07-30-2020, 10:57 PM
(07-29-2020, 11:48 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(07-29-2020, 09:19 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: To both of you:
1. Einzige -- orthodox Marxism-Leninism is dead. It has no viable derivative in the United States. Even fascism of the neo-Nazi and KKK types (the two are merging) has more mass support in America. Those are sick people, the leaders of fascist cliques typically sociopaths and the followers hard to find unless as duplicates. Government ownership of productive capacity is even becoming irrelevant as much of the value created in America is intellectual property, the result not so much of material creation as of imagination and staging.
But KKK and Nazi fascism are nearly dead. Trump-style fascism is relevant to the extent that Trump has taken fascistic themes (hurt national pride, fear of pollution by 'alien' culture, economic distress, dread of change that leaves many behind, and a mythologized history) along with support from rapacious elites who want to take everything away from the rest of Humanity -- including its freedom.
2. Classic X'er: the Marxist threat exists largely in your mind. You really ought to go out more and listen to what people say. The best arguments against Donald Trump are now from conservatives who recognize his threat to the political traditions that prevent the political thuggery that has destroyed democracies. Donald Trump really is a horrible person, a man with neither heroic personality nor a moral compass.
I'm going to agree with you and say, the Marxist threat is not a threat to me personally or the American right because the entire American right believes in might makes right. Bob is right, the Democratic party can't go head to head with the America right. Dude, the American right got rid of the British, crushed the Confederacy and the KKK, crushed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Toppled the Soviet Union and so forth. Donald Trump ain't that bad of a person. He's stubborn, he's gruff, he's not the perfect human being, he's not a saint and doesn't pretend to be one and above all, he doesn't give a shit about what the liberal elites think about of him. Dude, the liberal Washington elite and the liberal media elite and the liberal global elite are all fucking with America right now and America is going to hand them their asses back to them on a silver plate and leave the chips fall. The way I see it, the Democratic party is pretty boxed in at this point due to its significant loss of believers.
Abraham Lincoln said as the Civil War started to the effect that we should be concerned not with getting God on our side as whether we are on God's Side. If God is just, then if we too are just then we should reasonably expect His Aid in war. The Confederacy had some virtues in contrast to the Axis Powers, but they still fought to defend the abomination that is chattel slavery.
We ultimately won in World War II because we left the Other Side nothing for which to fight. Consider that there was no underground resistance to the British and Americans in Italy. We did not plunder. We did not destroy the rich legacy of Italian history and culture. The Nazis had their Werewolf cells, but these either decided to avoid trouble or were smashed easily because they had no local support. I have seen images of the American advances into Rome and Munich; Americans were seen as liberators. Japan? We had no resistance. Defeat isn't sweet, but the totalitarian regimes that had just wilted were far worse.
As for the collapse of Communism -- no troops needed to move so much as an inch, except in Romania (where the Army turned against a dictator and his brutal secret police when those sought to preserve hard-line rule).
...Donald Trump is a thoroughly vile person, and it is now clear that defeat looms for him. He deserves it for his support of dictators and now his bungling of COVID-19. 150 thousand people have died in America, and some communities are veritable concentration camps due to the disease.
You don't get out enough, and that is not a change from when COVID-19 was not yet on the scene. You may like to believe that you are representative of America, which is an arrogant position. Your delusion of such is comparatively harmless because you cannot really hurt people. Trump's delusion that he is America and people unlike him are not America even if you lionize him will prove either true or false in November. Disapproval approaching 60% is difficult to cut down.
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.
