Editorials & Other Articles

Otherwise they wouldn't buy into such an obviously ridiculous ideology.

The danger comes when they're able to enlist or bribe or intimidate others to do their dirty work.

Without the German General Staff and military planners, without Albert Speer, Hitler's merry band of addled drug addicts, ex-chicken farmers, failed novelists and sundry other fuck-wits would have been a footnote in world history. Without self-serving useful idiots like von Papen and Schleicher he never would have become Chancellor in the first place.

It's semi-competent and less marginally informed Republicans in Congress and the courts who are empowering this regime, and the conservative old guard who enabled its rise to power. Like German conservatives, aristocrats, media moguls and generals, they thought they could control the monster they helped create, only to find themselves consigned to irrelevancy and eventually destroyed. Then too, the concentration of mass media in the hands of a few billionaires has been a huge factor in foisting this mess on the rest of us.

With all the public media fascination with Nazi Germany, the lessons that catastrophe should teach us are lost in all the History Channel trivia about "super-weapons" and "the Nazi search for the Lost Arc."

That and America's general focus on sanitizing its own history--most especially its history of slavery and racism--have in large part brought us to this point.