Rise of the 4th Reich?

I wrote a preamble to today’s post yesterday. Check it out!

Moving forward: everything associated with Trump is bad news.

I’m not saying I don’t get it. The frustration and anger of his followers and fans. I do. We’re not anywhere near as bad off as the Germans were after World War 1, but we are more used to a certain level of fairness and hope than Europeans were earlier last century.

I’m a history buff. For me, its the STORY in “history” that is fascinating. I love studying the cultures of various places and times. I like putting meaning to events. This followed that for such-and-such reason. Hindsight is 20-20 and there’s a lot of wisdom to knowing our collective human past. You know the old saying about how “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”..?

Understanding the rise and fall of empires is crucial. So is understanding the rise and fall of social movements and political about-faces. But most especially I think its compelling to understand what lies behind entire populations seemingly losing their shit and turning on the powers-that-be– and then turning on each other and even the whole world.

There are many examples of these things in history, but the one that is closest to us both in time and culture would be the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and the chaos and diabolical planning that led to World War 2.

See– a lot of those precursors to collective violence are present in OUR falling empire. And… here it comes! The massive uprising of whole swaths of the population. As in Germany, its by and large the more rural, conservative, less-educated and more authoritarian-tolerant segment of the population. Such movements most often start in such places– in Russia, China, Korea, the Middle East… I could go on and on and on…

Some guy with a MASSIVE EGO tends to come forth in such a stew of frustration and says the shit no one else has dared to say for a very long time. He tells the frustrated segment of the population that they have every right to be mad and encourages them to show it. He makes promises– and threats. He lies unabashedly and targets weaker scapegoats. His biggest appeal is that he is NOT a part of the system that made things so bad. Or– he at least claims to not be, or that he changed his mind to fight for “the people.” And those in the media and in power laugh at him at first (they thought Hitler was comical too, to begin with…) then they declare the demagogue to be “outrageous” and “crazy.” And he is, but his backers don’t care. They just want to kick out the current leaders and start over somehow.

But the ego-maniac– The Dude with the ‘Tude– is just playing them for fame and power. Once he gets it– shit goes south, fast. The new Leader starts breaking the rules with impunity. He bullies his fellow officials and takes a mile for every inch granted.  Social freedoms are curtailed- at first, just ‘temporarily’ until things are past ‘crisis’ everyone is assured. Yet somehow temporary keeps stretching into longer and longer periods. There is always a crisis. Then the Tude-Dude actively goes after enemies, publicly shaming them– then imprisoning them– then executing them. When he runs out of old enemies, he finds new ones to point to for his followers (and those too scared to not go along, which is soon almost EVERYONE ELSE) to attack. Atrocities are committed. Either a civil or classic war or both erupts. A lot of people are tortured and die.

And it all starts just like this.

Knowing the patterns of history and watching it re-play like some sick psychological sci-fi film is not exactly fun. There is an inevitability to seeing things line up for it to happen, but watching your own country start to go mad in real time is not a fun place to be. A lot of very wise people know what I know and see what I see and are increasingly freaking out about it. Of course we are– we know what comes next, and its a very UGLY side to humanity that most prefer to pretend is behind us or beyond us.

What we are witnessing today could be the first bits of something that will create massive levels of collective shame years from now. As bad as things seem now with the entrenched plutocracy, a Fascist government would be a hundred times worse. People don’t think it can happen until one day it– does.