This and what Putin's presidency turned out to become in the long run is what I now happen to imagine largely felt like to witness the Nazis rise to power.

You just don't know what's coming before it's actually there. The historical evidence even shows that the Nazis weren't that out-of-touch with reality at first, at least in terms of what was largely acceptable back in their day - like rights to land, borders, with many countries and nations being in a very turbulent state after the first World War. It's only after they got the power and set up the frameworks, like gradually oppressive laws and manipulating opinions and values through propaganda, that they went to do what we ultimately associate them with.

Putin spoke very high of "the west" and democracy and such at first, but quickly showed his true self when the Kursk sank, then with Beslan (the Nord Ost), then many more times, but back in the day, without today's hindsight, it seemed so... plausibly deniable? Like people could just vote him out the next time or excuse some things with the same traumas and biases that still brewed in the generations born in or shorty after the USSR. Now a full-blown tyrant, modernized to dictate through deceit, looking wild compared to his first days - a proper example of boiling the proverbial frog; turning the dial little by little, either compounding into some greater evil or simply revealing its true self, both equally inconsequential in the end.

Trump and Musk, similarly, have for the most part been interesting characters, so bizarre that excepting anything more felt naive, beyond the realm of possible. And yet again, unless there is enough backlash early on, people like this will keep pushing, until they lead us to the edge.

I never wanted to see for myself how something so terrible can rise to power, seemingly past everyone's attention. It's dreadful to think that the lessons of history are bets learned on one's own mistakes, that the Germany's experience is not enough to generate the unrest that keeps such people out of power.

I'm not even on the same continent as these two, but I know they'll be influencing a whole lot of change around the world, change that will never benefit any way.

The more things change...