"Germany, 1938- America, 2009?"
"How could Americans now possibly be living under a creeping dictatorship and not know it? And how could we not only not see a police state condition but actually think we're living in complete freedom? Because most of us don't WANT to know what's going on. We've lost the ability to think critically about political, economic, and social dangers confronting us. If we have a job, if the political-economic system seems stable- as it does in America- then that's all we want to know.The general intellectual incompetence of Americans at present leads directly to a blindness to our current catastrophic situation. Without the learned ability to make decisive distinctions, people cannot discriminate between, for example, "economic downturn" and depression, or between "change of leaders through free elections" and coup d'etat through monied interests buying and selling presidents and congresspersons. Our minds are so undeveloped that we lack the capacity to discriminate between the essentials and the changing, superficial forms.
"There couldn't be a police state in the U.S.," says Joe American, "because we don't see men in uniforms with swastikas on their armbands goose stepping down our streets! " "We can't be losing our freedoms," says Jane American, because I didn't see anything about it in the New York Times and there was nothing about it on the evening news." We like to delude ourselves that the 1930s German citizen was some special case. But Nazism didn't arise because a few maniacs somehow got into power and did something unique to the German people's minds. Those myths have been exploded once and for all by our more recent understanding that those same tactics have been used and are being used to enslave the minds of people in many different societies.
"'Fascism' is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man's character, a structure that is confined neither to certain races or nations nor to certain parties, but is general and international. . .'Fascism' is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life." - Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
So our present "enemy" is our own conditioned lack of progressive awarness, our love of ease, our unwillingness to dispel our social and moral delusions, our headlong rush into the mindless attitude that "everything is okay." Even though our society faces a truly alarming situation, people find ways to ignore the peril. One way to do this is to assume that such an episode as the 1930s-1940s Nazi terror is no longer a threat. But we have a number of horrible examples of what happens TODAY to a society when its people fail to develop progressive awareness abilities, the most ghastly perhaps being that of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Ever since this indefensible horror, few Americans have had the ability to ask the critical questions:
• was there prior knowledge of (or even complicity) by the U.S. government in the terrorist attacks?
• is there a hidden agenda in the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq?
• is the government setting up a police state?
Thus we return to the absolute necessity to learn how to think critically. And perhaps now we can begin to see why it is essential to our very existence. Progressive awareness is no longer an intellectual option for the few; it is a necessary tool for discovering what kind of people we have allowed ourselves to become. Through self-study and change we must find out just what in us makes it possible for a new, more sophisticated "Nazism" to now be taking control, a more insidious brand of fascism, undetected because the blatant symbols and familiar catchphrases are indiscernible to our undeveloped minds. We either learn to use progressive awareness now, or we can passively watch while the new, disguised gas-chambers and death squads are prepared for us."
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