Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

Those 2 million aren't anymore worthy than the other millions, the many more millions, who are unemployed and have nowhere to turn for help.  

What that deal did, and all deals like it, was to peel away just enough of the opposition to keep our course headed in a downward spiral.  

There's are two books that I read about 30 years ago by Raoul Hilberg that I think probably prepared me more for this period in our history than anything else I've ever read or studied. They help explain how government leaders manage to get citizens to accept that which the citizens would never grant permission for, and to do the unspeakable, unthinkable, to fellow human beings. 

Hilberg, a historian, was writing about Nazis and WWII, but the methods are strikingly similar to what Democrats and Republicans in the US have been up to. Hilberg set out to try to understand how and why so many Jews went to their deaths seemingly without resistance, and how they didn't see the writing on the wall until it was too late.

Edicts curtailing their rights and movement (everything from limiting the amount of money they could have to where they could actually be in public, banning them from being in public squares or shopping at stores, and sending their children to school) didn't happen all at once, but one at a time, and their response each time was, "This has to be the worst that will happen; we can live with this", until they were rounded up and put on trains to death camps.  And their neighbors, who had lived among assimilated Jews, as friends and family, did nothing as the net was closing around the Jews. 

It's an eye-opener, about how it can happen to any people (and has since), and how so many of the same tactics used by the Nazis are used by modern day politicians. 

The only weapon against these tactics working is an informed electorate that see these tactics coming.

The Destruction of the European Jews 

&

Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders by Raoul Hilberg
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost