In 1932, when the leadership of the German parliament decided to try empaneling a cabinet under the leader of the largest party in the Reichstag, one Adolf HItler, one of the groups that lent the new idea strong support was…
…the German Kommunist Party.
This bit of cognitive dissonance startles a lot of modern Ameircans, with their exceedingly pat, linear understanding of political history. In the context of the times, it made perfect sense. And not without reason. The Communists believed that a coalition run by a Nazi would drive everyone in the middle to one extreme or the other – which would redound, conventionally, to their benefit. They stood to gain from the violence they believed would ensue.
And barring a major change in German political life, it might have worked.
But Hitler outmaneuvered them Commies, and everyone else. He promised Germans an end to politics – and, numbed by a decade and a half of depression, political violence and fractiousness, Germans bought it. And he got the allegiance of the German Army, which allowed him to sustain his seizure of complete control of all the levers of German government.
But that was all in the future. In the fall of 1932, the Commies beheld the spectre of (more) political violence, and chortled merrily. Division – in the form of a low-grade, cold-to-warm state of conflict – was in their interests, or so they thought.
To the best of my knowledge, Dennis Prager was the first to call our current national impasse a “civil war”. It’s a cold one – so far.
I despair, occasionally, of it staying that way;
He notes the propensity of today’s left toward violence:
Today, we watch leftist mobs scream profanities at professors and deans and shut down conservative and pro-Israel speakers at colleges. We routinely witness left-wing protesters as they block highways and bridges; scream in front of the homes of conservative business and political leaders; and surround conservatives’ tables at restaurants while shouting and chanting at them.
Conservatives don’t do these things. They don’t close highways, yell obscenities at left-wing politicians, work to ban left-wing speakers at colleges, smash the windows of businesses, etc.
Why do leftists feel entitled do all these things? Because they have thoroughly rejected middle-class, bourgeois, and Judeo-Christian religious values. Leftists are the only source of their values. Leftists not only believe they know what is right — conservatives, too, believe they are right — but they also believe they are morally superior to all others. Leftists are Übermenschen — people on such a high moral plane that they do not consider themselves bound by the normal conventions of civics and decency. Leftists don’t need such guidelines; only the non-Left — the “deplorables” — need them.
Like the Communists of 1932, they are hoping with every Antifa outrage, with every clogged freeway, with every mob scene in a store or restaurant or place of business, to provoke a response. It will, they think, redound to their advantage. Given that they control the means of information distribution in this country every bit as thoroughly as the Nazis did 86 years ago, it’s not a bad plan.
