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Obedient Americans Will Make Good Nazis by Harry Goslin English
statesman Benjamin Disraeli once said, “It has been discovered that
the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in
the nursery.” Well, if
not in the nursery, a public school system would suffice.
Get them young, get them early, and get them often.
Although it is doubtful that the forefathers of mass public
education openly took their cue from Disraeli, they certainly saw the
benefits of taking children away from their parents and massing them
in factories of “education.” Finally,
utopia could be created, good citizens molded, and maybe even
Catholicism eradicated. As
the 20th Century has demonstrated, creating utopia has
proved elusive and very destructive, and Catholicism has even survived
itself. At least the
public education system has done its part to create generations of
“good” citizens. What
exactly makes a “good” citizen?
Here in Assuredly,
many Americans would consider these objectives noble.
After all, many of them went through the same training during
the impressionable years of their lives.
As adults, all that was needed by the state to maintain
obedience to the same was periodic and pointed propaganda.
Every few months there is some national holiday that honors
veterans, war dead, the state, and past Caesars who ruled over the
American Empire. Should
holidays fail to provide the catalyst to trigger national obedience,
dates marking significant events, battles, or the vanquishing of past
enemies serves the same purpose equally well. Citizenship
“training,” whether in or out of school, wherever and whenever it
has been practiced, is nothing more than an organized conspiracy to
make children and adults exactly what the state wants them to be:
stupid, compliant, tax-paying slaves, easily led to believe that
voting makes a difference and serving as cannon-fodder for imperial
adventures is a patriotic and moral calling.
Trained to do what they are told, not complain, and not ask
questions, law-abiding Americans have been aptly honed to be perfect
Nazis. We
are certainly not the first people to be molded this way.
Early Christians were molded like modern Americans.
Obey the dictates of Caesar, they were told.
Despite Caesar’s persecutions, they did.
After the Caesars had fallen from power, national obedience was
paid to Now,
it might well be our turn. Although
the 20th Century can rightfully claim to be the period in all
of history where national obedience went to the greatest extremes--the In
a recent article, Lee
Harris discusses what he considers to be an unhealthy and
dangerous attribute of many Americans--complete and unquestioning
respect for the law. Speaking
of Americans in general, now and throughout much of their history, Lee
says, “the general populace continues to adhere to the view that those
who have been entrusted with the task of interpreting the law . . . must
be deferred to, no matter how absurd or capricious their rulings may
appear when approached from the perspective of sheer logic.” Whether
it’s a pronouncement from the Supreme Court or an executive order from
the current occupant of the White House, whoever that may be, Americans
just shrug their shoulders and say, “The law, is the law.” Perhaps
the greatest example of obedience and state-worship necessary for
full-blown nazification in “Well,”
some might say, “Americans were in need of leadership and help.
The Great Depression had sapped many of them of their jobs,
homes, savings, and spirit. He
gave them hope that the future would be brighter.” Any demagogue
stepping into office on the heels of such a government-generated
economic calamity could have pulled that off.
A couple of guys named Hitler and Mussolini come to mind.
The instinct to grovel was already there.
Ralph
Raico,
describing Roosevelt biographer Finis Farr’s reaction to FDR’s first
inaugural address, said, “Farr wrote of a troubling characteristic of
his countrymen, namely, the American public’s canine desire to fawn on
authority and crawl before the whip.
This dog-like aspect of our great nation is its least attractive
and also perhaps most seldom-mentioned trait.”
A survey of American history since reveals that not much has
changed. Americans still
demonstrate an irrational tendency to “fawn on authority.” “Education”
has done its part to turn out good citizens.
Even real smart people are stupified through unquestioning
obedience to laws and authority in general.
The intensity of tyranny we are all made to bear in the future
will be dependent on us. We
need only look to As
Hannah Arendt wrote in The
Origins of Totalitarianism, “Although tyranny, because it
needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can
stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions
of its own people.” Better
pay attention to that next big explosion in a
discuss this column in the forum Harry Goslin lives in Tucson, loves his family and hates the state.
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