“He would be as happy as anyone to be rid of these men. They frighten him as much as they frighten everyone else.”
I was going to say something, anything about Orson Scott Card’s latest exercise in one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state (here, but also here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). But then I remembered I’d already quoted what somebody else had to say:
Unsuccessful in war and unable to adjust to a troubled peace, Weimar’s visionaries dismissed what was for them an overly complex, difficult, and demoralizing reality and indulged in elaborating fantasies of a vicious war of revenge that cast them in the role of conquerors. In their literature these angry men gave vent to primitive wishes for the annihilation of France, England, the United States, or whomever else they pictured as Germany’s enemy. But the war visions of the 1920s were not merely the self-serving fabrications of isolated malcontents. Instead of being left to dissipate in the realm of dreams, daydreams, and semireligious entrancement, the visions of revenge and renewal were converted into a literature of mass consumption. The published fantasy—often a quirky mixture of adventure story, fairy tale, millenarian vision, and political program—was intended to act as a catalyst inflaming the same type of emotions among the readers that originally elicited the fantasies in the minds of their creators. In this manner, what originated as compensation for the frustrated individual was transformed into a psychological tool, a propagandistic call for militant nationalism and engagement in antirepublican politics. Some of these writers, in fact, were also active as political speakers and agitators.
“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it does rhyme.” —Except, of course, he didn’t, and anyway, rhyme’s gone all out of fashion. Though I wouldn’t trust fidelity or fashion to keep us safe, not from this crew. Remember, “If This Goes On—”
