A s Russian artillery shells were raining down on Berlin, even after the German Fuehrer had committed suicide, the security state continued on. Through the ruins of the Berlin streets, roving bands of S.S. officers roamed, hunting down and executing on the spot anyone suspected of desertion or cowardess. The third Reich had less than forty eight hours to live; yet, the security state was alive and well and lives on with us today.
Many people fail to understand that though the third Reich was pounded into dust long ago, many of its tenets of government live on. As the Red army rolled into Poland, the Polish underground began to rise up against the German invaders in Warsaw. It was at that moment that Joseph Stalin called a halt to the Russian push towards Warsaw. It was in Stalin we see the afterbirth of modern politics and of the security state. Flash forward to Libya and Syria; American policy has a light touch. Let the combatants bloody and eliminate the strongest and most popular and who do you suppose will be waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces?
[I]t is much safer to be feared than loved when, of the two, one must be dispensed with. Because " love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
No man of prestige is without ambition. It is quaint to think of George Washington as a backwoodsman surveyor, but Washington was a blindly ambitious man. He married one of the wealthiest widows in Virginia and through those marriage vows became a wealthy man himself. Yes, it is entertaining to think of the founding fathers by their popular historical images. The French and Indian War cleared Colonial America's borders of potential adversaries. Ambitious men asked, "What do we need a British crown for, when we might have our own?"
Continued at The Leftist Review; click here