It's About Liberty: A Conservative Forum
Topics => General Board => Topic started by: LadyVirginia on January 16, 2012, 05:00:29 PM
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My daughter saw this article from 1941 Harper's referenced somewhere recently. Perhaps you read it too.
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work–a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
<snip>
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.
Read the rest here for the interesting descriptions (http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/0020122)
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Very interesting read that I thoroughly enjoyed. I hope you don't mind if I share.
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I'd never read it, and I found it absorbing.
Anyone care to extrapolate to our current crop of candidates?
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I read the whole thing through and found it interesting, but I don't see where it is anything more than speculative opinion on the part of the author.
And I find the idea of someone "going Nazi" to be a subjective thing. Were the German citizens who went about their daily lives with the smell of burning human flesh wafting through their towns "gone Nazi"? The argument could be made both ways.
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I think this works better, for Nazi's, Commies, anybody who perverts religion or seeks to destroy it...nature (people) do not live in vacuums...something will always replace nothing...
"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything." -
-- GK Chesterton
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Very interesting read that I thoroughly enjoyed. I hope you don't mind if I share.
Absolutely.
What I found telling was the observation "Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t". (Which I think leads many a liberal to base their decisions on feelings--they have nothing else to go on). Probably sums up the behavior of many people on the wrong side of history through the ages. The character description are speculative (though I can't help but wonder if the author had individuals she knew in mind) but thought provoking in a sense that they suggests that core values come in different packaging. Some obvious and some not.
I've had to deal with people similar to those she describes.