bad things, just don't (really) think. And if it doesn't matter either way, if history just "rolls on", why would one think, especially about not so nice things?

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm ( http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... )

He totally acknowledges what you say, just like none of what I said implied a denial of it. But that's the starting point, the issue to work on, an issue to exercise agency about, not an excuse for people having no agency. Even if it's just the choice of being tortured to death by Big Brother, or being tortured, agreeing to love Big Brother, and then getting murdered, if you're reading this, you have a lot of choices. Not as many as you deserve, maybe not as many as other people have, but plenty.