09-04-2018, 07:38 AM
(09-03-2018, 08:15 PM)Hintergrund Wrote:(09-02-2018, 06:36 AM)Teejay Wrote: America right now reminds me of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930's. Complete with left and right wing extremists fighting each other on the streets.
These extremists are jokes - on both sides. If they weren't, we'd have thousands of victims.
Quote:I think Obama is analogous to FDR
Hell no. If he had defeated Muslim extremists all over the world, that'd be different.
Obama did nothing to feed anti-American sentiments worldwide; if anything he calmed them. He did whack Osama bin Laden in revenge that the rest of the world seemed to think appropriate. The usual critics of American military strikes (China and Russia) were scrupulously silent. They would have done much the same against someone who plotted to do 9/11-style attacks on Shanghai or Saint Petersburg (Russia -- not Florida!). Osama bin Laden is little admired, liked, or tolerated in the Islamic world.
But the anti-American sentiments that had been a raging fire had become warm embers that some stupid person could re-ignite if someone did something incredibly stupid, like casting linseed oil upon those embers. Extremists like Donald Trump symbolically do something to aggravate the situation.
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.
