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Sept. 21, 2023 Editor, The News-Gazette: What Hitler and his minority party admired about the U.S. of his time was referred to as “the U.S. model”: voter suppression, gerrymandering, immigration restriction of non-Aryans, mixedrace marriages outlawed, propaganda as education. It was hate wrapped in the flag.
Today, would-be autocrats want to tell us who to marry; what we are permitted to read, say or think; how to raise and educate our children; who’s allowed to vote; who’s allowed to come here.
From geometry, we learn irrefutable equivalencies: “things equal to the same things are equal to each other.” Wrap hate in a flag, hide it behind a cross, it is a betrayal of America’s founding principles, what my mother, father and two uncles joined the military to resist in WWII.
The new minority plans to rule permanently, promising to use violence to disenfranchise the majority if it loses elections.
The problem? That doesn’t work. As Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan, 1651, in “attaining Sovereignty by Rebellion … others are taught to gain the same in like manner,” so refusal to accept public order guarantees a “Warre of everyone against everyone” where “there can be no security to anyone.”
This minority expects the majority will submit passively. History indicates otherwise, evidenced by the millions killed in civil and religious wars.
Autocracies usually degenerate into sclerotic, dysfunctional failed states, as practitioners scramble for loot. Look around the world to see what life is like in dictatorships.
This is not about competing policies. This minority has no interest in the opinion of the majority. Their nominee admires war criminals and murderers who run police states. Whining endlessly about personal grievances is his only policy, and he has already announced a revenge tour for those who criticized him.
Maya Angelou advised, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” JOE PETITE Rockbridge County
