Below is a complete blogpost “essay” from the little-known blog The Atheist Conservative:
America’s Mussolini
One of our readers, A.G.S., sent us an idea he had for an article
comparing America now to the early days of Mussolini’s Italy. The thought came
to him, he wrote, when he read Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann. He
outlined the article he had in mind and asked me [JB] if I would complete it. At
first I was a little skeptical; I felt he was exaggerating. But the more I
thought about it, the more I found myself in agreement with him. The following
is the result of our collaboration.
***
In his famous story Mario and the
Magician, Thomas Mann demonstrates how fascism under Mussolini corrupted the
Italian populace. At the start of his regime a general feeling spread among the
Italians that it was right to impose conformity, and society was gripped by a
mood of collective censoriousness. In the story, set in an Italian holiday
resort, a child takes off her bathing suit to wash the sand out of it in the
sea, and her momentary nudity arouses the wrath of the crowd on the beach, the
police are informed and the child’s family is fined. The story as a whole is
about the destruction of individual will during an evening’s entertainment by an
evil hypnotist. The allegorical implications are unmistakeable.
As in Italy
then, an atmosphere of authoritarian regulation is spreading in the US now.
There is a powerful demand, emanating from the president and his circle, for
mental and physical conformity.
Proofs of this intent abound. Group action
and community involvement are encouraged, with the aim of inducing
non-conformists to fall in line. The Department of Homeland Security issues a
memo warning that persons who have a political point of view different from the
present federal government majority are a threat to society. Anyone challenging
the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which the Democrats in power have
embraced as an orthodoxy, is denounced as a heretic. In the cause of mitigating
the projected undesirable effects of climate change, the government proposes to
dictate what sources of energy you may use and to what extent. It will regulate
the temperature of your house, the clothes you may wear, the food you may eat,
and the car you may drive. In sickness and infirmity your body will be treated
as the government decides when its nationalized health policy is imposed.
Government will decree what opinions you may express on talk radio, in the
universities and schools, and soon in any public forum. By ‘spreading the wealth
around’ it will set a limit to how high any individual may rise by his own
efforts. Government will rule on how much business managers may be paid and
under what union-dictated terms an employee may work.
When conformity is
legislated and imposed by force, dissent criminalized and punished,
authoritarianism has become tyranny.
Obama is the Mussolini of America.
So, all partisan rhetoric aside, regardless of your political opinion, is what is quoted in whole above the product of a rational mind? I don’t think so…
If this or something similar was written of George Bush in 2008 I admit I would have been amused and maybe a little tempted to agree, but since this post is only eight months into the Obama Administration and Obama has expressly promoted a weak, non-radical, bi-partisan, broadly right-leaning centrist approach to his politics(which I despise by the way) and has acted in this manner consistently, to agree, in light of the obvious evidence, would be to admit a metal defect, or at least show a denial complex.
I’m no Obama fan, but truth does not vary with political opinion, and as an atheist and a rationalist, the truth is my quest to forever be searching for, regardless of whether I like it or not.
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