The More Things Change...
For those of us that are horrified with the behavior of Conservatives today, and might be tempted to see this as a temporary reaction brought on by the successive campaigns of a Black man and a woman, consider this, from Richard Evans' three volume work on the rise of the Nazi party, about the Social Democrats in Germany before World War I:
Sound familiar? A political majority achieved by reliance on small rural districts full of right wing citizens, despite the popular majority actually being far more left leaning; a refusal to accept the opposition as even a legitimate party; the misuse of the law for partisan purposes- all taking place in an empire far far away, and long, long ago. Nothing really changes, does it? I guess humanity is doomed to spend eternity fighting against these sickening, loathsome people.
And I just want to add another comment to this: Remember, it only took ten years and a disastrous lost war for Germany to go from this to absolute murderous hatred of the left, culminating in World War II.
"By the eve of the first world war, the (Social Democratic) party had over a million members, the largest political organization anywhere in the world. In the 1912 elections, despite an inbuilt bias of the electoral system, in favour of conservative rural constituencies, it overtook the Centre party as the largest single party in the Reichstag...
Combating the Social Democrats became the business of a whole generation of judges, state prosecutors, police chiefs and government officials before 1914. These men, and the majority of their middle- and upper-class supporters, never accepted the Social Democrats as a legitimate political movement. In their eyes, the law's purpose was to uphold the existing institutions of state and society, not to act as a neutral referee between opposing political groups."
Sound familiar? A political majority achieved by reliance on small rural districts full of right wing citizens, despite the popular majority actually being far more left leaning; a refusal to accept the opposition as even a legitimate party; the misuse of the law for partisan purposes- all taking place in an empire far far away, and long, long ago. Nothing really changes, does it? I guess humanity is doomed to spend eternity fighting against these sickening, loathsome people.
And I just want to add another comment to this: Remember, it only took ten years and a disastrous lost war for Germany to go from this to absolute murderous hatred of the left, culminating in World War II.
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