[Republic of Texas]

Politically, the US is about 50 years behind Britian, and gaining fast. If you want to see the political future of the US, just look at Britian. That's what scares me.

[Republic of Texas]

Nice HTML in the title, doncha think?

[SteveSenti]

Tell Alex Jones to take a breather from his conspiracy theory books, and go have a drink or something.

[denydenydeny]

Bookmarked. Theodore Dalrymple is a British national treasure, and in a perfect world he would be Prime Minister.

[Mark Felton]

wrong. absolutely wrong. The UK is following the US lead. How long have we been required to submit ethnic data for the government? 20-30 years?

The UK is also catching up with the US regarding education. They lag about 5 years in implementing Outcome Based Education programs. For the first time a few days ago I saw an article that said 30% of Scottish parents would homeschool. Their standards have been dumbed down and the system is in disarray.

[ricpic]

The Brits are, by and large, a pragmatic people. Any great overarching social/political theories put them off. This trait will save them from going too far down the path of blind worship for a "great leader."
The Brits will, as usual, muddle through rather than going wild in any particular direction.

[sixgunjer]

"Politically, the US is about 50 years behind Britian, and gaining fast. If you want to see the political future of the US, just look at Britian. That's what scares me."

You obviously don't live in California, neither are you a civil servant.

[Fiddlstix]

Bump

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Utter vileness does not need a numerical majority to become predominant in a society. The Nazis never had an electoral majority in Germany, yet Germany offered very little resistance to their barbarism.

The Nazi's and their allied German National People's Party won 52.3% of the vote in the March 1933 election (which did include the Communists, Socialists, and Catholic Center Party also). Prior to that, they had been the largest single party since the 6th Reichstag Election in 1932. Because the Nazis were excluded from the Government prior to that time, and they and the Communists could prevent a majority government frombeing formed without them, the minister von Papen was picked by Hindenburg, beginning the march of undemocratic rule in Germany that culminated in Hindenburg finally relenting and asking Hitler and his allies to form a government based on a parliamnetary majority, which they did. Even today, most parliamentary systems do not elect parties with more than about 40% of the vote due to numerous minor parties, so not winning a majority is hardly out of the ordinary.

There was little resistance by ordinary Germans because the Nazi regime was brutish to only the misfits of German society like Communists and Homoexuals, and to the Jews. Otherwise, the Nazi regime was full of benefits to the regular German - new homes, jobs, new public works, etc. This is like saying there is little resistance by me to the war on terrorism by the US. Of course not. I'm not its target. It'd be different if I was an Arab.

[witnesstothefall]

The organised lying that results from centralised information-gathering not only blunts critical faculties and makes it impossible to distinguish true information from false, but also morally compromises those who participate in the process: everyone is made an accomplice of the central power, and so less and less does anyone feel able to make a stand. The more state employees conform to the rules laid down, the more helpless and degraded they become, which is the ultimate purpose of these rules. When you go to the doctor nowadays, you are not seeking his advice; you are finding out what the government has told him to do. Only appearances remain the same; the reality is changed utterly.

Echoes of Soviet-style societal distortion. It's becoming ever more difficult to declare victory in the Cold War. (I mistakenly posted this to abuse first - mods please disregard)

[af_vet_rr]

Politically, the US is about 50 years behind Britian, and gaining fast. If you want to see the political future of the US, just look at Britian. That's what scares me.

Now why would you say that? It's not like we are starting to put cameras all over the place ;-) (FWIW, I've been to London, and while many people don't have a problem with cameras all over the place, it was creepy as hell to me, and I kept thinking "Stalin and Hitler never had the ability to monitor their citizens like the Brits do now).

[mg39]

Nazism, genocide, mass murder, and torture can happen anywhere there are human beings. This is why we must always be alert to evil such as this, and snuff it out as soon as it appears.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

I can’t help thinking of the murder of psychiatric patients and the mentally disabled in Nazi Germany. Neither the public nor the medical profession protested to any great extent (though, instructively, those few doctors who did protest were not punished for it). This terrible crime was made possible, though not inevitable, by an entire cultural context.

Actually, while I do not desire to defend Germans in general or Nazis in particular, the fact is that this statement is not quite historically correct. The fact is that when the institutionalized did start getting killed off, their families did protest very loudly, and the Nazi regime did have to back off a bit. The Nazis did in fact proceed with their intentions, but they had to be a lot more quiet and deceptive about it than they had been initially. This same pattern of cover-up and deception was carried over into the "final solution" project against the Jews, which is a big reason why so many Jews put up so little resistance against being transported into the camps, and why most of the rest of the world -- including preposterously many Germans -- apparently were so surprised and shocked about the dimensions of the Holocaust when the truth finally became known, too late.