12-06-2017, 06:45 AM
(12-05-2017, 01:44 PM)rds Wrote:(12-05-2017, 11:58 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Indeed the only sure lesson of history is that corrupt elites do everything possible to entrench themselves in power and, to the extent possible, either corrupt their possible competition or opponents or obliterate those opponents. That is why rebels were broken at the wheel and witches were burned at the stake. The usual command of an oppressor is "Suffer (for) me, or die horribly!"
I can see the current bare majority in power in America resorting to mass murder to keep their economic and political power. They have crossed into the zone of infamy. That is why Stalin's courts so readily issued the sentence "ten years without the right of correspondence". The person receiving such a sentence was quickly shot with no ceremony or appeal. He certainly never corresponded with anyone after that, did he?
This President better resembles infamous dictators than any prior President of the United States in practice. This Crisis could give us an America with torture chambers, concentration camps, and sites of mass killings. This President better resembles Slobodan Milosevic or Ferdinand Marcos than any prior President of the United States. He4 admires dictators -- not even conservative leaders like Reagan or Thatcher.
What amazes me is that the attitude of "it can't happen here" is so firmly into the psyche that most people I talk to just give me a dumb look when I say things can get much worse. Everyone knows the barbarity of the Nazi's and most know about Pol Pot, but they can't adjust their thinking to see it could happen here, all too soon. This is why objectifying people is so self destructive, most Americans here would read your statement about the death camps, and think you were bonkers, because they 'know' the German people of the '20s and the Khmer Rouge were just animals. Just this morning there's a report out that Trump wants to set up a private intelligence service with his old bud Erik Prince. I can't decide if they'll mutate into 'right wing death squads' or a new Praetorian Guard. Either way, not good.
We had slavery and Jim Crow.
Last night I saw Frontline on PBS, covering the 'patriot' takeover of a wildlife refuge in Oregon. In the footage, Cliven Bundy (one of the leaders) dropped the suggestion that blacks were happier as slaves actually producing things than collecting welfare.
(No, blacks are much happier when they are getting honest pay for honest work, as is true of just about any identifiable group of people!)
Cliven Bundy and his kind are close to being fascists, anyway.
We have small groups who believe in Nazi-like ideologies, including Ku Kluxism. We have a heritage of Big Business forming private militias to suppress union organization with murderous violence.
OK. The Germans (including Austrians, if you wish) are a sophisticated and cultured people whose achievements in literature are essential to the great corpus of Western civilization. Considering the Germans and Austrians alone one has Schutz, Bach, Handel, Telemann, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms, the Strauss family, Mahler (Czech Jews were culturally German), Richard Strauss, Reger, Hindemith, and Stockhausen. Liszt was ethnically German, and Bartok had a German mother. Although mathematics, science and technology are not quite culture, Germany had impressive achievements in both.
So how does a country give the world Bach, Goethe, Euler, and Planck, but fall for Hitler? Mediocrities and worse intellectually who fall for a demagogue, and rapacious plutocrats who decide that they want complete power over working people. Hitler appealed to greed of elites and the resentments of people in economic distress. We Americans are no better just for being Americans. Before someone talks about religiosity in America, right-wing Christianity has shown through its support of pedophile Roy Moore that America has plenty of vipers claiming to be Christians.
It would be foolish to confuse the Republican Party, which used to be clearly for democratic norms and the rule of law and free from religious bigotry, with the Nazi Party, which always showed contempt for democracy and the Jews. There has never been an equivalent of the Beer-Hall Putsch in the history of the Republican Party. Likewise, anyone who confuses Trump to Hitler has gone off the deep end. To be sure, Hitler began bad and became horrific, which Trump may get no chance to do. To be sure, both Trump and Hitler represent reckless, cynical demagogues, which is dangerous enough in itself. If anything we Americans are in more danger of a Pinochet-like caudillo taking over in the name of rescuing America from the dangers of democracy gone awry than we are of Trump becoming a full-blown fascist dictator.
But enough Americans did fall for a demagogue, the most dangerous figure in democratic societies short of a puppet of a foreign power. Trump is the symptom, and not the disease. Too many American are simply too gullible to perform the one act needed in a democracy if one is to participate in that democracy. Trump could unwittingly prepare Americans for a left-wing demagogue, which is no better.
Oh, yes -- private, politicized militias responsible to no formal government are a great bane of democracy, whether Mussolini's Black Shirts, the SA and SS in Germany before Hitler took power, the Klan and similar groups at any time in American history, the Croatian Ustase, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, or the Romanian Iron Guard. If one thinks that the Left is incapable of harm with private, politicized militias not responsible to formal government, consider that the Communist-dominated Action Committees in Czechoslovakia facilitated the Communist coup of 1948 in Czechoslovakia. Blackwater or its successor operating unchecked in America? Good grief!
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.