Did you know Americans used to scoff at the USSR for requiring papers to travel in their own country?
Imagine we are sitting at a table - a roadside café in Frankfurt, Germany.
It's 1936.
I tell you, "I had a nightmare. We were here, but it was 1946 instead. The Americans and Russians have bombed all of Europe into the dust, because this new guy running Germany invaded Poland, Russia, France... he won approval to call the Jews inhuman, and killed millions of them in gas chambers, with machine guns, diseases and starvation. Tens of millions more died in Europe trapped between immense armies - the Americans put a thousand bombers in the sky at one time."
Quietly, you talk to the waiter when he next approaches, and shortly the ambulance arrives. Smiling men in white usher me off to the hospital. Clearly I am mentally ill. No one could do what I suggested that Führer was planning; Germany is starting a new age of recovery.
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Every generation is living in the most modern society it has ever known. None of them actually ask for the purges taking millions of people to early graves.
But it happens, largely because no one can believe it, and so no one acts early to prevent it.
Take the lesson.
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Or not. Some people today are calling for "Red Flag" laws, in which an anonymous caller can cause a SWAT team to appear at anyone's house - like yours - to search for and confiscate weapons. Yes, the suspicion a person possesses a weapon is enough to invade her home, destroying her property and critically endangering her life - all on the word of a person who will merely be charged with a misdemeanor after the door is broken, the flash-bangs go off and possibly the homeowner and her dog are shot. You, and your dog? When will it happen to you?
We have police in the schools.
We have our pre-teen children groped by ersatz police called the "TSA", part of the Homeland Security Administration, because their parents want to ride in an airplane.
Real police have the authority to stop you and put you in handcuffs until they identify you.
Really. You.
And some have the audacity to call others "Nazis"...
I have news: it's not just the current President making this happen. You're not taking the lesson, possibly consumed with the idea that if only those people could be ordered to do what you want, everything will be OK.
