The Tragic And Impending End Of A Republic
... when opportunism wins against all reason.
January 31st, 2020 will forever live in infamy. Today, the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate abdicated its power of holding the president accountable and sacrificed oversight for blatant opportunism, thus setting a dangerous, moreover self-destructive precedent.
Truly tragic to watch Democrats so passionately defend the U.S. Constitution and ultimately democracy in its essence to their Republican colleagues in the Senate, who, in turn, had already decided the outcome of this "trial" long before it began.
Tragic also, because whilst they are still playing by the rules of ethics, decency and facts, the other side has been employing the most shameful as well as cynical tactics known in history from the very beginning: the NAZI playbook!
Here are few examples of said tactics to make the shocking parallels abundantly clear:
• make the most ridiculous claims sound plausible
• convert the most outrageous lies to absolute truth by repeating it over and over again
• corrupt every one in their orbit either by financial bribes or threaten the unwilling with exposing their darkest personal secrets
• offer the highest positions to the least qualified, thus giving small men (women) a power they otherwise would never wield
• exchange facts for their cultist conspiracies
• use propaganda channels in media and press to pervert the truth further
• shift the goal post every time they are caught out
• make themselves the victim each time their criminal behaviour is exposed
• use "whataboutism" when the evidence against them is overwhelming
And so, the passionate defence Democratic House Managers are making most skilfully, it is, nonetheless, falling onto deaf ears, because it is so much easier to pretend to see and hear no evil rather than standing up to power and speak the truth.
Their Republican colleagues will most definitively come to regret their cowardly expedience; at the latest, when they will realise that surrendering a democratic republic to a corrupt authoritarian regime, which soon will have no more use for them, was collective political suicide.
They can't even begin to comprehend the magnitude of their selfish action and what the future will encompass for all Americans because of it.
The majority of the U.S. public still has no idea in what grave danger it finds itself. If people think the upcoming election will save them, they need do think again!
The German as well as the Jewish population felt the same unease, the same anxiety in the beginning of the 1930s, but they didn't believe their hard fought-for democracy of the Weimar Republic could fall because of a small, albeit scary minority.
In the end, neither the republic nor democracy itself survived, because Conservatives and Monarchists supported and enabled Hitler thinking they could use him as their useful tool seeing him rather as the blunt instrument to do their bidding, while secretly despising him and his uneducated, coarse behaviour. (Sound familiar?)
They too chose opportunism over country, self-serving partisanship over their constitution and their oath.
We all know of the catastrophic result their shameful decision brought only 15 years later, as half the world lay in ruins and more than 20 million people had died in a senseless, cruel war that had stripped away every iota of humanity.
You think, it can't happen again? It already is!
Just exchange Putin with Stalin, Trump with Hitler and recognise the weak sycophant Boris Johnson as the epitome of British appeasement. Salvni in Italy would like to become the next Mussolini, and Turkey's leader Erdogan already sees himself as the sultan he so desperately craves to become in a new Ottoman Empire.
We all must ask ourselves, whether we are prepared to let history repeat itself.
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