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Saturday 24 September 2016

Enabligatory Behavior

The following meme presents itself as original at this link here.

I don't know if the Facebooker there is the originator of the text, I don't know if the originator of the text is a history teacher, a non-history teacher passing himself off as one, or someone, by implication, playing the part of a non-history teacher passing himself off as one. He sounds like a cereal box history teacher, at any rate.


Forgive me if you think I'm stating the obvious here, but Hitler wasn't elected. "The German people" did not elect Hitler. Period. Moreover, however, the respective backdrops of the Weimar Republic and 21st Century Schizoid America are so vastly different that these analogies are meaningless. Nevertheless, I'll give one set of analogies a go since the subject of the origins of Hitler's rise to power has been alluded to:

The Enabling Act of 1933 is basically The Patriot Act of 2001 with the exception that the latter was more fecklessly enabling by those who played bi-party to it. Prior to that, Paul von Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler to the German Chancellory is the Supreme Court of the United States' appointment of George W. Bush to the US Presidency, except in the latter case Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. is more aptly analogous to von Hindenburg, insofar as it relates to with enabligatory behavior.

Wikipedia would be this history teacher's friend, apparently. The party that nominated Donald Trump has pushed the issues named a lot over the last several decades, and it's not the first time Americans are being fed this analogy. The difference is, it had always been cryto-warnings commensurate with the crypto-fascist policies the party ran on.

Now the entire apparatus is so corrupt that only the rhetoric is different – with minor exceptions: Terrorism. It's the lie that keeps on feeding the machine that the two major candidates are running on. And while the word communism doesn't drip from the Democrats' mouths, they have completely co-opted the national security state buzz-terminology (and policy), and are actively trying to foment paranoia of Russia right out of McCarthy's playbook. Of course, this only because the Yanks want Syria, as if Libya & Iraq aren't all they can handle.

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At the following link, the author misattributes something to a Facebook post by a former major league hardballer because what he says is apparently heinous enough that the misattributor can get away with making it sound like the ex-pitcher tossed it from thin air. It begins with the headline Curt Schilling: Those accused of terrorism should be stripped of rights and executed.

Among the offense expressed in the comments section, I didn't notice anyone mention that that is precisely — and I do mean precisely — current US foreign policy, which has in fact already laid the groundwork for it to be domestic policy as well.

Let us also not forget that the current administration has carried out a record number of deportations and has prosecuted a record number of whistle blowers. It might be amusing that among other things, Republicans loyalists, or whoever, have compared Obama to Hitler. Gee, I wonder who that benefits...