History Matters

I've been flouncing around this idea for some time now; time to say something it seems.

Through much of the 1920's Germany was a battleground between numerous militant ideological groups, some of them actually German. Prominent among these were the groups generally lumped under the rubric "communist", who for the most part actually were an invading ideology from the not-quite-yet-established USSR. Countering this ideological invasion was a collection of mostly domestic German political factions, many of which were themselves socialist in nature, and the actual German government. The accepted history is that Adolph Hitler found employment with the German military intelligence establishment infiltrating many of these groups. By means obscure today, Hitler rose to legitimate political prominence by achieving control of one of these socialist political groups and "successfully negotiated" a merger with at least two others, resulting in the much-decried National Socialist Democratic Workers Party. And that's how arguably the raging flaming asshole of human history defeated an ideological invader and became a national hero. Briefly.

In related action, the leaders of the nascent USSR infiltrated their ideological invasion agents into the United States during the same time period. That invasion proved marginally more successful than in Germany in that no centralized opposition arose in the USA, but there can be no question that it occurred, as confirmed by the many former Soviet official documents that have become public knowledge in recent decades. The limited success these invasion agents achieved is of less modern importance than is the fact they developed many times their numbers of fellow believers and even more of those who achieve personal success by advancing arguments and beliefs long since disproved. This is an example of a successful change of a national political context.

Nearly a century of history later, we find ourselves targeted for ideological invasion by a different group of ideological activists. You know ... Muslims.

Human historical experience regarding ideological disagreement resolution doesn't offer much opportunity for a different process taking place this time, but one can always hope. And it is a process. A pattern of reinforcing incitements will continue to take place, many of them seemingly "obviously" unconnected (by those who don't take inspiration from them). And now that ideological conflict resolution process is blatantly occurring within the United States.

This promises to be a long, drawn out series of events dominated by more own-goals and blue-on-blue casualties than victims of actual attack, and that's not counting the casualties experienced by the ideological non-combatants of our attackers. There is no "enemy headquarters" to attack, the primary combatants make every effort to subvert our social and political structures against us, and there is as yet no widely adopted ideology specifically countering their beliefs for us to rally 'round.

Everything takes place in a context of events and beliefs. Hitler's "heroics" against communist invasion and domestic political success don't make him a good, or even arguably sane, man. People in similar-seeming circumstances to those from the "Good Hitler" days makes identifying with his actions and statements from then more understandable, but the cure for that is to improve the similar-seeming circumstances. New context leads to different beliefs resulting in different actions chosen. The trick for us today is to discover the means to arrange a new context for Muslims that makes their own "Good Hitler" ideological activists unacceptable to them. Good trick that, I agree, but it's what I've got so far.