06-27-2017, 12:07 AM
So what can possibly go wrong?
1. Incompetent leadership. The leadership is simply insane, demented, stupid, or lazy. This is more competent in an absolute monarchy, few of which remain, than in democracies. Nothing can stop the bad leader from doing stupid things like declaring war on Austria when one really means Australia.
2. Evil leadership. Enough said.
3. Extreme polarization. Think of the prelude to the Spanish Civil War, and how that might apply to America, a country riven with ultra-modern minds and medieval minds wielding cultural, political, and administrative power.
4. Class struggle. By now I would have thought Karl Marx irrelevant in the modern world. Then comes Donald Trump.
5. Miscalculations. Leaders call a bluff and get burned, or "loose the fateful lightning of the terrible, swift ... nuke" and expect no bad consequences for themselves.
6. Fanaticism. People in one country have a missionary zeal to spread an ideal unwelcome in other countries into those countries.
7. Misunderstandings. See the assassination of the Archduke. Or misjudge a meteor strike as a nuclear bomb blast.
8. Secondary consequences -- starvation and pandemics.
1. Incompetent leadership. The leadership is simply insane, demented, stupid, or lazy. This is more competent in an absolute monarchy, few of which remain, than in democracies. Nothing can stop the bad leader from doing stupid things like declaring war on Austria when one really means Australia.
2. Evil leadership. Enough said.
3. Extreme polarization. Think of the prelude to the Spanish Civil War, and how that might apply to America, a country riven with ultra-modern minds and medieval minds wielding cultural, political, and administrative power.
4. Class struggle. By now I would have thought Karl Marx irrelevant in the modern world. Then comes Donald Trump.
5. Miscalculations. Leaders call a bluff and get burned, or "loose the fateful lightning of the terrible, swift ... nuke" and expect no bad consequences for themselves.
6. Fanaticism. People in one country have a missionary zeal to spread an ideal unwelcome in other countries into those countries.
7. Misunderstandings. See the assassination of the Archduke. Or misjudge a meteor strike as a nuclear bomb blast.
8. Secondary consequences -- starvation and pandemics.
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.