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Thank you Glenn, once again really great work.
Not to be one of those tin-foil hat dudes, but in Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free", he sites two maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ I have linked to more excerpts to my name below (via the University of Chicago Press).
Mayer notes that, "one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings." Hitler did not sieze power and immediately start gassing Jews and invading nations, it was a steady drip, drip, drip of incremental steps toward facism. More Mayer:
If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
The military analysts/MSM scandal is just another drip. Torturing detainees (drip), secret prisons (drip), illegal spying (drip), telcom immunity (drip) all justified by our version of the reichstag fire (911 - although I am suspicious of the official 911 story line, I believe it was another example of the Administration's incompetence, ala Katrina). But the parallels to the early 30s are hard to ignore.
I think we are still early enough, more towards the "German Firm" side of the continuum. Thanks to you and others, I hope we can consider the end and repair that leaky faucet.
