02-16-2020, 12:05 PM
(02-15-2020, 06:12 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(02-14-2020, 11:45 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:Dude, I've been out witting the liberals for years. The Trump rallies aren't like Castro styles rallies. Where did you get that crazy idea from?(02-14-2020, 07:18 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Ah....You sure seem to have way more freedom than any other person living under leftist authoritarian rule these days. I figure a few more years of good old fashioned American tolerance and exposure should pretty much seal your political fate. Keep singing boys.
We have the wit. Your side associates blind obedience to, and unqualified loyalty to, the personality of Donald Trump as the definitive patriotism. I never saw that with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. One can disagree without being a traitor. One is a traitor if one betrays his country by compromising its institutions to the aid of a foreign power hostile to a longstanding heritage of one's country.
Your President holds Castro-style rallies. Your President held rallies in Iowa just before the caucus and in New Hampshire just before the primary. I could excuse Carter because he had a contest. What is Trump's excuse?
It's not the repression that we now have that scares me; it is what can follow. I am nearly broke, and I have but one escape from a fascistic regime in America. That exit, I regret to say, is typically honored in a funeral parlor and at a grave-site.
I am so broke that I might end up in an unmarked grave. OK, I have other concerns than having a stone honoring someone who missed out on something to have a monument that nobody goes to see. Mercifully I am so inconsequential that I will likely die of natural causes.
Left-wing tyranny or right-wing tyranny... both are evil.
Did I say that I like left-wing tyranny? Marxism-Leninism is ethical, spiritual, and economic failure. Marxists claim that by removing the capitalist class they can make an economy more productive by taking out the profit and the wasteful indulgence in which capitalists wallow. Never mind that capitalist profit is a reward for meeting shortages, fostering innovation, promoting safety, and punishing gluts and incompetence. Did you ever watch the miniseries Chernobyl? The Soviet system failed to install the redundant safety mechanisms necessary for preventing a meltdown of the reactor core , and the bureaucratic simply passed the buck all the way to Gorbachev... who had to make life-and-death decisions that he apparently disliked making. At that, Gorbachev was trying to gut the dictatorial qualities of the system. People are obviously more than machines of production unless the system so demands under old-fashioned aristocratic feudalism or the state serfdom of Marxist regimes.
Note well that Mussolini learned many of the tricks of the dictatorial trade from Lenin: the use of a secret police to implement state terror, regimentation of the government, suppression of independent thought, consolidation of economic power for its own sake, and highly-staged rallies. Stalin went further than Lenin and Hitler went further than Mussolini. Hitler praised his infamous hanging judge Roland Friesler as "our Vyshinsky (Stalin's master of the purge)", suggesting that the extreme Right and extreme Left are much more alike than the extreme Right is like a conservative traditionalist like Churchill. Put a social democrat against a Commie and watch the sparks fly.
...If you want a difference between a Trump rally and a Castro rally other than the slogans... Trump does not fill his rallies with children who get to see his rally instead of attending school. American school boards do not close schools to make the equivalent of Young Pioneers available to participate in political rallies. (I know from experience that Boy Scout troops are prohibited from appearing in Scout uniforms at partisan political events).
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.