Posted on 07/07/2015 11:22:14 PM PDT by Rummyfan
Last week, I swung by the Bill Bennett show to chew over the news of the hour. A few minutes before my grand entrance, one of Bill's listeners had taken issue with the idea that these Supreme Court decisions weren't the end and, if you just got on with your life and tended to your garden, things wouldn't be so bad:
Claudine came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out?
David Kelsey writes from the University of South Carolina to scoff at that:
In one corner, we have government recognition of marriage contracts between gays. In the other corner, we have Jews, Catholics, gays, their sympathizes [sic] and other undesirables being put in Nazi concentration camps.
One of these things is nothing like the other, unless you're a lunatic. Maybe the reason conservatives keep "losing everything that matters" is because they really can't tell the difference. Which causes increasing numbers of people to recognize them as lunatics.
Since you call me and Claudine "lunatics", allow me to return the compliment and call you an historical illiterate. If "one of these things is nothing like the other", it's because that's never the choice: It's never a question of being Sweden, say, vs being the Islamic State (although, if you're a Jew in Malmö, they're looking a lot less obviously dissimilar than you might think).
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
There are now calls from certain people to eradicate the Jefferson Memorial and change the name of Washington D.C. Sounds crazy? Remember...many current things we thought nutty and had no chance of becoming reality twenty years ago have now come to pass.
“consider the terror of the French revolution”
That’s a rich subject right there. I think America may come closer to this than Weimer Germany’s slide into Nazism. One difference is America’s Left is headed by rich, white ‘bourgeoisie’ whereas France had economic collapse and a popular revolt against the aristocracy. But you can see where the American Left’s humanist demagoguery is driving them to attack each other -much like the Terror. When liberals start guillotining each other I’ll take another look.
You want your country back?
Start holding people who perpetrate and advocate such travesties accountable...personally.
Those that rule over America have a completely different criteria for committing violence (physical or financial) against non-belligerents than the vast majority of Americans would condone.
Another lost Leftist triumph in WWII was French Leftists supporting the Nazi invasion to the point of sabotaging supply and communication lines. Their rationale was Fascism is closer to Communism than Republicanism. They supported the Fascist takeover of France as a social progression towards communism. Many of them went to the camps under the Nazis.
They would if more Americans knew something of Mao.
the Left is using his playbook.
When a psych major in the 70s I thought Jung’s Thanatos was nuts. Watching it unfold has been a truly educational experience.
Taken the other way round, if there are no queers, there are no queer marriages
that is why there are closets
Delineating the difference between nazism and collectivism is like trying to draw the line between rape and sexual assault. It all feels rather the same to the victim.
Bump
OK, I'll just post the Hayek quote from my profile page, it's germane to the thread, since the idea behind your comment keeps coming up. Realize this was an educated contemporaneous observer writing just after the events.
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Realize that Hayek's "liberal of the old type" is what we today would term a conservative, that the collectivist Left in this country has appropriated the term "liberal" to hide from socialist and communist.
Which is odd, because they're essentially the same people -- it's just that one group is in more of a hurry than the other.
Use both. Frankly, they're just variations of the same thing anyway -- and progressivism is just the "pragmatic" version of it.
I gained an interesting insight into the minds of those who embrace tyranny from a Russian I met on a drilling location. I asked him what he thought of Stalin, wondering how he would react to the mention of 'Uncle Joe' in the allegedly post-communist Russia. I was surprised when he gushed with praise for Stalin as having been 'the strong man who defeated Hitler'--all else forgiven.
Even allowing for education in State controlled schools with the full force of decades of editing/rewriting history, the point was clear: these people respect and revere a strong leader, despite all the crimes they may commit (so long as they are not the object of such attentions) maintaining that power.
So it is with anyone of totalitarian leanings--the ruthless exercise of authority is a plus, so long as their personal ox is not the one gored.
With today's misnamed "Liberals", who fancy themselves the victim of others (such victimhood real, imagined, or simply blown out of proportion) the idea of a standard bearer who will (in their minds) not only eliminate the reason for their grievance but somehow make things right by avenging past alleged wrongs appeals, even against those who had nothing to do with them.
The left has always used the manipulation of those who have grievances against those they place in the role of oppressors, and the attraction of turning the tables on the oppressors (real or imagined) guarantees the next aggrieved group. This can go on longer than any blood feud because there is a steady supply of newly oppressed people to set against a steady supply of newly minted oppressors, and those in power need only keep a finger to the wind, switch sides when appropriate, and expunge the history of references to any oppression they may have committed.
On the other hand, we have people who would accept progress toward universal and stable Liberty for all and the elimination of grievances as much as possible while safeguarding a few natural (unalienable) Rights as predominant and sacrosanct.
That the National Socialists were ever placed on the Right of the political spectrum has always seemed to be a mischaracterization to me. At the root of that philosophy is a totalitarian regime, the antithesis of Liberty.
Unfortunately, the ignorance of the average person leaves Steyn few well-known dictators to compare with current events with the American masses, and of those the Nazis are the best-known example.
You can say that again.
For a long time I have had a déjà vu feeling about living in the early years of Nazi Germany or the beginning decade of the Soviet Union, but the past two weeks have sent it from a creepy, unsettled suspicion to a galloping awareness of a massive change to reality.
It is astounding how rapidly the foundations of freedom and liberty are being demolished before our eyes! It is being done at warp speed - as if a dam had suddenly collapsed.
True ... true, NBF. However, I think the reason that he was using only Nazi examples was to show the hypocrisy of the liberal progressives. At least then they have to say "Well, it's different when we do it" with some embarrassment.
However, as the leftists truly don't believe that anything the Stalinists did was wrong, they don't have any way of differentiating that with what they are doing. They don't see it as hypocrisy. They don't see that there was anything wrong with it when Stalin or Mao did it.
i would vote for it being changed to “oprah dc”
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