Posts: 1
Threads: 1
Joined: Mar 2021
I am listening to an old cd from 1993?1997?1999?2002? Power talk strategies for lifelong success with tony Robbins. On disc 2 with Strauss and Howe they examine the rhythms of history 80-100 year cycles using history. You mentioned the next 80 year event was going to be in 2020! Year of Covid!
Posts: 10,465
Threads: 197
Joined: May 2016
COVID kills like a shooting war. 500.000 deaths and counting? That there are no Purple Hearts or Gold Stars to award makes it no less a war.
Crises create heroes and villains, and end up shaping the core views of survivors as long as the survivors are around. We have yet to see it, but I expect to see plenty of literature on the tragedy that is COVID-19. The truth will leak out, and it won't be pretty. There will be moral lessons to learn, even if the lesson is nothing more than "Denial of solid scientific evidence can get you killed".
If I am to predict anything, it is that Americans will come out of the Crisis of 2020 practically engineered to act as if something like COVID-19 awaits us. Figure that the Crisis of 1940 came to an end in Europe, at least for Americans, about as American troops liberated Dachau, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald... and that those were not the worst that the Nazis could do. Many Americans wondered that if such could happen to Jews who had done nothing wrong, maybe racism was a bad idea. America's experience in fighting murderous, racist regimes in Germany and Japan may have made Americans less sympathetic to violent racists who donned ghost-like gowns and burned crosses while saying much the same things that Nazis said about race. There might have been some difference between Nazis torching a synagogue on Kristallnacht and Kluxists bombing the Eighth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama... but not enough difference.
Let's not forget that many of the heroes of the Civil Rights struggle were themselves GI's -- especially black GI's such as Thurgood Marshall, Vernon Dahmer, and Rosa Parks. White GI's in politics and journalism buckled quickly. Some struggles have no valid Other Side. As was so with the Nazis, so it was with the KKK.
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.