I've had this in the back of my mind for a while.
Most people think Phil Sheridan, who hated Indians with a passion, said the only good one was a dead one. He didn't, of course, It was honed down into that familiar quote.
A lot of people felt that way, from the days when the Wild West was west of the Hudson River to the islands of the Pacific in WWII. Many had reason. And, yes, decimating the fighting men of one side helps the winners prevail all the more completely.
Many of the South's leading commanders (Stonewall, JEB, Van Dorn (granted, shot by a jealous husband), and Albert Sidney Johnston, etc.) and sizeable portions of its troops were killed in action. The best the unreconstructed Confederates could do was the Klan.
We know how the Commies obliterated anybody who could be a nuisance any chance they got, to the tune of 130 million dead. Hitler achieved the same with the Night of the Long Knives and other vehicles of civic enhancement. The French citoyens wiped out the nobility and the Good Ol' US of A didn't have much trouble with Loyalists because the American Revolution was also a very ruthless civil war at the end of which a great many Tories departed for more congenial outposts of royal Albion. Many returned, but any resistance was DOA.
So consider this point. We all know the enmity between the ever-shrinking (and it is) Left and real Americans continues to gain in viciousness. The Brooklyn shootings Troop mentioned are the latest example. A lot of people think we'll see a second (third, actually) civil war.
If so, will we have to decimate the Left unto the third and fourth generation or, as Andrew Jackson did with the Five Civilized Tribes, drive them from the United States?
I ask this because we all know the Lefties are in it for the long run. We've beaten them before and they've always regenerated. It took the Democrats 50 years to bounce back from the Civil War and another 20 before they were able to control of the government. What we call the Deep State is merely the way the Left used civil service. The Roosevelt Reds stayed for their 20 years in the bowels of the government and many got another Federal job for another 20 years. The old New Dealers became so entrenched, it took someone like Reagan, who was willing to wage war on them, to change things and the old Reds passed the torch to the hippie dippy types trained by more New Dealers, tenured in colleges all across the country.
And that's where we are today.
So, we'll play a new round of Dorothy Thompson's old parlor game, Who Goes Nazi?.
Can we live with these people or is it them or us, to the last man, woman, and child? They've always had it in the backs of their minds. What William Ayers dreamed 50 years ago is being proposed today under the rubric of Flu Manchu. They would if they could.
Where do you come down?
4 comments:
The woke movement shows the South was right all along.
I prefer Chivington’s quote.
It will be war to the knife.
What's the "Who Goes Nazi?" game and take about?
Thompson provides her conclusion to the question, in an article by that title written by her and published in Harper's in 1941:
It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
What's the "something" that's in the nice people who don't "go Nazi"? And what's missing in those she believes will?
Whatever that something is, I'm wondering if it lines up with the Peck quote, and involves the desire/need/willingness to engage in the ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
Or is backed up with the practice of holding in balance my old favorite paring of Truth and Grace, or my new favorite, Accountability and Compassion. Both similar to the ancient favorite of the patriarchal Jewish G-d, who supposedly had one of his spokesmen tell the mortals what was good and required of them, and that was for them to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with him.
Causing me to posit that those who are less inclined to "go Nazi" are likely open to hold and exercise one of those pairs, which is no easy thing to go. Or they might be devoted to the idea of greatness in simplicity.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope. Winston Churchill
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