(12-13-2016, 06:29 PM)David Horn Wrote:(12-13-2016, 05:05 PM)Odin Wrote:(12-13-2016, 10:31 AM)radind Wrote: I have been in mourning for the last 8 years and finally have a glimmer of hope.
L-O-fucking-L
We have our own train wreck in the offing. I'm not mourning, but I am baffled. This is a worldwide phenomenon. We need to see it that way. After all, the Philippines elected a one-term mayor to run the country, and he's running death squads from the Presidential mansion. Most of Europe is seriously considering neo-fascists. It's not just us.
It was bad enough when Commies had atom bombs. At least the Commies cherished their own lives and didn't pretend that a heroic death was anything other than a tragedy. The first people that I could rule out in the 9/11 attacks were the Commies of China and Cuba. Marxism offers no Pie-In-the-Sky-When-You-Die.
Fascism in any form is a death cult celebrating death whether as killers or the killed. For them martyrdom in the name of Nation and Party is a new form of life. This is not simply an attribute of Abrahamic religions (European fascism twisted the heritage of Christian martyrs to the service of Race and Nation, and "Islamofascism" has done much the same with ancient martyrs in the name of Islam), but even Buddhism (think of the kamikaze pilots who put Buddhist devotion into their rationale for flying manned missiles to their doom).
If any good can come out of a Trump Presidency it will be a warning that fascist demagoguery, however clever it may be, gets horrible social policy. I expect American politics to be reduced to a sort of reality show that will offend almost anyone with a three-digit IQ and scare much of the rest of Humanity. I expect America to be the sort of place that people want to stay away from -- sure, there is work, but it comes with the sting of hunger and the sting of the lash, a part of the ugly legacy of plantation slavery.
Such will turn much of the world against the New America. I expect people who love such freedom as they have to find an America that has abandoned liberal democracy to see a fascistic America as an Evil Empire on par with the old Soviet Union. Even where there is no democracy, nations such as China and most Arab countries will assert the superiority of their culture to the garish vulgarity of the Reality Show and its anti-intellectualism. I expect even Russia to turn against America once Donald Trump or his successor becomes untrustworthy.
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.