I'm a sceptic that the 4th Turning started in 2008

[pbrower2a]

(07-21-2020, 09:31 PM)Marc Lamb Wrote: Frankly I think the big elephant in this "Generational Theory" room is a flawed consensus among you all is that a 4T somehow represents a "regeneration" of sorts, where a solid majority gets on the same page and attacks troubling issues in a singular mind.

Of course this was the case in 1933 Germany, right after FDR and the Democrat Party crushed Hoover & the Republicans in November, 1932.

To say that the Germans responded very differently from how Americans responded to the early stage of the Crisis of 1940 is to show that nations can respond very differently. Germany got its own sort of Regeneracy, one repudiating the recent past as completely as was possible, but also in the most perverse way possible. But the German Regeneracy was a false or fraudulent one, one based upon the acceptance of the worst characteristics of the national heritage. The slogan "Deutschland erwache!" (Germany awakes!) signifies the death of whatever traces of freedom Germans had developed over the centuries. If FDR found real scapegoats in criminal marauders who would never make a viable contribution to American life, Hitler found innocent people to sacrifice. German Jews (and other Jews who found themselves with the misfortune of coming under Nazi rule) would be lambs to the slaughter. In America, the creative talents of Jews would manifest themselves in the Golden Age of American Cinema. The Hollywood Jews recognized well that they could not make Americans not Jewish act like Jews, let alone accept Judaism, but they could create fit models for American life during a hard time of depression and in turn war. 

Nazi culture was blatant, but inept propaganda. America was suited to certain expressions of propaganda, most blatantly "whatever you do, do not be a criminal"... OK, parents were always telling kids this. The Hollywood Jews created a stock hero in, of all things, the Roman Catholic priest, to get this message out to Irish-American and Italian-American kids exposed to criminal subcultures -- reject those subcultures and do your civic duty, and things will turn out well enough for you. It was parallel to the Jewish experience, and something that Jews shared with Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans. It resonated well. I remember seeing a work on how the Jews really dominated Hollywood... but refuting the idea that Jewish cultural domination could be suspect, it turns out that the Golden Age of American Cinema offered Americans of all ages, ethnic groups, and levels of intellectual sophistication the most life-affirming and morally-unobjectionable movies ever -- and, in view of the technical skill then available, movies still watchable eighty or more years later. The Jews in Hollywood allowed a motion-picture code to prevail, and certain things (overt sex and mockery of religion and American patriotism) were off limits. The Jews wanted it that way. It was wiser to have the parish priest telling devout Catholics that it was in no way immoral to attend the movie theater. 

When war came those Jews could unleash righteous patriotism against the man who dedicated himself to the annihilation of everything Jewish. Such was a good choice. 

It may surprise you that before 1933 Germany had an impressive cinema that then rivaled Hollywood. Hitler and his cultural henchman Goebbels destroyed that in Germany. The lucky part of German cinema found its way to Hollywood. Much of that was, of course, Jewish. That part of German cinema strengthened cinematic techniques in America.  

Quote:But this was not the case in 1860, nor in 1776. Not even close. Not even remotely close. Many votes in those days were case in musket balls with lots of blood.

But there are parallels. Lincoln called to attention the founding of the new America. FDR saw Lincoln as a model of wartime leadership during World War II and made the most of that model. 

Let's not kid ourselves. This time the Crisis isn't achieving independence from Britain, endeavoring to keep the Union together (in the North) or preserving a supposedly wonderful way of life (in the South -- nobody ever asked the slaves whether things were so great for them), or waging two wars at once against enemies intent on obliterating democracy everywhere at once. We have a tiny virus... and if Trump had any idea of how to lead he would be making a demonized enemy out of an utterly inhuman, destructive, and insidious virus. 

This is the "Adolf Hitler of Our Time":



Go ahead. Hate this enemy. Hate it as you wear a mask. Hate it as you recognize that it denies you much that you ordinarily enjoy in life. Hate it as it makes your economic life precarious. Hate it while you wash your hands for twenty seconds instead of five.  

Quote:Only a sober look back at FDR's America in the 1930s, without the blinders of Democrat Party hackery, can reveal how closely Democrats & Republicans pols in this country attempted to mirror Hitler's Germany (perhaps, as one commentator called the New Deal "without the blackshirts").

...yes, but with no compromise in the rule of law, academic freedom, workers' rights, religious freedom, and the right to form a small business and make a go of it. The Republican Party had entwined itself completely with an economic bubble that burst and for which the GOP had no viable solution. If you are not part of the solution, then you are not part of the process of resolving a big mess.

Quote:Thank God, those attempts failed. Largely due the Founder's collective wisdom in writing the U.S. Constitution, but also in We The People's respect for that document and the rule of law.

Yeah, sure. Tell me all about FDR's concentration camps (OK, incarceration of Japanese-Americans was a mistake), secret police rewarding children for spying on their parents, and politicized youth groups such as the Hitlerjugend and Bund Deutscher Maedel. Oh -- Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts which scrupulously avoided partisan expressions? 

Quote:If today's Democrats believe the Constitution is hopelessly flawed and invalid, win an election with the aim to settle that score in an undemocratic fashion, don't be surprised that a unpredictable resistance results in votes being cast as they were in days of old.

The Constitution isn't the problem. It is a current President who seeks to demolish its protections in the name of his personality-cult-in-all-but-name.

Note that someone such as I, very much a liberal, typically now attack Donald Judas Trump from a traditional, conservative standpoint.  Adolf Hitler stripped whatever checks and balances there had been in the German legal tradition, and without those he could initiate wars unilaterally and damn millions to slaughter for being "subhuman". Trump may not be that bad, but he is attempting to establish an unaccountable federal police force (yes, a secret police analogous to the Gestapo, Kempeitai, KGB, SAVAK, Tontons Macoutes, or Mukhabarat -- or for something associated with one American state, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission). Check the Wikipedia article on the latter. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississipp...Commission

I suggested that it be put into the category of "secret police", and that has stuck. 

Donald Trump now mandates that we have a New Birth of Freedom -- a catch-phrase that I have extracted from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.