politics

[serafaery]

This is chilling after having just seen Cabaret and noticing similarities between the depiction of Nazis coming to power and the current political climate in America. Thanks desultorie.

Watch on YouTube

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The Ominous Parallels

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Leonard Peikoff wrote a book titled "The Ominous Parallels" on the same subject:

http://www.peikoff.com/op/home.htm

What Peikoff doesn't say on his website, but which is part of Amazon's description of the book...

http://www.amazon.com/Ominous-Parallels-Leonard-Peikoff/dp/0452011175

...is that he wrote this in 1983.

But it wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.

Germany in the 1930s was recovering from several crushing blows-- the loss in World War I, the heavy burden of reparations, massive inflation, bizarre political events, the rise of Nazism, and so on.

Hitler rose to power, giving us World War II and the Holocaust, because the German people were simply driven insane by all these pressures. There was a power vacuum at the top and the people demanded a strong leader to take over.

None of those conditions exists in the US today. Our economy is strong; our political processes are moving along normally-- in the SNAFU sense, anyway; and the occupation of Iraq is a negligible expense in dollars and lives (2% of the GDP, 0.08% of the mortality rate).

So Naomi Wolf's position is grossly overstated for political reasons of her own.

Any democratic people should remain mindful of the potential for this kind of breakdown in social order, but it simply isn't going to happen here unless things get a LOT worse.

When you cry wolf (or Wolf) and nothing bad happens, you make it that much more difficult for people to respond appropriately to the real threats. In this case, the real threats are the tiny incremental compromises in individual liberty, the slow growth of socialism undermining our free markets, and the marginal increases in governmental power.

These are the things we need to act against rather than wondering if Dubya is actually Hitler II.

. png

Re: The Ominous Parallels

[serafaery.livejournal.com]

Hey cool, you're all like, informed and stuff!

This makes me happy, your comment, because it was kind of my intuitive response to the video. Similar to "zeitgeist" and other conspiracy-theory type pieces, they always are engaging and exciting at first, but leave a lot of holes in the plot.

So I really liked listening to her, but don't think that it's all as urgent and dire as she seems to think it is. And what I came away with is pretty much exactly what you seem to be saying - that we should guard against and fight for our freedom and not just sit back and allow ourselves to be under surveilance or held without charges. I don't see any reason to panic about Hitler Junior coming to power. I did catch her a few times overstating issues, too, which made me suspicious. Were people really forced to drink gross liquids by the TSA at gunpoint? Not exactly.

Re: The Ominous Parallels

[desultorie.livejournal.com]

I would call the flagrant abuses of human rights & our own laws to be more than "tiny incremental compromises" in our individual liberties. I would also term the massive unbalancing of executive power more than marginal.

I'm sorry, but I loathed zeitgeist from the first few minutes, and find her arguments far more coherent & rational. I know, personally & publicly, of many outrageous crimes, committed by several branches of law enforcement, that endanger Americans everywhere.

Ed: Sorry about fixing this twice, but my fingers stray when I'm impassioned.

Re: The Ominous Parallels

[serafaery.livejournal.com]

See this is why I always try to avoid policiticicics in my journal - because a) I don't know enough to make really informed comments about anything and b) I always get upset when people start to feel offended/things get heated/whatever. I like the video and I watched it like 5 times so I'm keeping it up, but yeah. Sorry if I was offensive or anything.