Part One: It seems that Americans have a very short attention span, and a memory loss regarding the lessons History (which is and was a factual state of affairs), and prefer to fictionalize and fantasize about our present, forgetting that any truth from the past matters and that and action today, WILL have consequences for tomorrow.
During the Second World War, the American public became aware of a new political ideology, known as Fascism. We discovered the face of a Fascist, Adolph Hitler, and slowly, and sometimes out of sheer avoidance realized that Fascism was something dangerous, something contagious; we believed at; first it was similar to having the sniffles, but not stepping in quickly enough to find a cure we then discovered it was more like a pandemic. Fascism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt
“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.”
― Henry Wallace
During the years of the Cold War, the American people began to realize that however virile and victorious democracy had demonstrated itself, a new form of governing was gnawing at the foundation of the world, like termites finding sanctuary in the sturdiest of timbers. There was a malaise identifying itself as Communism. It was a mistaken bug bite that when scratched turned into a series of bumps, which then exploded into a full body rash. Communism: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned, and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.
“[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.”
― Harry S. Truman
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”
― Edward R. Murrow
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” (response to Senator McCarthy and his rather be dead then Red crusade)
― Joseph N. Welch
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