delete

see response #1 to post.

Thanks to poster.

http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm

I'm not trying to "dis" you, as given my intense loathing of Naziism, I've frequently cited similar quotes. But I've also learned after frequent embarrassments, to DOUBLE-CHECK such stuff before posting.

In America, in 2010, we are not victims of a semi-Orwellian State where a fascist government actively stifles dissent. At least at the level that I'm sure Goebbels was talking about and probably having wet dreams of.

I would say the opposite is true of our situation: We are actually surrounded by the very truths that Goebbels would have feared The People having access to. We swim in them. What we suffer from (on several different levels) is apathy and (worst of all) complacency.

The government can commit atrocity after atrocity and the villagers will never come for it with pitchforks and torches because the villagers are busy browsing for shoes online and playing Farmville.

Imagine some sort of evil version of It's a Wonderful Life where a monster like Goebbels is led around being shown that, in the future, there will be little need for jack-booted thugs and Memory Holes, for the most part anyway.

That the people themselves will happily pace their cage, celebrate its tiny dimensions as though there were nothing more, as long as the hand-held and desktop glow-boxes continued to entertain and distract them.

And my worst realization, writing this, is while Goebbels is dead, there are many people who thought like him who realized the things I talk about in the paragraph above and who use those methods just as surely as he would have, were he alive.

PB