11-07-2018, 12:38 AM
Trump is too incompetent... and evil. He can force an apocalypse, but he cannot ensure a salubrious result. If he should provoke a war, then that war is likely to be mindless carnage.
OK, he is not Hitler -- but was Hitler a Gray Champion? Hitler had his strengths as a leader; he was good at dividing power among potential rivals; he was attentive to detail; he thought outside the (moral) box that most people would reject leaving; he was adept at keeping a nation scared of real or imagined evils. In the end he traded the imaginary evil of the Jews for the real menace of the Allied Armies finally having more power than the Wehrmacht. Contrast Churchill, who made sure that the British people feared defeat far more than they feared him, who did not find scapegoats other than the wartime enemies, and who found a potential rival at times a necessary ally to be cultivated even at the risk of giving that person more potential power. Churchill also made sure that to conquered people that defeat at his hands was better than any alternatives available.
A Nazi victory was the worst thing to happen to just about any people (the only imaginable exception was gentile Balts who had endured worse under the Soviet Union) and created a resistance in its wake. A British or American victory was the end of the nastiness, and a time for starting over. A German soldier had to watch his back all the way from the old German border to his place of posting; a British or American soldier did not.
Trump is a potential Gray Champion only if an evil person can succeed at the role. I am not going to say that victory justifies all crimes, as those crimes eventually tear at the system. In general, the world outside America despises him; he is not going to gain friends by invading Cuba or Venezuela, let alone Iran.
OK, he is not Hitler -- but was Hitler a Gray Champion? Hitler had his strengths as a leader; he was good at dividing power among potential rivals; he was attentive to detail; he thought outside the (moral) box that most people would reject leaving; he was adept at keeping a nation scared of real or imagined evils. In the end he traded the imaginary evil of the Jews for the real menace of the Allied Armies finally having more power than the Wehrmacht. Contrast Churchill, who made sure that the British people feared defeat far more than they feared him, who did not find scapegoats other than the wartime enemies, and who found a potential rival at times a necessary ally to be cultivated even at the risk of giving that person more potential power. Churchill also made sure that to conquered people that defeat at his hands was better than any alternatives available.
A Nazi victory was the worst thing to happen to just about any people (the only imaginable exception was gentile Balts who had endured worse under the Soviet Union) and created a resistance in its wake. A British or American victory was the end of the nastiness, and a time for starting over. A German soldier had to watch his back all the way from the old German border to his place of posting; a British or American soldier did not.
Trump is a potential Gray Champion only if an evil person can succeed at the role. I am not going to say that victory justifies all crimes, as those crimes eventually tear at the system. In general, the world outside America despises him; he is not going to gain friends by invading Cuba or Venezuela, let alone Iran.
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.