According to Merriam-Webster:
de·vo·lu·tion noun \ˌde-və-ˈlü-shən also ˌdē-və-\
Definition of DEVOLUTION
Definition of DEVOLUTION
1. : transference (as of rights, powers, property, or responsibility) to another; especially: the surrender of powers to local authorities by a central government
2. : retrograde evolution : degeneration
I am not concerned with the first definition, but rather the second; retrograde evolution : degeneration.
We have always hailed ourselves as being just, good, and honest people. Why have we allowed terrorism to affect us? To change us? This is the slow march, the dance if you will, done by Hitler and the Nazis before they devolved into the vilest of animals during WWII. Is it the absence of God, the void of faith, or the sheer hatred that blinds us? Isn't hatred an exact definition of terrorist. Passion without reason?
In my previous rant, “Has Obarfo done the right thing?” http://apatriotrant.blogspot.com/2011/05/has-obarfo-done-right-thing.html?showComment=1304428611993#c9171716334088028176 I question the motives for his, "I did this" and "I did that." I went on to say:
Americans will never lose any sleep over UBL's death; however, as they have time to consider the consequences of the actions of this big-mouthed, self-possessed, manical, narcissist, egocentric person in the WH, I think all Americans might wish it had not been dealt with like a trophy, but more discreetly as "house cleaning" and taken out with the trash. And why in the world talk about the burial and how his body was handled in the muslim tradition. No head turned toward Mecca, or perhaps they turned the ship around, to honor him. I hope someone ate bacon and had it on their hands before they handled him. UBL is no longer the only problem. The jihadists are emboldened and, and if you think Gitmo was a catalyst for recruitment, just what in the hell do you think this grandstanding by BO is going to cause?
And then, we had the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American citizen. We didn’t cut off the head of the snake… It will grow another one. As bad as he was, he should have been brought to justice and executed as a traitor, a murderer, or something. It was another grand-standing attempt by obozo in an effort to resurrect his sinking poll numbers.
This brings me to the barbaric and brutal manner in which Gadaffi was executed, but only after he was kicked and beaten, and quite frankly, if we follow obozo’s example and applaud this kind of behavior, I don’t see much difference between them and us. We are slowly becoming they, and they are becoming we just like in the story of The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss. This story of the “haves” and the “have nots,” but the “have nots” began mimicking the “haves” until one day, they were the same; one couldn’t tell the difference between the groups.
We must not allow the liberal progressive idiots dictate how we as Americans react. We must check our emotions at the door and continue to do what is right. After the word “devolution” came to mind, and I began this blog, I received this blog in an email. This blog by Ken Marrero mirrors my sentiments almost exactly:
Am I the Only One Disgusted with Post Gadhafi Libya? 10/20/2011 By Blue Collar Muse
Mitt Romney said, “It’s about time … Moammar Gadhafi was a tyrant who terrorized the Libyan people and shed American blood, and the world is a better place without him.” Marco Rubio weighed in with, “… justice has been done today.” Meanwhile, the reports of exactly how Gadhafi died are, in the words of one network, “conflicting.”
The one constant in the accounts I have read is that when he was captured he was alive. A few minutes later, he was not. Therein lies my problem.
I will not defend or condone Gadhafi’s life or actions. They are indefensible. He was a murderer and a tyrant. None of that is in question. What is in question seems to be the issue of what we do with captured tyrants.
If Gadhafi were killed in a shootout like Saddam Hussein’s sons, I would have no problem. If we locate him in a training camp and obliterate it with a missile, I would have no problem either. Those are legitimate actions in a war zone and are morally and intellectually defensible.
However, when we found Saddam Hussein, a man just as evil as his sons or Gadhafi, hiding in a hole in Tikrit we did things a little differently. Because regardless of the lawless scum we were hunting, it was Americans doing the hunting.
The scenarios are eerily similar. Both men were found in makeshift hidey-holes. Both had members of an entourage or security detail with them. Both were discovered by a group of hundreds of their enemies, all armed to the teeth. Both were found shaken or disoriented. Both were taken alive.
The difference? Hussein was captured by American soldiers. Gadhafi was captured by Muslim insurgents. Hussein got three hots and a cot for a few months, was tried, convicted and executed. Gadhafi was promptly murdered by his captors. This act is now celebrated by GOP politicians as justice and overdue justice, at that.
When did I wake up in Bizarro World? I thought I lived in America. I thought we believed all men are created equal and none may be deprived of life without due process. As frustrating as it is, I thought mine was the nation ridiculed for wounding a criminal in a police chase, spending thousands of tax dollars to heal him, jail him and try him and execute him if he is found guilty. Because taking a man’s life – any man’s life – is the ultimate in serious.
Last month we had yet another national discussion on Capitol Punishment around the execution of Troy Davis. Several witnesses recanted their testimony and we again agonized over the ultimate punishment. Because we are Americans.
So I am disturbed when a man surrenders or is captured and it appears probable he was murdered by those who held him. That is not how we do things in America.
In the end, however, it is more disturbing that two of the most powerful and respected men in American government – Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney – find nothing wrong with the events as they transpired. Or, if you will, are unable to refrain from offering their approval of events the nature of which they do not fully know.
Perhaps such behavior is good politics. But if I have learned anything as an activist, it is that good politics breed bad realities!
The men who murdered Gadhafi do not share our values, our principles or our view of Life and the worth of every man. We may have stood alongside them as they fought a vicious strongman. But we ought to distance ourselves from them. We ought to roundly condemn them. They are as much animals as the man they murdered and by murdering him have earned our contempt and disgust.
The first act of the post-Gadhafi Libya was not to show a watching world they were ready to join it as civilized men. It was not to demonstrate that the freedom from tyranny they have publicly cried out for truly burned in their hearts. It was not to side with an American President who sent aid because their oppressor cruelly treated them in their helplessness.
They showed they were replacing Gadhafi’s tyranny with their own. They showed they pursued mere liberation instead of yearning for true Liberty.
And there are Americans who celebrate this? Words fail …
Let us not lose the boundaries that separate us from chaos and Anarchy. I am constantly reminded by the images of the Nazis ascent to power in Germany:
Let’s take a look at how Hitler got into power.
Features of Fascism
1. One leader – a dictatorLeader Name Party Country
Il Duce Mussolini Fascisti Italy
Führer Hitler N Nazi Germany
Caudillo Franco Falange Spain
2. A fascist state is TOTALITARIAN (one party state), so there would be no choice between parties in an election.
3. A dictator maintained his power by violence and fear. Private armies were used (e.g. Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s Brownshirts = Sturmabteilung or Stormtroopers) to protect the leader and attack enemies (e.g. Communists)
4. A dictator maintained his power by strict control of the media. CENSORSHIP denied people information, and PROPAGANDA forced fascist ideas onto people.
5. Nationalism was encouraged with the use of symbols, e.g. Italy with the clenched fist and the sheath of corn, and Germany with the swastika, goosestep and straight-armed salute.
6. Hitler united the majority of Germans by attacking minority groups. He said ARYAN people (Teutonic, blue eyed, blond haired) were a HERRENVOLK or master race. He said inferior races (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Yellow/Black skinned people) should be exterminated. Uneconomic peoples (e.g. the aged or the disabled) or non-conforming Aryans (homosexuals, socialists, Jehovah’s witnesses etc.) were to be exterminated.[1]
And then the use of propaganda:
Mein Kampf contains the blueprint of later Nazi propaganda efforts. Assessing his audience, Hitler writes in chapter VI:
"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (...) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."[2]
When he started his political career, he certainly did not want people to know that he was lazy and a poor achiever at school. He fell out with one of his earliest supporters - Eduard Humer - in 1923 over the fact that Humer told people what Hitler had been like at school.
Hitler was certainly gifted in some subjects, but he lacked self-control. He was argumentative and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline....moreover, he was lazy. He reacted with hostility to advice or criticism. (Humer)
Hitler was certainly gifted in some subjects, but he lacked self-control. He was argumentative and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline....moreover, he was lazy. He reacted with hostility to advice or criticism. (Humer)
Humer had been Hitler’s French teacher and was in an excellent position to "spill the beans" - but this met with Hitler’s stern disapproval. Such behaviour would have been seriously punished after 1933 - the year when Hitler came to power. After 1933, those who had known Hitler in his early years either kept quiet about what they knew or told those who chose to listen that he was an ideal student etc.[3]
In a 1920 leaflet, the NSDAP blamed 300 bankers and financiers throughout the world for dictating policy to the world and holding it to ransom.
"Shake off your Jewish leaders............Don't expect anything from the Bolsheviks (the Russian Communists)............(The Russian government) is nine-tenths Jewish. Bolshevism is a Jewish swindle."[4]
Hitler kept to his promise of working within the law. If he did not, it would have looked like an act of political desperation. However, as with any small party, the Nazi party's funds were limited. Political obscurity beckoned for the Nazis.
They were saved by an event out of their hands - Wall Street Crash of October 1929. This event was crucial to the Nazis. The Americans called back the money they had loaded Germany in 1924 and 1929 (the Young Plan). Germany had no money to invest in her economy. The growth from 1924 to 1929 had been somewhat of an illusion as a great deal of the money invested had been from overseas loans - primarily America. Money borrowed had to be paid back. In October 1929, Germany was left effectively bankrupt - again.
The impact of the Wall Street Crash took time to impact Germany. Unemployment was not a major issue for 1929. But by September 1930 it was.
September 1928 650,000 unemployed"Shake off your Jewish leaders............Don't expect anything from the Bolsheviks (the Russian Communists)............(The Russian government) is nine-tenths Jewish. Bolshevism is a Jewish swindle."[4]
Hitler kept to his promise of working within the law. If he did not, it would have looked like an act of political desperation. However, as with any small party, the Nazi party's funds were limited. Political obscurity beckoned for the Nazis.
They were saved by an event out of their hands - Wall Street Crash of October 1929. This event was crucial to the Nazis. The Americans called back the money they had loaded Germany in 1924 and 1929 (the Young Plan). Germany had no money to invest in her economy. The growth from 1924 to 1929 had been somewhat of an illusion as a great deal of the money invested had been from overseas loans - primarily America. Money borrowed had to be paid back. In October 1929, Germany was left effectively bankrupt - again.
The impact of the Wall Street Crash took time to impact Germany. Unemployment was not a major issue for 1929. But by September 1930 it was.
September 1929 1,320,000 unemployed
September 1930 3,000,000 unemployed
September 1931 4,350,000 unemployed
September 1932 5,102,000 unemployed
January 1933 6,100,000 unemployed[5]
And as I wrote during my trip to Israel:
"... we set out for the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem. Dachau, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust Museum in Berlin did affected me quite as deeply, nor touched every nerve I have as a visit here did.
The chronology of events in 1940 Germany is alarming and seeming all too familiar when compared with what is happening in the United States. I was a tourist, and on this visit on this day sent warning sirens blaring in my head when I heard the narrator on the audiotape say, “ Hitler and the Nazis …‘reshaped the family, … replaced or removed religion, the government took over the education, … control of the banks, the financial system, healthcare, the auto industry… assumed control of the children, and … ran the youth camps.’ Two old radios were in this exhibit, and the narrator continued, “Radios were distributed by the government to the people in order to disseminate information [propaganda] effectively and efficiently to everyone in order to “control the masses.” [Could this be a little like ensuring everyone has broadband, or cell phones, etc.? Added by TG] It started with a fire intentionally set in a government building in Berlin to instill fear. They were successful in instilling fear. Then, the Nazis promoted the “terror threat.” It was all they needed to “gain a foothold” when the government came in “to protect the people.” And the people willingly let the fox into the henhouse."
Are we there yet? I think we are knock, knock, knocking on the gates!
[1] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/adolf_hitler.htm [2] Mein Kampf citations are from the Project Gutenberg-hosted 1939 English translation by James Murphy.
[3] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/adolf_hitler.htm
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