If you don’t know what fascism IS, if you don’t know what communism IS, if you don’t know what those ideologies are comprised of, where they came from, what the social pressures were that gave birth to them, WHY people embrace such oppressive ideologies in the first place, then you can NOT — absolutely CAN NOT — prevent them from arising again.
Stonekettlestation on Facebook
I just wanted a screen grab of that Facebook status update from Stonekettle Station (it is appended at the end of this article) That’s the reason this article is here. That and to revisit Stonekettle’s fascism post from yesterday. (A screengrab of that is appended at the end of the article as well) here is a snippet from it,
The Brown Shirts were Nazis.
Brown Shirts = Nazis = Fascists = Extreme RIGHT.
So to say “LEFTIST Brown Shirts” demonstrates a staggering degree of both historical and political ignorance.
Now, our grandparents fought — and many gave their very lives — to defeat the fascists. Our entire country was devoted to that endeavour in a degree of effort never seen before or since. After the fascists were defeated, we spent more than 60 years in steadfast opposition to the extreme LEFT political system of communism. We literally spent TRILLIONS in this effort, there are world ending weapons lying in readiness out there in the cornfields of the Great Plains and patrolling the depths of the sea as a result. We gambled our very future on that effort.
So if anybody should know how to format a proper political and historical insult, it for goddamned sure ought to be somebody from VIRGINIA, the very state in which the United States was born.
This ignorance, this increasing gleeful ignorance of Americans, is an abject failure of American education at all levels. This is a failure of leadership. This is failure of political discourse. Most of all, this is a failure of CITIZENSHIP.
And there’s nothing amusing about that at all.
Stonekettle Station
What Jim is driving at is that our collective intelligence quotient is getting dangerously low here in the United States. Collective intelligence quotient? This can be expressed as The Wisdom of the Crowd or some other generic humanist approach to life. Collective reasoning. Finding our way as a group, rather than a bunch of dissociated individuals with no stake in a mutually agreed to game. You know the game, Life? I buy property because there are rules for that, raise children because children are the future, plan and scrimp and save only to lose almost everything to bad health? You know, Life.
Life like our forefathers imagined it. Humanist group think as opposed to authoritarianism like the Orange Hate-Monkey has promised to bring us, or as I phrased it back in the halcyon days of October Authoritarianism vs. Humanism -Or- The Orange Hate-Monkey vs. A Village. What beautiful days those were, lumed in a radiant light of Summers past. Full of hope for the future. How I miss October.
To answer the original question posed by the idiot that Jim is making fun of; yes, all forms of authoritarianism are pretty bad. How you get to authoritarianism through the various ideologies and theologies is what is important to know. This is important so that you don’t fall into the same traps our ancestors have. Why record history if no one is going to learn from it?
Facebook status backdated and expanded for the blog. (edited and rearranged for WordPress 9/26/2017)
