Reply #9: Bullshit. Two members of the same family of authoritarian disease [View All]

Weimar Republic, weaker and younger...fell easily and much more directly

American Republic, older and steeped in tradition, people not easy to sell on authoritarianism, must be repackaged, made kinder and gentler, rebranded.

Both Hitler and Bush spoke endlessly of freedom and wanting only peace.

I submit you should read the book I am currently reading, "I Will Bear Witness" by Victor Klemperer - 2 volumes.

Pay careful attention to the years 1933-1937 for they mirror so much the America of 2001-7 it is literally nauesating.

http://www.amazon.com/Will-Bear-Witness-1933-1941-Paperbacks/dp/0375753788
http://www.amazon.com/Will-Bear-Witness-1942-1945-Diary/dp/0375756973

Bushies & Nazis, both vitriolically HATING Liberals. Oh yes, Hitler's hatred of liberals has been largely erased from RW history and inroads have been made in cleansing the rest of history of it, too.

Bushies & Nazis both claiming virulent anti-Communism, then enacting many of the same policies of the hated Communists, wholly unnoticed by Loyals Bushies and Nazis alike, and yet right ut in the open for all to see. How can they not see it?

In both America and Germany, even as late as 1940, common Germans still showing kindness to the poor Jews, even as the instruments of the State were preparing to murder them.

In both America and Germany, "elections" which few besides the Nazi "winners" believed in.

In both America and Germany, lies upon lies upon lies, so shameless and out in the open, an aware person simply could not believe that it could all so easily be gotten away with. Daily astonishment at the conflicting pronouncements.

Read the books. THEN tell me it's disingenuous to make the comparison.

Oh yes, it's ALL in the 2 volumes. No exaggerations here.

Does that make it automatic that the Final Stages of BushPutinism in America will be exactly alike the Final Stages of Hitlerism, as Klemperer himself refers to it often?

Of course not. It will be different in form, but much more similar in end function I think. Our New Totalitarianism is deisgned for us today, not Germans of the 1930s. It takes different inducements to sell us on the New Totalitarianism than it did the 1930s Germans to sell them on Hitlerism.

My point is, don't you think you should read up on the rise of Nazi Germany, 1929-1937 especially, before you dismiss out of hand "disingenuous" comparison that are anything but?

And all borne out by a simple reading of the diaries of those who were there, and other books on the topic.

Finally, you are correct in the reaction of America of the 1930s to facsism, which ultimately was a rejection.

You haven't failed to notice key changes in American national character since those days? You really think we resemble those people more than we resemble the Good Germans who ignored the death of habues corpus and silently accepted torture and murder in their name?

Read the books. You may be surprised.

I leave you with a quote from another German who LIVED THROUGH HITLER'S RISE (but what would he know about it, right?):

All over the world I dread the self-deception which we have experienced - that this could not happen here. It can happen anywhere. It is improbable only where the broad masses of the population are aware of the possible menace and thus will not be lulled into security; where they know the type of totalitarianism and will recognize it in its rudimentary stages and in each of its manifestations - this Proteus who keeps appearing in ever new masks, who slips eel-like out of our grasp, who does the opposite of what he says, who distorts the meaning of words, who speaks not in order to communicate or tell the truth, but in order to numb, to distract, to hypnotize, to intimidate, to dupe - who will exploit and evoke every fear, and will promise security and utterly wreck it at the same time.

Totalitarianism is neither Communism nor fascism nor National Socialism, but it has appeared in all of these forms. It is the universal, terrible threat of the future of mankind in a mass order. It is a phenomenon of our age, detached from all the politics governed by principles of a historic national existence of constitutional legality. Wherever it comes to power, domestic politics gives way to intrigues and acts of force, and foreign policy, the conduct of relations with other states, is shrouded in a semblance of talk and negotiation, but without being tied to any rules of the game, to any community of human interests.

It is not easy to see through totalitarianism. It is like a machinery that starts itself while its very operators often fail to grasp what they are already putting into effect...

(more at...)

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jaspers02.htm

You should probably read that, too. Few writings on the nature of what we face from the Kinder and Gentler Nazis, the Bushies, are more prescient.