08-19-2021, 03:00 PM
One possible explanation: those influenced by those who survived the last 4T are told some very clear lessons from the previous Crisis. I see images of the Nazi genocide, and those are seared into my consciousness even though I (born in 1955) obviously did not experience it for myself. GI's saw Nazi symbols as objects of derision, the Silent (just think of Mel Brooks) intensified loathing of Nazis, and we Boomers lapped it up. If something in any way resembled Nazism (like the KKK doing terror in the name of White Supremacy, the repressive apparatus enforcing Apartheid, the madness of the Khmer Rouge, or the militarism of Saddam Hussein) we knew enough to excoriate it.
Americans may have still been thinking of the Civil War as the definitive Crisis until at least the 1920's, but after the American Civil War few people saw the Civil War as the definitive crisis. To be sure, Franklin Delano Roosevelt coopted Lincoln-like rhetoric against the Nazis, and American administrations of POW camps holding German soldiers used Abraham Lincoln as the model for Germans to adopt as a hero in contrast to you-know-who.
All Crisis Eras are dissimilar in who the enemies are like. The Confederates were gentlemen in contrast to the Nazis, the latter even worse abusers of slaves. But so is the object. Germany, Italy, and Japan are not The Enemy this time, as the fascists that we American must deal with this time are people born and raised here; America is not going to splinter over slavery; and we obviously aren't seeking independence from a King who tries to micromanage life in "the Colonies". I can already predict the most likely focus of the next Crisis, the Crisis of 2100, and that will be the consequences (environmental ruin causing now-unimaginable dislocations -- unless one does the math as I can, and I can see no salubrious conclusion because I can do the math -- due to global warming), and that will make bungled responses to a respiratory plague in 2020 completely irrelevant.
A hint: Stalin's collectivization of Soviet agriculture was a sheer horror, with freehold farmers being obliged to become serfs of the Soviet state. But free farmers could survive as serfs on collective farms. "King Neptune" (an allusion to the Roman god of the seas) will expropriate land from hundreds of millions of peasant farmers worldwide and cause famines on a scale never known in human history -- and the largest number of victims will be the peasant farmers who won't even have serf-like roles on any collective farms.
Americans may have still been thinking of the Civil War as the definitive Crisis until at least the 1920's, but after the American Civil War few people saw the Civil War as the definitive crisis. To be sure, Franklin Delano Roosevelt coopted Lincoln-like rhetoric against the Nazis, and American administrations of POW camps holding German soldiers used Abraham Lincoln as the model for Germans to adopt as a hero in contrast to you-know-who.
All Crisis Eras are dissimilar in who the enemies are like. The Confederates were gentlemen in contrast to the Nazis, the latter even worse abusers of slaves. But so is the object. Germany, Italy, and Japan are not The Enemy this time, as the fascists that we American must deal with this time are people born and raised here; America is not going to splinter over slavery; and we obviously aren't seeking independence from a King who tries to micromanage life in "the Colonies". I can already predict the most likely focus of the next Crisis, the Crisis of 2100, and that will be the consequences (environmental ruin causing now-unimaginable dislocations -- unless one does the math as I can, and I can see no salubrious conclusion because I can do the math -- due to global warming), and that will make bungled responses to a respiratory plague in 2020 completely irrelevant.
A hint: Stalin's collectivization of Soviet agriculture was a sheer horror, with freehold farmers being obliged to become serfs of the Soviet state. But free farmers could survive as serfs on collective farms. "King Neptune" (an allusion to the Roman god of the seas) will expropriate land from hundreds of millions of peasant farmers worldwide and cause famines on a scale never known in human history -- and the largest number of victims will be the peasant farmers who won't even have serf-like roles on any collective farms.
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.