How History Relates To Current Events

[Scar My Machine]

I found this quote from 1945 which is from post WWII. It described how the Nazi's described how they were able to get the German people to subscribe to voting their political party into power and found it to be disturbing and found similarities to a certain political party the (imo) has done something similar in America over the past 9 years.

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country

- Hermann Wilhelm Göring (1945) post WWII. German, Nazi leader

I just wanted to discuss how this relates to our former president and how we have been told for almost a decade that we have been threatened by terrorists/attacks and how this has kept us at war in the middle east for far too long.

Any thoughts, counter points are welcomed/encouraged.

[LoTek]

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”

~Adolf Hitler

“All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.”

~Adolf Hitler

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

~Joseph Goebbels - Nazi Propagandist

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

~ George W. Bush

“You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”

~ George W. Bush

"We need a common enemy to unite us.”

~Condoleezza Rice

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

~Dick Cheney

"I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it.”

~Dick Cheney

and lastly:

“You must not kill your neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism”

~Bertrand Russell

[WhiteLines]

Old tricks are the best tricks.

[candyman]

Wait we have been "told" that there have been terrorists attacks? Really? So what about all of the cases that have happened? Were those not real?

Dude while there may be some truth to your argument the way you presented it was all wrong. You just gave a big "fuck you" to all the people that lost their lives in these attacks and all of those that have given their lives in the fight to try and stop them as best as they could. You are also making a joke of the situation in the middle east...which was a problem LONG before our former president...it was even a problem long before we even had people come over to the New World. So yeah...if you are going to do a history lesson try to include all of the relevant history...

I am going to call Godwin's law on you here too...seeing as you did the common raping of Nazi Germany history to make people from today with different standards look bad.

[candyman]

Here I know that 1988 isn't considered "history" but remember the Halabja poison gas attack or did your teachers "forget" about that one too? Its easy math when you look at the events surrounding the attack, what was used in the attack (hint: considered WMD), and then what happened to the people involved in the attack and the military instillations that supported weapons manufacturing at the time.