Happy New Year from the blast zone
It's another New Year's Eve in our nation's capital, and here I am, buying cases of liquor, fueling up my car, and plotting emergency escape routes. You think I'm paranoid, but really, no one ever thinks it's going to happen to them until it actually does. People hear about all sorts of terrible things--military coups, genocides, tsunamis, deadly chemical accidents, suicide bombers--and they think two things. First, "Those poor people." Second, "Thank goodness that could never happen to me." Millions of people have thought this, and millions of people have been wrong.
The last time I truly felt fear for my physical being was as a child in the early 1980s, during the end of the Cold War--undoubtedly because I had seen The Day After (1983) on TV at a tender age. Possibly also because we had "tornado/nuclear attack" drills at my elementary school, in which we learned, I kid you not, to curl up into little balls under our desks. As I grew up in a mountainous area not prone to tornadoes, I saw through that one even at age six. At least they were trying not to freak us out completely.
It is certain that some of the fears I feel now--fears of dirty bombs at the Capitol, of IEDs on my morning Metro ride--are no more rational or merited than my childhood fear of nuclear war was. Fears of a one-party government takeover are another story, history shows. Next time: why the Weimar Germans and post-WWII Czechs didn't see it coming until it was too late. [Continued here.]
The last time I truly felt fear for my physical being was as a child in the early 1980s, during the end of the Cold War--undoubtedly because I had seen The Day After (1983) on TV at a tender age. Possibly also because we had "tornado/nuclear attack" drills at my elementary school, in which we learned, I kid you not, to curl up into little balls under our desks. As I grew up in a mountainous area not prone to tornadoes, I saw through that one even at age six. At least they were trying not to freak us out completely.
It is certain that some of the fears I feel now--fears of dirty bombs at the Capitol, of IEDs on my morning Metro ride--are no more rational or merited than my childhood fear of nuclear war was. Fears of a one-party government takeover are another story, history shows. Next time: why the Weimar Germans and post-WWII Czechs didn't see it coming until it was too late. [Continued here.]
Labels: apocalypse
posted by Waage on Friday, December 31, 2004
1 Comments:
As promised:
Historically, it has proven to be remarkably easy for a single party on either end of the political spectrum to take control of a democratic state, especially in times of terror and economic vulnerability. No one ever thinks it will actually happen to them, until it does. Consider the following:
Germany, 1933: Hitler took totalitarian power over then-democratic Germany through a set of seemingly reasonable steps to react to a terrorist crisis. In 1933 the Reichstag, or German parliamentary building, burned down in an apparent act of arson, apparently by Communist activists. In the wake of the fire, Hitler called a general election so the Nazis could take control of Parliament. He only got 44% of the vote, but then arrested all the Communist deputies (lots of people were afraid of the Commies so they bought this no problem), which gave the Nazis a majority. This new Nazified Parliament passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler carte blanche to make whatever laws he needed to, again, using the Communist threat as justification. The rest is history.
Czechoslovakia, 1948: The Socialist (we would now call it Communist) Party took power over then-democratic Czechoslovakia by cleverly manipulating parliamentary procedure. The strategy relied on all the other players assuming that the Communists would play by the rules of the game. The Communists had been using their power to fire non-Communist police officials. In retaliation, the non-Communist cabinet ministers all resigned, assuming that this would force the President to call new elections, which were sure to put the non-Communist alliance back in power. However, the Communists used their control of the Ministry of Information (the media) and the Ministry of the Interior (the police) to consolidate their power and menace the President into instead installing an all-Communist cabinet which basically answered to the Soviet Union. Bam! The Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia.
--MW
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