Appeasement of the CCP?
Commentary
In crucial times, we would be fortunate indeed if the leaders of the free world were as courageous, as principled, and as great communicators as Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.
But such leaders are, unfortunately, rare.
Ordinary leaders have in the past resorted to appeasement, that is, being too ready to make significant and unnecessary concessions to the enemy.
We are living in one of those times when a general war with powers hostile to our way of life seems to be looming but is of course not inevitable. That our potential enemies are coming together is a warning sign.
October 1936: Berlin judges swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler saying, “I swear I will be true and obedient to the Fuhrer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, observe the law, and conscientiously fulfill the duties of my office, so help me God.”Â
Lawlessness is a state of disorder due to disregard of the law. Â
That is an incomplete definition. For it neither takes into consideration the nature of the law disregarded, nor the vigor with which an unjust law is sometimes enforced.Â
Bad law, vigorously enforced, moves a nation toward tyranny.Â
Good law, negligently ignored, destroys respect for the law. Â
The propaganda techniques that Spainâs far-right Vox party has adopted in its campaign for the Madrid regional election of May 4 were already tried and tested in Germany by the Nazis.
Both the campaign billboard in which Vox attacks the cost to the Madrid region of unaccompanied migrant minors, and the words used to dehumanize the leftist Unidas Podemos candidate, Pablo Iglesias, such as âratâ and âhunchback,â mirror strategies used by Hitlerâs National Socialist German Workersâ Party to win over millions of Germans in their drive to persecute and annihilate not only the Jews but also the disabled and sick.
Ernst Fraenkel was born into a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany on December 26, 1898. Having served in the German Army during World War I, he thereby avoided the anti-Semitic persecutions of the mid-1930s.  But in 1938, Fraenkel, seeing the writing on the wall, emigrated to England and then, in 1939, to the United States.  His intellectual journey is significant for today.
In 1941, a manuscript he had written while in Germany, entitledÂ
The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, was published by Oxford University Press. The book is visceral.  It was written on the increasingly ugly tarmac of the Third Reich. And its thesis suggests a haunting parallel to what we see in the contemporary American crisis.Â
Christa Ludwig, la voix humaine la-croix.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from la-croix.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.