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Posted on 03/07/2009 10:41:05 PM PST by smoothsailing
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Oh goody! Looks like we're having another Depression -- maybe just a little one, but who knows how long we can stretch it out, if we give it a good try?
"Throughout the nation men and women ... look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth... I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people... This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms." (Italics added.)
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/how_the_great_depression_broug.html at March 08, 2009 - 01:36:57 AM EST
People forget that we also got our own “El Presidente for Life” during the depression. Roosevelt and Hitler both came into power in 1933 and died in office in April of 1945.
It appears that both of them intended to rule unto death.
bookmark
Most of those who look at the “Glorious New Deal” will see that it was not doing anything to get the U.S. out of the depression and in actuality even as late as 1939 the economy got worse. It was only with the industrialization that came from Lend Lease as well as the beginning of the rearming of America (we only had a standing army of about 100k in the late 1930s) that kick started the economy and got us back on our feet.
This new brand of socialism that is comming in today on the heals of the latest dem. president will not fix any of the problems and may even make it worse. But then again dems dont typically learn from history.
There are several parts of this article which don’t work.
First, Germany was a multi-political party country. In elections...the leader (who might only get 25 percent of the nation vote) has to find other parties to partner with. Hitler’s party was not the dominating party at the time. But the lead party was forced into the corner when they considered the two or three options which would have given them 50 percent of the vote and control of the country. Hitler used this advantage. The multi-party system brought Hitler to town.
Second, by 1930, the upsurge period of the Nazi party...the depression was mostly over, and the country was in the rebuilding stage. People were building bridges, homes, roads, and fairly occupied. They weren’t angry or hostile in terms of the national feeling. What did exist was a large male population who returned from the war and felt that the government had not stuck by them or that leadership was ‘right’ in giving up on the war.
Third...radio came of age. You got to hear Herr Hitler in the evening give his peppy speeches. Most political figures of the time....were terrible speakers and just wanted to political dialog. Hitler went straight for the steak and potatoes...giving the public the same type speech that you’d hear on Rush Limbaugh...heartland chat, whats wrong with the country, we need to stand up, and of course...”yes, we can” type speeches. This is how a small political party in Bavaria can grow and triple in size within one year.
Out of every ten Germans...around six fell for the Hitler direction. There is a significant number of Germans who didn’t buy the speeches, the direction, or war discussions. Everyone acts like it was a totally united Germany in 1936 behind Hitler...and it wasn’t.
Between the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 and the dawn hours of September 1,1939, there was time enough to birth a new generation in England and on the continent and to forget every lesson learned in the mud and blood of Flanders and Passchendaele.
. The new generation, and, alas, the generation that had been tutored in the blood and mud of the trenches at the cost of 10 million lives, forgot their lessons, worse, they contrived rationalizations to turn history and common sense on their heads. Both sides of the trenches got their lessons wrong. The Germans concluded that losing war was intolerable. The French and the English concluded that war itself was intolerable. Thus, the Germans made themselves vulnerable to a homicidal megalomaniac who would create a cult of personality, deprive them of their discernment, and ruin them utterly even to the point of cannibalism. He would bring them to war, he would bring them to intolerable conditions, he would bring them to ruin. From beginning to end most of them would remain under his hypnotic thrall.
Alas, the English also got their lessons wrong too, they turned to the Lotus. Abhorring evil, they chose to cope with it by simply denying its existence. Or at least they would deal with it by returning good for evil, appeasement for aggression. Up to the very cusp of Armageddon they thought they could bargain with Faust. They saved their umbrage which should have been directed at Hitler and turned it on the Jeremiah, on John the Baptist, one of their own, who was vainly summoning them to the Sword and Buckler of their sacred honor.
Lest we Americans grow too smug, our humility should be increased by recognizing that we chose to cope with evil with a geographical cure: we would leave it in Europe. Our arrogance was reinforced by an accident of geography, we were separated from Hitler by an ocean and therefore we could say that we were separated from evil by our righteousness. Our self -deception nearly let slip the whole world into a new dark age.
In Volume one, The Gathering Storm, of his historic (the Actual publishing of these volumes was a matter itself of history) as well as historical account of The Second World War, Churchill identifies his theme:
How the English-speaking peoples
through their unwisdom
carelessness and good nature
allowed the wicked
to rearm
Living today in Germany, I am fascinated by the Teutonic way of seeing the world and am drawn to explore the "Hitler Zeit" or, the "Hitler Times", as they are now euphemistically described, with my neighbors. Yet, it would be boorish to barge into such a sensitive subject with people who are unfailingly polite. So I have contrived a game to draw them out, I ask them the following question: Who is the greatest man of the 20th century? Most often the answer I hear is, "Adenauer." I suppose that is understandable, if not inspiring. Sometimes, I hear one from the following genre: Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Theresa. I take this as evidence of the leftist educational influence in Germany. I have never heard the name, Winston Churchill, spontaneously advanced in response to my question in Germany. At first I was surprised but now I understand that this is part of a tapestry that is for them best left folded over. The fault for the second world war lies not with the German people but with Adolph Hitler alone or in company with a few of his henchmen. The German people themselves, you see, were duped. In many ways I believe Germans have taken the wrong lessions from the second war as they did from the first. The problem is seen as the Nazis and so they must today be suppressed. Rather than defend liberty of speech, they adopt the Nazi tactic and suppress speech. They see a grave danger in Scientology and virtually outlaw it. But then they saw a greater danger in George Bush than in Vladimir Putin.
And so were the English, French, and we Americans duped in 1933. Or were we all? Did we not seek to be duped? Churchill read Mein Kampf and so did others. Why was he nearly alone in taking a lesson from it? What is it in men that encourages us to rationalize evil? I certainly do not think it is a anything as prosaic as "unwisdom, carelessness or good nature," cited by Churchill, that ultimately accounts for it. I think there is a more sinister impulse implanted in men.
The signs were all there to see: the cult of personality; the intolerance of contrary opinion; the formation of extra-normal operatives such as political street organizations and youth organizations; playing on victimology; the creation of an us against them mentality; the demonization of opponents; the false sense of urgency; the immunity from the rule of law for the elites; the fawning of the media; the distortion of science; the tinkering with life in the laboratory; the mass psychosis.
George Bush and Winston Churchill share a one admirable characteristic in common, both men repudiate pettiness. So Bush carried this normally noble character trait to a fault in turning the other cheek to his attackers to the destruction of his own administration. Churchill would not denigrate even Chamberlain personally. Yet there is no question that Churchill could identify evil. He saw it from the very beginning in Hitler. He might have misjudged Mussolini a bit in the early going, but Churchill nailed Hitler from the get go, from even before the day Hitler came to power in 1933. He was never deceived, either, about the murderous tyrants of the Kremlin and their evil, pernicious doctrine. I tell my German friends that I think Winston Churchill was the greatest man of the 20th century, "because he single-handedly saved the world- once from fascism and once, with others, from communism."
What is the point of all this? Well, it is high time that I got to the point. More than one Freeper has asked me to comment on the early doings of the Obama administration. Believe it or not, this is a vanity about that. Am I comparing Obama to Hitler? Yes I am. I would rather make the point by identifying parallels with communism, the Soviets, their gulags, their repression, mao tse- tung's cult of personality, the treatment in the press, their domination of academia. But I am writing this to persuade people so I pick Hitler rather than Mao, Hitler rather than Che Guevera, Hitler rather than Hugo Chavez, because in today's world it is politically correct to attack Nazis and unproductive to attack extreme leftism.
How dare one compare unfavorably our first black president, freely elected by the people, with one of history's most evil men, Adolf Hitler? I'll leave that for you to ponder. If this vanity slips out somehow from FreeRepublic, probably because it is identified as an execrable example of hate on the right, the debate will be confined to how the right must be censored, they will say that it is far more dangerous than, for example, Scientology (but perhaps with less influence.) But others with a more open mind might just open those minds further to the parallels between Obama and Hitler. They might consider what it was about the English state of mind after the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month which very nearly led them into gotterdammerung. They might consider how Churchill was shunned and dismissed as a war monger. They might see some parallels in our society today in the way in which we are treating our Jeremiahs, our John the Baptists. I am bound to say in sadness that I see no Winston Churchill in our midst but I do see that it is 1933 for Obama's America.
On October 25 of last year, before the election, I published this on Free Republic:
How conservatives can contrive to come out of the wilderness or whether they can come out at all cannot now be foreseen. Much depends on whether Obama merely perverts our institutions and traditional liberties or succeeds in subverting the Constitution à la Hugo Chavez. Obama has many tools short of violence and few institutional obstacles stand in his way. He has the overwhelming justification of the financial crisis which might well become a depression. He will pack the court. He will use the treaty making power to detour around our constitutional liberties. The propaganda machine will be overwhelming. The bright side, if it can be counted as such, is that all will not be well on the left. Hillary will exercise her ambitions, inevitably at the expense of Obama. Every special-interest group will be calling in their IOUs. In the long run, an extreme leftist coalition cannot hold together unless it moves beyond our constitutional government toward some sort of repressive regime. I look for Stalin versus Trotsky wars on the left with the potential for these internicine battles to spin out of control. Who knows where that will lead? Much depends on whether the left stays within the model of a representative democracy or seeks to extend its power with subversion of our historic liberties.
It is difficult to lift one's gaze above the machinations generated by Obama's new administration to see the path leading out of the wilderness for conservatives and for the country. I think it revolves around the word, liberty. There is every reason to fear that our economic times will closely resemble 1933. Will the political Times parallel 1933 as well? The portents are ominous. The absence of a conservative opposition to raise the standard even against the corruption of Obama's appointees is as dispiriting as it is revealing. We will be lucky, however, if the worst legacy of Obamaism is mere corruption. Yet, we have betrayed ourselves to be too callow even to stand up even against obvious corruption. Somehow, men must raise themselves up and defend their children and their children's birthright. They must recognize evil. They must fight for liberty if only for their childrens' sake. If we succumb to the cult of personality every child in the world is lost for we are the hope of the world.
Here is how Churchill ends his the first volume at England's darkest hour when England must stand alone against the overwhelming power of evil yet, indomitable, he ends on a note of hope:
During these last crowded days of the political crisis my pulse had not quickened at any moment. I took it all as it came. But I cannot conceal from the reader of this truthful account that as I went to bed at about 3 a.m. I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. 10 years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or would want a preparation for it. I thought I'd do a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail. Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.
bfl
Is Obama destined to become similar to Hitler? No.
Fortunately, the US is not 1939 Germany. Many of the people who voted for Obama do not support socialism. Remember, Obama had to portray himself a centrist, near conservative on the issues.
The majority of Americans still want fiscal and personal responsibility. Here is where Obama has begun to fail his followers and where Obama will lose centrist Democrats.
We can already see those cracks among Democrats. Obama is over-reaching and attempting to use the economic crisis to justify his hard turn left while doing absolutely nothing to fix the crisis or build confidence in the markets. Many are considering getting off the Obama bus.
Finally, the criticism by Feingold and others is interesting. If you like conspiracies, think of the possibility that we may be seeing a Clinton cabal taking form to stand up against Obama.
On December 5, before Obama took office, I posted the following which is only been vindicated by events since. I say again, the danger remains that the entire electoral and political system will have been so co-opted that there is no defense at the ballot box. Here is the post: (please pardon the length )
Reality check
With the passage of time conservatives will be tempted to accept the soothing siren that the election results were not so bad. After all, this was not our year, John McCain ran a singularly poor campaign, George Bush had created a poisonous atmosphere for Republicans, and we were swamped by the greatest financial crisis in nearly three quarters of a century.
Rubbish!
Take the telescope away and put the correct end to your eye. The truth is that McCain could not beat a man who was utterly unqualified for the office. Actually, he was a man flagrantly disqualified for the office by his notorious radical associations. The authentic war hero could not beat the most liberal senator with an extremely dubious pedigree. Yet Obama won because he became a national pathology. But he was able to attain Messiah status only because the ground was fertile and had been well plowed for him. While it is true that he would not be entering the White House were he not black, it is also true that the culture put him into the White House because he is he black. The elevation of the first Black man to the presidency, while historic, was a one-off historic event. Why the culture put him there is a far more portentous fact with ominous significance for conservatives.
Conservatives will commit a very grave and ultimately fatal error if they look exclusively to the mechanics of the loss for understanding. That is the path of rationalization and half measures. We took that path after ‘06 and it has given us ’08. Senator Santorum did not lose Pennsylvania because of his housing arrangements. Senator Allen did not lose Virginia because he said the word "Macaca". This time, the Democrats did not pick our lock on the old South because we failed to get out the vote. No, Senator Chambliss faces a runoff in, of all places, Georgia, because liberalism is ascendant and conservatism is in extremis. In all these instances Americans showed themselves not to be reacting so much to conventional political stimulus but showed they were thirsty to drink the Kool-Aid.
The bitter truth is that liberals have advanced their march and conservatives are in retreat everywhere. Conservatives have shown no offensive power whatever. We could not mount a realistic threat in any blue state. The rats, on the other hand, have driven deep into the heart of the Confederacy itself. Republicans in New England are literally an extinct species on the national level. Our money has dried up. Our leaders are discredited. Social conservatives are despised by fiscal conservatives. We are reduced to talk radio and a few conservative publications to get our message out and Democrats have made plain their plans to destroy the former and have even intimated a desire to control the latter. Driven out of public office, driven out of the northeast, on the run in the Mountain states, impotent in the rust belt, conservatives have no platform to stand on, no ammunition to shoot, no funds with which to re-arm and re-equip.
What happened in this election was not the result of miscalculation, or ineptness,-although they were there in spades and played their part as I have predicted and documented on these threads for more than two years- it was written on the wall years ago. It was only accelerated by the patrician, elitist indifference of the Bush administration. It was only aggravated by the mistakes of the McCain campaign. It was only precipitated by the financial crisis.
Conservative values are being swamped by a cultural wave. It is a testament to the commonsense of the American people that, despite generations of brainwashing by academia and the media, a more Americans still identify themselves as conservative rather than liberal. Take no false hope from this for our support which is grounded in the common sense of the American people is as vulnerable as were Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida, which states used to be full of people with common sense. The cultural marxism of the left is ubiquitous and relentless. It has not won its last electoral victory. It has only now attained critical mass.
We will not get 'em next time any more than we got them this time which is the time after the last time. Conservatism was not edged this time in a squeaker in which the young candidate sprinted past the old, the techno savy hacked the benighted, the well funded outspent the embarassed, the charismatic out shown the plodder, in this election Obama was carried as a bobber on a cultural wave. We were swept away by that wave and have not yet washed up on the beach.
The election dynamic cannot be understood in the idiom of political science because it was a pop culture phenomenon. Rather than consulting, for example, the usually savy Charles Krauthamer who does think it was a squeaker lost because of Saral Palin, who took away the "preparedness" issue, plus the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros, one might better consult Howard Stern to see the invisible forces which have finally birthed an electorate which does not think or react any longer according to the old rules. To stretch a point, Live boys or dead girls in bed would have made no more impact on Obama's favorabilities than Ayers or Wright - so much for the preparedness issue having the power to influence this electorate. The Kool Aid drinkers were hell-bent on Obama. The new culture was utterly impervious to facts but it did hunger for ecstasy, for a cosmic, transcendental political orgasm.
We are so yesterday.
Some of us predicted this calamity two years ago, even before the midterm elections. I even listed then most of the states we would lose today (I missed North Carolina-who knew it would be this bad?). We sensed something was going terribly wrong; we knew we were terribly vulnerable, we knew that our spending and venality were making us more vulnerable. We understood that Katrina was bungled and made us look incompetent. But we thought all the setbacks were confined to a few identifiable issues and personalities, like the president or Brownie. We sensed our vulnerability but we expressed it in terms of demographics and other language of political science. We even knew that the media and academia are changing the rules on us. We could not have been expected to predict two years in advance exactly what the precipitating factor would be-in this case Obama's melanin count-but we knew we were destined to go down. In other words, we still don't know what hit us and we don't have the tools, the idiom and, in many cases, the felt need to find out what hit us and fix it before we go down again.
Conservatism is facing an existential crisis.
Make no mistake, Rahm Emanuel is not ramrodding Obama's administration because he is devoted to good government. These guys fully intend to exterminate conservatism and to eliminate the individual liberties which it defends. They want to do that because they want to impose their vision of the world. The American nation is the greatest stumbling block to the world vision. The Constitution is the bulwark of the American nation. The Constitution is defended by conservatives with their pesky values. Conservative values champion the individual. Rights of the individual are repugnant to their collectivist vision. For the first time in the nation's history, Americans have reason to believe that their President-elect would cheerfully dismantle our constitutional republic and sell out our sovereignty to One World leftists.
Can you imagine the reaction to what I had just written as it would appear in an establishment political magazines like Time, Newsweek, or The New Republic? They would gleefully hold these words up as solid evidence of the hate and paranoia which dominates the right. My anxieties would be dismissed as the ravings of a paranoiac. I hope, frankly, for the good of my country and my children that every one of those "ravings" proves unfounded. But suppose they're not misplaced, suppose Obama is exactly as his history, his associations, his writings, his unguarded public utterances, tell us that he is: a Saul Alinsky communist, a radical, dedicated to the dismantling of the American Constitutional Republic?
What is the upside in believing that he is not what I fear he is? Will we get a better government out of him? Perhaps, perhaps not. What is the downside in not believing that he is the man I fear he is? The loss of our country, our freedoms, decency for our children. Which is a more prudent choice?
What is the likelihood that Obama could succeed in mortally damaging our way of life? I know of no American institution in government, with the possible exception of the United States Senate where perhaps 40 Republicans could be cobbled together to wage a filibuster. I have little confidence in the court and its current configuration and I can't believe it will go anywhere but farther to the left. Outside of the government, talk radio and the rump of the Catholic Church and the embattled Christian conservatives might hope to mount a significant defense. Throw in the National Rifle Association and a couple more and you've about exhausted the list. Can Barak Obama, Rahm Emanuel and the rest of them actually pull it off? There is not much to withstand them. Do you think the results of this election and the election in 2006 warrant us in believing that we will stop them in the next election? Which is the more prudent answer?
So it is not only conservatism but our God-given patrimony which is under existential threat.
It is imprudent to remain willfully oblivious to the threat. It is prudent to take steps as drastic as the threat if the threat is potentially mortal. We cannot balance the severity of risk against the probability of risk because no one can truly know the source of risk, the heart of Barak Obama. A prudent man will consider the severity of the risk even though the probality is unknowable. A prudent man, a prudent conservative man, will acknowledge the danger.
Part of that danger is the new cultural element which has been insinuated into American politics. It is a chicken and egg situation. The politics of The Frankfurt School has spawned a cultural marxism which has infected our corpus like a virus. It supplies the intellectual rationalizations for modern "progressivism". Saul Alinsky is but a link in the chain from The Frankfurt School through Bill Ayres to Barak Obama. Politics founded The Frankfurt School which shaped the culture which spawned, nurtured and indoctrinated Barak Obama who in turn has won this election. The circle is closed.
This represents a danger on several levels. First, if the other side contrives the victory over conservatism it will not be just a note to political history, it will emphatically include cultural tyranny. Second, it means that our paradigm, our epistemology, does not equip us to either understand this election or win the next. If, as I believe, our society has reached a cultural tipping point which spills over into the political, we are way out of our league. How can we confront and deal with the danger we do not understand?
The very strength of conservatism, and its very nature, especially its faith in the eternal and His inextinguishable verities, leaves us vulnerable in the short-term. The problem is, Barak Obama and Rahm Emanuel probably do not intend to grant us the long term.
Take it up with Mark Lewis, I’m sure you too will iron out the history/s/s
It looks like these times will require the repeal of Godwin’s law.
I still disagree.
Obama may help place the foundations and policies in place to foster a hard left move in our government, he will not be the man to implement it.
Liberalism and conservatism can only be incrementally imposed. Either one, pushed to hastily, ends up on the losing end of American tolerance.
The only way Obama can fully implement his agenda is through violence. So far, I cannot imagine such a scenario when there are so many who would oppose him within his own party.
We can only take this one day at a time. We must fight every policy, every bill while educating America about the alternative....conservatism. Yes, we need to keep an eye open to the unimaginable, but no more than that. Else we risk marginalization.
One thing that we have that Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany didn't have is the Internet. That may be the thing that saves us. Consider that without it would we would not even be having this conversation. It's possible now to tell enough frogs sitting in the hot water that they had better jump out!
I see the eventual outcome and legacy of Zero as that of Hoover, not Hitler.
Easy to see the closeness of Comrade Obama with days of yore. JMO
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