It's So Black & White It Takes A Colored Man To See It, II

O.K., depression subsided, thanks to this slowed-down Lenny Kravitz track (provided by, my man, J.T.Slice) so let's continue to wander through the fields, even if these aren't made of joy:

Nazi Germany. That ending to the last post is as good a starting point for this one as any. Mention the Nazis and, online, the scream of Godwin's Law goes up. I find this silly because, when most think of the Nazis, they think of the end of the war (when mothers would rather kill their children than allow reality to reach them as the Americans arrived) and not it's beginnings - what stupid (especially "spiritual") ideas led to the Nazis gaining power. And to people being willing to kill. They were the same.

These ideas - marching under the Tibetan banner for "good luck" the Nazis never delivered - were directly from German paganism. Ask the Dalai Lama, maybe.

Snarky "I don't care" anti-Newt Gingrich video text aside (I know - he's an over-sexed hypocritical nutjob - none-the-less) NewAge IS paganism. The Nazi's were pagans, but - though we defeated Adolf Hitler - we never defeated the ideas that animated the Nazis, like the slogan of the Hitler Youth, "Mind, Body, Spirit," which is now everywhere, used for the quack-end of NewAge's "alternative" medicine movement without shame. As the people who defeated the Nazis, we have become seriously ahistorical a-holes not to have figured that one out.

Remember the woman in the last post, Susan Lambert, insisting on torturing her dogs through the use of homeopathy? She would've fit into the Third Reich, no problem - listen to Hitler's deputy, Dr. Rudolph Hess, defend it as well:

"The new Germany considers it politically necessary to proceed in the verification of all phenomena whatsoever. However, certain physicians have not hesitated to attack and reject not only new therapies but also others whose origins go back to a distant past - as is today the case with homeopathy — without even making the effort to subject these therapies to serious examination. For this reason, I have taken under my protection the XII International Congress of Homeopathy in Berlin, to express the interest of the National Socialist State in all modes of therapies that are useful to the people´s health."

Considering the state of Susan Lambert's dogs, that's some "help," huh? (I just told you about this kind of "help" in Part I,...) And notice the lie that homeopathy's pre-science "origins go back to a distant past"? He's harking back to paganism but homeopathy was really invented in 1796. And the claim "physicians have not hesitated to attack and reject not only new therapies but also others whose origins go back to a distant past - as is today the case with homeopathy — without even making the effort to subject these therapies to serious examination" is still as popular today as it was then - especially amongst Whole Foods shoppers. They simply can't talk themselves into escaping this nonsense. But doctors can:

Freedom of Information requests by [General Practitioner] magazine found that one in seven of PCTs in England paid for homeopathy services in 2011/12. The number of PCTs funding homeopathy has fallen by a quarter since 2010/11, when one in five trusts funded it, and by half since 2008/9, when a third of trusts provided funding for it. 

A total of 116 out of 152 PCTs responded to GP's request for data about trusts' 2010/11 and 2011/12 expenditure on services involving homeopathy. Previous GP research found 34% of PCTs funded it in 2008/9. 

PCTs said homeopathy was now classified as a low priority because of poor evidence for its clinical effectiveness. 

Two trusts withdrew funding after the House of Commons science committee said in 2010 that the NHS should not fund it. Another two said they planned to stop funding in 2012/13.

As The National Review's Jonah Goldberg reminded us:

"Many of the progressive and holistic ideas that lie at the heart of today’s lifestyle Left, the environmental Left, and the New Age movement share numerous unquestioned philosophical, emotional, and practical similarities with the intellectual and cultural currents that fed into and sustained Nazism."

But, while it's mostly the Left, it's not only the Left. See, the dirty little secret of World War II is the Germans were normal, but just operating under a particular set of beliefs, circumstances, and holding a whole lot of false assumptions, just as many are today.

Bad economy? Check. Racial ideas and hatreds - with an emphasis on anti-semitism? Check. Nostalgia for a "pure" and "natural" time that never existed? Check. A distrust of logic and ("Big Pharma") medicine? Check. Paganism, unquestioned, and running rampant? Check and double check.

I could go on. Oh shoot, I will:

Mormon Endorsement of Hitler and the Nazis 

 Well, "golly gosh," as the Mormons say - that explains the black thing! - let's go even further:

In 2009, Mitt Romney, who is now trying to campaign for president as a moderate, lent his star power to an unusual charitable project: celebrating right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck to raise money for an unaccredited Utah-based college, which was founded by acolytes of the late W. Cleon Skousen and promoted the work of this fringe conservative figure. Much-touted by Beck, Skousen was an anti-communist crusader, a purported political philosopher, a historian accused of racist revisionism, and a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He contended that the Founding Fathers were direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, claimed that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes, and wrote a book that referred to the "blessings of slavery." Skousen, who died in 2006, taught Romney at Brigham Young University. 

Five years ago, the conservative National Review referred to Skousen as an "all-around nutjob." 

Romney recalled taking a class at BYU on the Bible taught by Skousen, whom he called "a brilliant man and a wonderful story teller."

And there's more:

It’s quickly becoming the story of the election season. Every day there’s a new report of bosses putting pressure on employees to vote for Mitt Romney or very bad things will happen. The threats range from job loss to wage cuts, and the Gilded Age-style strong-arming shows no signs of slowing. 

Most recently, we’ve learned that Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions, sent an email to workers with the following subject line: “Will the US Presidential election directly impact your future jobs at ASG? Please read below.” 

David Siegel, the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts, has been playing the worker intimidation game. So have the Koch brothers, sending anti-Obama voter materials to 45,000 employees of their Georgia Pacific subsidiary (thanks to AlterNet’s Adele Stan for bringing us that story). In Michigan, the president of Lacks Enterprises warned his company’s 2,300 employees that their paychecks will shrink if Obama is re-elected. 

On a June conference call to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Mitt Romney himself enthusiastically pushed the tactic: 

“I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”

Who says I can't have fun?

Of course, the response of the conservative National Review to this clear manipulation - seeing how they're backing Romney for president despite knowing he's insane - can be summed up best by the words, "I don't care." But roll it all together and what you get - from the Left and the Right - is what we have now:

A clusterfuck of bad ideas, hurtling us towards disaster, but with no "America" to stop us, as we stopped Nazi Germany, because it is now America caught in it's tailwind. We are the nation of loonies.

As I said when I started this, "we live in,…a crazy, cult-infested, pseudo-intellectual wasteland," and the reason for that is we're the long-term recipients of some very-bad-and-yet-still-unquestioned ideas, all defended by the words "I don't care." Being stupid is now part of our cultural DNA.

Come on - even if it's not true and never will be for a million years - do you think you can talk one of these self-proclaimed "smart and independent" women out of the cockamamy belief that "everything happens for a reason"? Good luck. The kind the Germans had. These women's minds are trapped.

Trapped in non-existent "ancient teachings," as false as homeopathy - as Hess said - "whose origins go back to a distant past." Challenge these NewAge women and the farthest you're going to get, concession-wise, is "I don't care." They are determined to believe it. And will defend it to the death.

This is our own cultish thinking in action - and it is easily exploitable - as they, and many others, have already been exploited. We live in the modern age, but we have barely evolved at all:

This is what's been happening to us.

And - just like in World War II - it's becoming difficult to find an escape.

We're simply lost, if we don't start paying attention, to our own lack of attention,…