In “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” by Gotz Aly, I learned how the national socialists kept the average German citizen content during the war through redistribution of war booty, through socialized medicine, appropriation of wealth from conquered countries, dispossession of European Jews, regulation of banking and industry, and propaganda. Mr. Aly showed that national socialism was a political scheme designed to keep the German lower classes in favor of the regime. And it worked.
In “The Pink Swastika” by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, I learned how the Nazi Party evolved from many socialist and sexualized small groups to become a self-referential inner circle built around Greek concepts of virility, youth, masculinity and ruthlessness.
And I look around today and see that all of the same precursors exist. Go to any ANSWER web site and look at the hundreds of links to other web sites for similar groups, all aggrieved, all willing to use force to redress their own vision of social justice, economic inequality, and sexual inequality. I see how the majority in this country, who I assume are mostly not in these sorts of hyper-politicized groups, nevertheless are now conditioned by several decades of predominantly leftist education and national media.
The national socialists in Germany took several decades to coalesce into a mass murder machine. They didn’t start out killing, they started with a basket of supremacist philosophies and it took a long time for reality to catch up with their philosophies.
It feels like that’s where we are now–in the catch up phase.
Reality is slowly catching up with what have recently become the governing philosophies in America. We won’t get to a terrible end for a while, maybe not for quite a while. But I would really like to see the trend reversed, because where we’re headed currently, with the basket of nationalist, socialist, sexualist, and militant philosophies in control, and with political and economic mechanisms to manipulate the democratic majorities keeping these forces in control, is a dark dead place.
Coincidence is not causation, however, coincidence is not sufficient to explain the evolution of the Nazis. They grew from their component philosophies just as we grow according to our DNA structure. They weren’t pre-determined, but they were heavily influenced.
What hubris to think that we can engage in similar nihilistic, destructive, hedonistic and militant past times, and expect a different result.