Not in Our Stars But In Ourselves

Human beings can rationalize anything, and for most the answers are always simple.

I was saddened to read of the Neo Nazi demonstration in Dresden. Anyone who has studied World War II or read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut has empathized with the residents of that great old city and felt despair at the sight of the bodies and the ruins. Now the Neo Nazis have found in this tragedy the victimhood needed to dilute blame for the Holocaust.

They have found common cause with residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in blaming the allies, especially the United States, for what happened in February 1945. Fortunately, most Germans reject that notion and accept national guilt for crimes of the Third Reich.

It is so easy to blame others for our difficulties. If only the Kulaks would give in the new Soviet man could appear. Twenty million deaths later, the Soviets were no closer to a stateless society than when the purge began. Germany’s economic problems of the twenties and thirties were the fault of the Jews.

There seem to be four great answers to political and economic difficulties: it’s somebody else’s fault; it must be collectivized; the state must control the economy; and the market will make us free. Men and women of my era have seen each of these answers come a cropper.

Despite the greatest failure of collectivism of all time, there is never a shortage of those screaming for nationalization of industries and for the reeducation of the rest of us. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are not alone in calling for redistribution as the answer to a nation’s needs.

Even as Hitler’s Germany was being consumed in its own excesses, strong men from the right were being born and preparing to cure the ills of such disparate societies as Chile, Iraq and a host of other states.

Even as communism fades in China, the regime saves itself by taking on the qualities of gangsterism so representative of National Socialism.

While here in the U.S. as the memory of the Great Depression fades from our national memory, many are intent on dismantling the tools that saved us from the excesses of the market. Laissez faire policies that brought us robber barons in the nineteenth century are being recycled in our own time to create a capitalist class of great wealth even as the national standard of living stagnates.

Words like business cycle and crash have been banished from our lexicon. Ownership has new meaning as we happily ignore or forget that everyone was welcome to participate in the market run up of the nineteen-twenties.

Progressives of both of our political parties saw a role for government in a capitalist society. But now the watch word from one side is that liberals want to socialize and impoverish and from the other that capitalist excess has already crossed the line to right wing excess.

The answers are harder than the slogans that parties proclaim. But those who seem to understand this are marginalized. We centrists must never give up. It is up to us to demand that the rules of reason and law must not disappear.

Blog on!

Wild Bill