History Repeats: The Continuing Threat to Freedom and Democracy

Lately it has been popular in some circles to talk about the US being a ‘late stage democracy’ that has ‘never been more ripe for tyranny.’
Sometimes they like to drag in Plato to give their thought pieces a gleam of higher learning and a supposed grounding in history.
But their pieces fall into that trap, that very sort of temporal vanity and self-centered preoccupation to despair that Newman notes so well in saying that “every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it.”
Would you be surprised to hear that less than one hundred years ago there was an actual plot, bankrolled by some of the most powerful and famous figures of the American one percent, to use military force to depose a sitting American President and instead install a fascist in the White House who would be more compliant with their greed and lust for power?
The model for this takeover would have been similar to Benito Mussolini’s infamous ‘march on Rome.’
Would you be further surprised to know that some of these unrepentant financial figures then went on to help bankroll Hitler, and continued doing business with his atrocious regime even as their most vile business partners actively fought the US, their own country, in the war?

This post was published at Jesses Crossroads Cafe on 19 JULY 2017.