10-09-2016, 02:32 PM
(10-08-2016, 04:06 PM)aramarie Wrote: If their 3T ideals go against what the majority live by and not seen as rational they will be ignored and viewed as a replica of the destructive tendencies of their parents generation as well as having the 4T fresh in their minds they will not want a return to that. They will crave order for the ideal of peace for at least the majority.
Precisely. The American High (1946-1963), in which nostalgia for the Roaring Twenties was unthinkable, will likely serve as a possible analogy. Trying to live as if it were the Roaring Twenties required that one live with the accoutrements of the Roaring Twenties, most of which had been scrapped, lost, unavailable, or unserviceable. In big cities, housing from the time had often become, or was about to become, slums.
By the late 1930s things were better for most Americans than they were in the late 1920s. Securities values had not recovered from the heady prices of the late 1920s, and they would not reach those prices again until the 1950s. People blamed bad behavior of the 1920s for then recent hardships and expected similar results for similar tendencies.
The last 4T was innocuous for most Americans; the few exceptions were war casualties. For some ethnic groups (like Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and to a considerable extent Irish-Americans) the 4T was the time in which they started to get some respectability.
Elsewhere? For European Jews, for the Spanish Left, for political offenders who ended up in the maws of the Gestapo and OGPU, for just about anyone living between Berlin and Vienna on the west and and either Leningrad*, Moscow, or Stalingrad*, and for denizens of Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki the 4T was an unspeakable horror. This time we Americans might not be so fortunate as Americans of the last 4T. Mister, we could use a man like 'Abram' Lincoln again!
The destructive weapons of our time are far more devastating, and there are fewer places in which to hide. Should we Americans get pathological government (Donald Trump will not be the last threat of such when he loses; the stresses of a 4T have typically created openings for demagogues), then we could have a 4T that causes many American cities to look like Dresden at the end of World War II. Most of the nastiness of this time reflects efforts of privileged elites to maintain the business practices and economic inequality of the recent 3T, hoping to enshrine such for all time. Such is failure.
But I digress. The recent 3T will be mocked in humor of the next 1T when it is not faulted for all the faults of the current Crisis, let alone the tragedy and material destruction at the end of the Crisis.
Just imagine what the world would be like had the victorious Allies decided to lighten up on reparations from a defeated German people in the shaky Weimar Republic. Hitler becomes an irrelevancy; large Jewish populations flourish in Europe, prospering in countries like Poland and Romania that never underwent Communist rule. We may have cures for cancer and prion diseases... and have life expectancies in the 110s. The Federal Republic of China 'missed out' on Maoism and catapulted into prosperity by 1970. Korea might have gotten independence in a form resembling Dominion status in Canada. The only separation in India is of Burma.
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.