The Second World War lent new urgency to the war against poverty. Nazism had taken root in Germany at a time when the country was in a devastating depression, provoked by the punishing reparations imposed after the First World War and deepened by the 1929 crash. [John Maynard] Keynes had warned early on that if the world took a laissez-faire approach to Germany's poverty, the blowback would be ferocious: "Vengeance, I dare predict, will not be limp."I am sharing this quote tonight because it seems to me that we may be headed down a similar road. If the conservatives in this country have their way, the majority of the citizenry will feel as if they've landed in post-WWI Germany. With the Tea Party already holding sway with a significant number of Americans, we could end up convulsing into something akin to Nazism.
Those words went unheeded at the time, but when Europe was rebuilt after the Second World War, the Western powers embraced the principle that market economies needed to guarantee enough basic dignity that disillusioned citizens would not go looking once again for a more appealing ideology, whether fascism or Communism.
It was this pragmatic imperative that led to the creation of almost everything that we associate today with the bygone days of "decent" capitalism -- social security in the US, public health care in Canada, welfare in Britain, workers' protections in France and Germany.
~ from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ~
Is that truly the road we wish to travel?
That's the scariest thing about the times we're falling into now: if things get bad enough, we're going to look for someone... anyone, who seems to have a way to fix things, which will certainly turn out poorly for democracy and rights.
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