1. Divide individuals by gender, by ethnicity, by wealth and income, by education, by age, and by sexuality;
2. Pit one group against another using the force of government to provide unearned rewards to some at the expense of others by putting limits on the rights of individuals to earn a living, limiting their freedom of association, and their freedom to cooperate with one another;
3. Thereby, creating distrust and hatred as the factions fight to control the government that insists on hurting many, making it a threat to all, thereby making it a matter of life and death for each group to control the government;
4. Watch a country that once honored merit in the market place, but became an unlimited democracy, succumb to greed for the unearned with the development of ever more special interest groups dependent upon government largess;
5. The government-run and funded education system becomes a tool promoting more and more government powers, seeks to suppress all private education alternatives, seeks to suppress individual rights especially freedom of speech and the freedom of the press or media, promotes the collective rights of some groups at the expense of the rights of the individuals in other groups, and promotes versions of the country's prior history that diverge ever more from the truth such that more and more power and money flow to the government and the education system;
5. The government-run and funded education system becomes a tool promoting more and more government powers, seeks to suppress all private education alternatives, seeks to suppress individual rights especially freedom of speech and the freedom of the press or media, promotes the collective rights of some groups at the expense of the rights of the individuals in other groups, and promotes versions of the country's prior history that diverge ever more from the truth such that more and more power and money flow to the government and the education system;
6. In which a majority coalition of those who have less wealth and want government forced transfers of wealth to themselves and those who most lust for power turn the country into a socialist, fascist country (very poor, primitive countries usually turn communist instead);
7. Which in turn comes to be ruled by the most brutal elements of the power lusters with a total loss of individual rights.
I read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the summer after the 9th grade and came to understand most of this. I think I understood some of these lessons better than Shirer did. There have been many further examples of this process since WWII.
Here is a very interesting analysis video of what we are presently facing based on a young woman's experience during the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
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2 comments:
I agree. What you say is true enough, and not only Shirer but F.A. Hayek says all of that, exactly.
Thanks for your comment about Hayek, Tom. It was not the case that Shirer said this, however, but that one could conclude most of this from the history he gave. Another important conclusion of his history was that only communism is the left of fascism. It is a complete fiction that fascism was not socialism and almost everyone recognized it as such in the 1920s and 1930s. There was a concerted post-WWII effort to write fascism out of the socialist domain. Fascism is the form of totalitarian socialism favored in nations in which many people own property, as was the case with Germany and even Italy and Spain, while communism is the form favored in nations in which almost everyone is very poor (Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba).
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