12-07-2016, 08:02 AM
(12-07-2016, 05:56 AM)Tuss Wrote: Where are you from, Remy?
As a European, I largely agree with you and I think it's approximately the European experience. I used to claim the 2T ended in 1977. Nowadays I settle for 1980. So from the viewpoint of the theory it would seem we were ahead of the US. Or maybe it's just that this forum is heavily dominated by lefties who refused to accept the world had changed until Reagan's second term, by which time they were forced to wake up and smell "the Morning in America". For a good part of the early 80's, they instead retreated to their dens, where they made exciting forecasts, trying to persuade each other how Reagan sure enough was soon to drop the bomb. Subconsciously, nuclear Armageddon perhaps appeared more palatable to idealistic Boomers than admitting they could have been wrong about anything.
For Americans the Crisis of 1940 ended on V-J Day with the surrender of Japan in 1945. For most of Europe the Crisis ended in 1948 as the divide between Communist and non-Communist states solidified with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the failed Communist coup in Finland, the Berlin Airlift, the split between Tito and Stalin, and the end of the Greek Civil War.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.