08-28-2019, 09:06 AM
(08-28-2019, 08:02 AM)Anthony Wrote: Trump is a 3T leader from the word "Go."
His economics are classic 3T (despite the pack of lies he told to get elected), and the "scorched-earth Culture Wars" (S&H's own words) he wages are also classic 3T.
3T ways and ideas create the ills and dangers of the Crisis. The faster and more completely nations repudiate 3T ways of economics, politics, culture, and intellectual life during a 4T, the better they get through the Crisis. The divide-and-culture ethos of the 3T creates a mess.
It takes nearly all capable adults to pull off a 4T well, and that requires social unification that does not split society into masters exempt from responsibility and pariahs who become the scapegoats. A well-run society in a 4T is capable of getting all to make reasonable sacrifices without determining that whole classes of people based on origins are vermin. It also takes a sacrifice of class privilege instead of elevating it as the social objective.
I look at the scenarios in science fiction of Axis victories, some of them quite convincing because absolute evil is absolutely fascinating --- yet I also recognize a great unreality. The Axis Powers had great economic resources at their disposal at their peaks of expansion, had superb generals, and had brave soldiers, too. They had the advantage, at least early, of more complete preparation, surprise, and willingness to break the conventions of waiting for valid excuses for moving troops where those troops were unwelcome. The problem with something like The Man in the High Castle (I have read the book but have never seen the TV series) is the ultimate reasons of the Allied victory: that the British and Americans (to a much lesser extent the Soviet order) more completely turned their economies from consumer societies to war machines, that they better used their scientific talent, that their intelligence services were more effective, that they did not waste people through persecutions and mass murder -- and most obviously, that once they won a swath of land they left people no cause for striking back. A German soldier had to watch his back the whole long distance from Poznan or Krakow to the eastern front from partisan attacks alone before facing the obvious dangers of hand-to-hand combat with the Red Army; the American or British soldier had no such problem after D-Day even in Germany and Italy. With the British and Americans, conquest implied that the war was over for the liberated or conquered peoples, and human dignity was enough to take the sting out of defeat. With the Third Reich or Thug Japan, conquest by brutal overlords began a horror that made resistance necessary for recovering some basic dignity, however temporary.
The Nazis, fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan lost the war due to thuggery. It is telling that as the Italian people switched sides their country became a more formidable belligerent on the side of the Allies than under the leadership of the Sawdust Caesar with all his pretension to restoring the glory of the Roman Empire. Turn the good and evil of the Axis and the Anglo-American alliance around, and one has even more potential for an Axis victory. Germany lost the war in part by casting off people (Jews) who could have been extremely useful to Germany as they were to the British, Americans, and Soviets. I have contemplated such a scenario, and I have thought of who the villains would be in America. The Klan presents itself, for obvious reasons, for sharing much the same bigotry as the Nazis and imposing some sick version of Manifest Destiny in America with a nightmare of genocide and slavery that must die; I have rogue elements in France rather easy to establish (the Vichy characters are in place in 1939). Britain is a bit trickier... but I can easily see a fascistic Britain collapsing in a scenario in which the roles of Churchill and Adenauer are inverted. (The two are quite similar). OK, the Spanish Republic survives without intervention of the fascist powers...
Dekluxification = denazification. Rommel Plan = Marshall Plan in the eastern former USA, Yamamoto Plan in the western former USA. The infamously-divided city is Chicago. Klan leaders are tried, convicted, and executed as war criminals for atrocities that include genocide. A large swath of the Southwest, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, the Permian Basin, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston reverts to Mexico because the Klan regime violated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in treating Mexican-Americans as lesser than white people. California, Oregon, and Washington get settled in great numbers by peoples from the Far East who fill an economic vacuum as Americans from elsewhere found their way to the Pacific Coast. The Diary of a Young Girl is by Lorraine Hansberry instead of by Anne Frank, the latter ending up as one of the leading journalists in postwar Germany. Other details: the Germans compel the integration of professional sports, dictate a law similar to the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the name of the Emancipation Proclamation, and initiate the building of such projects as the Autobahns linking Montreal to Miami, Halifax to Chicago, Washington to Memphis, and Chicago to Mobile. The center for film-making in America can no longer be in Hollywood, so it relocates to the sunniest part of the eastern United States -- the Shenandoah Valley.
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.