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estebanana -> RE: Black Hole eats sun (May 27 2012 15:48:01)
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quote:
The interesting question is what made the people execute their racial program back then, and what holds them back today, although there are the same reasons and hostilities.
There was Rwanda in 1993-94, Darfur ... The Balkans wars of the mid late 1990's, those situations turned into genocides and the those who carried them out were up front about their programs. But the same complexities exist, not everyone in those countries wanted those atrocities to happen. One of the differences with Germany is that Hitler was calling for pan European domination and in Rwanda for example, there was the intention to decimate another population in the same society without the intent to take over all of Africa. This caused the world to take note and need to stop him by banding together. And Hitler wanted Libya too and other areas of North Africa for the petroleum resources. Hitler wanted everything from Cornwall to St. Petersburg and from Stockholm to Tripoli.
He sold that plan up front and many regular Germans bought it, just as many regular Americans bought George Bush's selling of the danger of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In America about one third of the population stood up and said very clearly, this is a very bad idea. In Germany I'm not sure that was possible in the climate of moral and cultural delusion that Hitler was convincing the Germans to embrace. He was selling people something and they wanted it, but as I've said before I think in that atmosphere of, in Georges Bush's words. 'you're either for us or against us' mentality of Hitler you dared not speak against him. To speak out counter to the Bush Doctrine was possible if one wished to do that.
And another interesting analogy between 1930's Germany and post 1980's U.S, crops up; the US military was still feeling very palpably demoralized and non respected by circumstances of the Vietnam War. America had just had it's century of air superiority and they had one more technological aviation advantage that they had been working on since the 1940's, that was the Stealth Bomber and the F-117 fighter. Both aircraft had the radar profile of a sparrow and could fly at night. Germany after WWI was building the biggest most killing tonnage Navy in history.
While the US population by and large did not know about the Stealth program, it was sold to the public just prior to the First Gulf War and what ensued was described at the time by high Pentagon leaders as euphoria. The sense that there was one more chance for America to be an all powerful force in the sky brought about a euphoric, but quite deluded, sense of empowerment for the public. In the collective consciousness of the public this notion of total air war domination to obliterate something they were told was pure evil had the potential to be heroic and it created a temporary bubble of moral security. It felt good to be the winner, to have a moral imperative they thought was equal to the moral imperative to fight Hitler from taking all of Europe in the 1940's.
The parallels drawn between Hitler and Saddam Hussein were very strong; there was a joke going around at the time that Saddam was the "Designated Hitler ". A word play joke on the American game of baseball where there is man called a 'designated hitter' who bats as proxy for another player. The subtext meaning we always need an enemy designated for us to use our military forces against. There was a lot of national pride wound up in whether or not the US military was still a viable potent force in the world or whether is was withering into an ineffectual world police force sent to bang heads together when ever there was a problem in some little country the average American either never heard of or cared nothing about. It was all unimportant and abstract.
Enter Hitler in the 1920's and imagine Germany had the same military moral and self esteem problems that the US had after Vietnam. Hitler told the Germans that he would fix that self esteem problem and instead of merely fixing it, he super sized self esteem, albeit falsely. He created a bubble of euphoria that many wanted to live inside, but many were also caught inside the bubble and did not want to be there. Early on those who did not want to perpetuate the euphoria deluded society stood up against it, but those groups were shut down and made examples of after a point.
Another good comparison of how paranoia and euphoria can drive otherwise good people to become hysterical is the McCarthy communist hunts of post WWII. There was a congressional committee formed to root out communist threats many of the tactics used by McCarthy were unsound. In 1952 or 3 McCarthy even wrote a book that is similar to Mien Kampf. Lucky however that voices of reason in the public and in politics routed out McCarthy and derailed him; his aspirations and drives were nothing short of Hitlers, really. He was a Hitler waiting to happen, but lucky he was in the post WWII political environment and enough politicians had had enough war already. He did do a lot of damage to many people and reputations before he died. But he had that dark gift to be able to exploit fear and use it to gain power. Much like J. Edgar Hoover the head of the FBI, but that is anther story.
My point is that McCarthy was an operator within the US congressional structure like branch of the Nazi SS was a an operator in the German government. Everyone knew he had power and was crating paranoia, but he was difficult to stop because he could turn people against you and instantly turn you into what he wanted them to fear, an un-American actor. He was a real ****. He was from Wisconsin and he reminds me of another current embattled governor from Wisconsin.
So my long rounded point is that if the conditions are ripe, people like McCarthy and Hitler can fit themselves into an area where they distort the publics perception of danger and puff up it's national pride. This creates that bubble of euphoria and false national self esteem based on how abstractly powerful a military has be sold to be. Personally I think much of a population that is caught in these circumstances wish it would go away, or that they could opt out. In Germany rebuilding the infrastructure of the military that was sacked at the end of WWI helped the economy a bit, just as getting into WWII end the Great Depression for America. The potential war and greater military self esteem and the ideology looked attractive and sexy, but I think that there were still those who looked at that situation and did objected, but how could they even voice an objection? It would be like speaking treason. Many must have been or could have been caught in an excruciating moral dilemma knowing what was happening was wrong, but having no power to stop it.
This may be some mad speculation, but had McCarthy not been stopped he could have caused much, much more damage on a global scale. Lucky the climate was not totally set for him, and people spoke out against him in time. America had also just basically won WWII and was feeling glad it was over. But he had that ability to manipulate people into confluence through fear.
All said to open up my take on how fear and power can operate to both sway the public into buying a political plan and to keep those opposed silent. I really observe that power is non discursive and that once in control it does not have to bargain with you in a democratic fashion.
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