08-14-2017, 10:16 AM
(08-14-2017, 02:31 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-14-2017, 01:05 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: The problem is that we're clearly in a 4T and in a 4T the center never holds. I would say that like summoning a demon by saying its name, the left is busy doing that now with fascism. Fascism can only arise if there is a credible threat of communism.
I'm dubious that we're in a true 4T. We haven't had a regeneracy, a clear decisive shift into new values and trial and error mode. We're in see saw mode. That puts as more in 3T stagnation and disagreement than in a 4T decisive culture shift. Of course, there is a partisan tendency to see any brief moment on the top of the see saw ride as some sort of permanent thing. Hillary will win. Trump will suddenly develop people skills. At this point, I'm not holding my breath.
One indication of a Regeneracy is the recognition that 'business-as-usual' no longer holds promise. Maintaining the status quo becomes either unsustainable or absurd.
Quote:I have a feeling that some of the Alt Right people wearing Nazi or Klan regalia and praising Hitler are doing so because it makes people jump and go all irrational. This doesn't imply that the violent folks don't often take it more seriously. I remember my old high school American History class, where we had an extended discussion of an awakening race riot held in a nearby town. We actually had eyewitnesses, participants, two close friends, ladies, both ever so ready to say how much fun they had throwing punches and scratching at folks with opposite pigmentation. In the end, they got in the car together and drove home.
One girl was black, the other white. They both laughed as they told their tales the next day. When you are young, violence can seem like fun. When people die, it's been taken further than that point, in my opinion at least.
Nazism and Ku Kluxism are offensive, absurd, and above all else evil. But throwing punches or stones in a race riot might be perversely fun for a short time, but such gets old fast. 'Race riots' as in Detroit fifty years ago died out on their own. That was in an Awakening Era. When the violence becomes more sophisticated and more protracted because the Establishment condones or promotes it, then we have something more like the scenario of the break-up of Yugoslavia, which is a dangerous 4T event.
Quote:Agreed, the press blows their coverage up way out of proportion.
Newspaper owners want to sell newspapers. Panic is profit.
Quote:While there is admittedly a strong streak of anti communism in classic mid 20th century fascism, there are many forms of autocratic racist dictatorship. Saddam might stand as an example of one to took the authoritarian way of thought and applied it to totally non-European cultures. I see Hitler, Stalin and Mao as creating authoritarian structures, alike in too many ways, the left right distinction lost behind a commitment to Agricultural Age hierarchy, authority and intimidation. I could see the current owners of the means of production using fascist ideas and values without communists hiding under every bed.
Saddam Hussein repressed Communists as he repressed any rivals. In the 1970s he arrested Iraqi Communists, put them on show trials, and arranged for them to be convicted and hanged -- probably in an attempt to elicit respect from the West. It impressed few in the West except to show the brutality of the regime. His regime had many characteristics of fascism.
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.