How Does It Happen?

How does the Bush Administration reach the point where it is now walking over any nation it desires, and dragging the downtrodden and the powerless middle class of the U.S. into this rapidly forming hellhole they are deceptively calling a "mild recession"? It's happening in small, tolerable steps, not large enough to enrage, only large enough to keep us confused, fearful and indecisive. Milton Mayer wrote the definitive work on this subject, and it sounds, almost word-for-word, like a history of the past 2+ years and a forecast of the next ?+. Excerpts:

"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy.......

"You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing)."

These are from his book, They Thought They Were Free. The most intriguing section is not terribly long reading (maybe 4 minutes) and is posted HERE.

Oh, you say, another comparison of Bush to Hitler. Another extreme-leftist whack at the government. You know what, he who does not learn from history IS doomed to repeat it. We are, today, all passengers of this Christian Fundamentalist-piloted speedtrain to Hell. Before December, 2000, Armageddon was a fascinating concept and a study of doomsdayers. Never before has it seemed so real. Never before has world war and political instability existed to such a degree in conjuction with so many nations (stable or otherwise) each armed with enough power to destroy the world.

PLEASE read it and pass it on. It's what's happening in America now.