04-19-2021, 09:07 PM
Classic X'er:
this video may unsettle you. You may like putting yourself at ease about your bigotry and your cruel rhetoric. Much of what keeps many of us from entering the abyss is our revulsion at evil. If we are to avoid becoming evil ourselves, then we must judge it in its early stages. A newborn Nile or saltwater crocodile may seem harmless; we all know what it can grow into. The hatchling crocodile grows from being a potential snack for such small killers as terrier dogs and domestic cats to the sorts of creatures that can singly dispatch a zebra.
Fascist butchery never starts with mass murder. It only culminates in mass murder... maybe. It is easy to understand (if not excuse) a predatory act such as an armed robbery for getting the money for booze or drugs. Understandable as it is, my state (Michigan) has the same mandatory sentence for armed robbery as for attempted murder: 25 to life, with no parole for 25 years. In a sense the equivalence has its validity: every armed robbery is a potential murder.
Adolf Hitler wasn't much of a murderer, as despots go, for the first six years of his vile rule. A military coup may result in the quick elimination of likely opposition that of course requires a few thousand murders, as under Pinochet -- but after that people know the norms (recognize that far worse is possible in life than exploitation, abuse, humiliation, and mindlessness... if you don't love it, leave it, so pretend that your suffering is a good thing with desirable objectives) and know how to stay alive another day. You know how that goes: no matter how you suffer, remember to show that just-happy-to-be-alive smile that shows that the secret police hasn't shoved your teeth down your throat because you made a joke about the dictator. Yes, there was the Night of the Long Knives, which, disgusting as it was, was made to look as an aberration in a society that tried to seem normal. Yes, there was the program to kill the mentally-disabled, but after leading figures called attention to that in international media (Hitler was conscious of his image, as is especially so of the hollowest people) he backed down. Not until he could get away with anything under the fog of war did he start mass murder that never stopped until liberation of occupied Europe and Germany itself.
I understand the corporate wing of the American Hard Right, and I have no cause to see it operating on any higher moral ground than the tycoons and big landowners of Germany from the time of Bismarck to the time in which the Commies dispossessed many of them. Some may be less nasty than others, but they had no problem supporting a beast like Pinochet in Chile because he kept wages near starvation levels and labor discipline tight while making sweetheart deals with the American owners of "American interests (really, corporate investments) abroad". Yes, even Americans are clever enough to do Orwellian doubletalk to justify the worst that Corporate America does. Most Americans have no stake in the inflated profits achieved with the aid of brutal discipline in foreign workplaces and corrupt dealings with dictatorial leaders. Most of us are simply content that such does not happen here.
Don't fool yourself. Many of our economic elites would like that to happen here through connivance with political stooges. Once that happens, we may lose all dignity other than the ability to show the mandated smile that demonstrates our gratefulness for not having some of our teeth kicked, hammered, or fist-knocked down our throats for failing to recognize how great it is to be overworked and underpaid or even being rendered destitute after having been a small-scale business owner-operator for the benefit of people devoid of any responsibility other than to their class of exploiters.
Remember: the armed robber doesn't stick around to keep offering the proposition "your money or your life" on a continuing basis. A brutal exploiter keeps such in place. So the money that you intended to use for a night on the town instead buys heroin for some desperate addict in need of a fix -- well, at least you will still be able to earn more money, and perhaps good money from a job that pays well and fairly due to a good union contract. The next time that you go out for a night on the town you will know enough to park in the parking garage within the building instead of parking a few blocks away to save a few bucks on parking. With the brutal exploiter like a German plutocrat in the Third Reich and a colonial empire that extended from France to Russia and Norway to Greece, your only hope is to outlast that situation. Terms of employment best known as serfdom are the proposition "your toil to exhaustion or your life" every nightmarish day until the Allied armies emancipate you.
Liberty is worth some hardship and frustration. Nobody can get everything that he wants consistently unless a tyrant, and every tyrant rightly fears ending up like Nicolae Ceausescu or Satan Hussein.
this video may unsettle you. You may like putting yourself at ease about your bigotry and your cruel rhetoric. Much of what keeps many of us from entering the abyss is our revulsion at evil. If we are to avoid becoming evil ourselves, then we must judge it in its early stages. A newborn Nile or saltwater crocodile may seem harmless; we all know what it can grow into. The hatchling crocodile grows from being a potential snack for such small killers as terrier dogs and domestic cats to the sorts of creatures that can singly dispatch a zebra.
Fascist butchery never starts with mass murder. It only culminates in mass murder... maybe. It is easy to understand (if not excuse) a predatory act such as an armed robbery for getting the money for booze or drugs. Understandable as it is, my state (Michigan) has the same mandatory sentence for armed robbery as for attempted murder: 25 to life, with no parole for 25 years. In a sense the equivalence has its validity: every armed robbery is a potential murder.
Adolf Hitler wasn't much of a murderer, as despots go, for the first six years of his vile rule. A military coup may result in the quick elimination of likely opposition that of course requires a few thousand murders, as under Pinochet -- but after that people know the norms (recognize that far worse is possible in life than exploitation, abuse, humiliation, and mindlessness... if you don't love it, leave it, so pretend that your suffering is a good thing with desirable objectives) and know how to stay alive another day. You know how that goes: no matter how you suffer, remember to show that just-happy-to-be-alive smile that shows that the secret police hasn't shoved your teeth down your throat because you made a joke about the dictator. Yes, there was the Night of the Long Knives, which, disgusting as it was, was made to look as an aberration in a society that tried to seem normal. Yes, there was the program to kill the mentally-disabled, but after leading figures called attention to that in international media (Hitler was conscious of his image, as is especially so of the hollowest people) he backed down. Not until he could get away with anything under the fog of war did he start mass murder that never stopped until liberation of occupied Europe and Germany itself.
I understand the corporate wing of the American Hard Right, and I have no cause to see it operating on any higher moral ground than the tycoons and big landowners of Germany from the time of Bismarck to the time in which the Commies dispossessed many of them. Some may be less nasty than others, but they had no problem supporting a beast like Pinochet in Chile because he kept wages near starvation levels and labor discipline tight while making sweetheart deals with the American owners of "American interests (really, corporate investments) abroad". Yes, even Americans are clever enough to do Orwellian doubletalk to justify the worst that Corporate America does. Most Americans have no stake in the inflated profits achieved with the aid of brutal discipline in foreign workplaces and corrupt dealings with dictatorial leaders. Most of us are simply content that such does not happen here.
Don't fool yourself. Many of our economic elites would like that to happen here through connivance with political stooges. Once that happens, we may lose all dignity other than the ability to show the mandated smile that demonstrates our gratefulness for not having some of our teeth kicked, hammered, or fist-knocked down our throats for failing to recognize how great it is to be overworked and underpaid or even being rendered destitute after having been a small-scale business owner-operator for the benefit of people devoid of any responsibility other than to their class of exploiters.
Remember: the armed robber doesn't stick around to keep offering the proposition "your money or your life" on a continuing basis. A brutal exploiter keeps such in place. So the money that you intended to use for a night on the town instead buys heroin for some desperate addict in need of a fix -- well, at least you will still be able to earn more money, and perhaps good money from a job that pays well and fairly due to a good union contract. The next time that you go out for a night on the town you will know enough to park in the parking garage within the building instead of parking a few blocks away to save a few bucks on parking. With the brutal exploiter like a German plutocrat in the Third Reich and a colonial empire that extended from France to Russia and Norway to Greece, your only hope is to outlast that situation. Terms of employment best known as serfdom are the proposition "your toil to exhaustion or your life" every nightmarish day until the Allied armies emancipate you.
Liberty is worth some hardship and frustration. Nobody can get everything that he wants consistently unless a tyrant, and every tyrant rightly fears ending up like Nicolae Ceausescu or Satan Hussein.
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.