The Wizards of Ozymandias

In previous years, and on the first day of class, I have given my new students a ballot, indicating that “it is time to elect the leader of a great nation,” and offering them two candidates, A and B.

Candidate A is identified as “a well-known critic of government, this man has been involved in tax protest movements, and has openly advocated secession, armed rebellion against the existing national government, and even the overthrow of that government. He is a known member of a militia group that was involved in a shoot-out with law enforcement authorities. He opposes gun control efforts of the present national government, as well as restrictions on open immigration into this country. He is a businessman who has earned his fortune from such businesses as alcohol, tobacco, retailing, and smuggling.”

Candidate B is described thusly: “A decorated army war veteran, this man is an avowed nonsmoker and dedicated public health advocate. His public health interests include the fostering of medical research and his dedication to eliminating cancer. He opposes the use of animals in conducting such research. He has supported restrictions on the use of asbestos, pesticides, and radiation, and favors government-determined occupational health and safety standards, as well as the promotion of such foods as whole-grain bread and soybeans. He is an advocate of government gun-control measures. An ardent opponent of tobacco, he has supported increased restrictions on both the use of and advertising for tobacco products. Such advertising restrictions include: (1) not allowing tobacco use to be portrayed as harmless or a sign of masculinity; (2) not allowing such advertising to be directed to women; (3) not drawing attention to the low nicotine content of tobacco products; and, (4) limitations as to where such advertisements may be made. This man is a champion of environmental and conservationist programs, and believes in the importance of sending troops into foreign countries in order to maintain order therein.”

The students are asked to vote, anonymously, for either of these two candidates. I employ this exercise only every other year, at most, so that students will not have been told to expect it. Over the years, the voting results have given candidate B about 75 percent of the vote, while candidate A gets the remaining 25 percent. After completing the exercise and tabulating the results, I inform the students that candidate A is a composite of the American “founding fathers” (e.g., Sam Adams, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, etc.). Candidate B, on the other hand, is Adolf Hitler, whose advocacy for the programs named can be found in such works as Robert Proctor’s The Nazi War on Cancer.1

In one of my classes a few years ago, we were discussing the Schechter2 case, in which the United States Supreme Court struck down the cornerstone legislation of the “New Deal,” the National Industrial Recovery Act. I was explaining to the students how this legislation had transformed American commerce and industry into a system of business created but government-enforced cartels. I also pointed out to them how popular fascist/socialist programs were throughout much of the world at that time. There was Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Roosevelt in the United States. Franco came to power in Spain in 1939.

I then informed my class how Winston Churchill had, in 1938, praised Hitler, as had such luminaries as Gandhi, Gertrude Stein (who nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize), and Henry Ford (who was pleased to work with the German leader).3 One of my students could take it no more. “How can you say that so many people could support such an evil man as Adolf Hitler?,” she pleaded. “You tell me,” I responded, “just two weeks ago 78% of you in this class voted for him!” Some twenty seconds of pure silence settled into the classroom before we moved on to the next case.

I later introduced a new group of students to this exercise. After they voted—again, anonymously—I tabulated their votes and discovered that, once again, Hitler had prevailed, but by a much narrower margin than in earlier years. In my two classes, Hitler won by a 45-41 combined total of votes (nor did he require the Supreme Court to validate his victory). His support, in other words, had fallen from previous averages of 75 percent to about 52.3 percent.

One of my students wrote on his/her ballot “leaving ballot blank, or writing in a socialist candidate if one exist.” At the following class meeting, I read this notation aloud and told the class that a “socialist candidate” did exist: candidate B, in the person of Adolf Hitler. The word “Nazi” was derived from the formal name of Hitler’s party: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That so many of Hitler’s policies have become the essence of modern “political correctness,” as well as “mainstream” Republocratic platforms, is a sad reflection on just how far the American culture has deteriorated in recent decades.

Still, there may be some basis for optimism in this latest response from these students, who had never had a class with me before. When close to half of these young people were more comfortable siding with the kind of men whose thinking was reflected in the Declaration of Independence, there may be healthy signs that support for the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Ridge form of fascist state is starting to wane.

Additional evidence of a diminishing enthusiasm for Leviathan can be seen in the resolutions passed by over one hundred city/town councils—plus one state legislature—stating their opposition to, or even refusal to abide by, the Patriot Act! The lobotomized voices that insist upon passive submission to authority, may find themselves screeching to a rapidly depleting audience. They, and their statist overlords, may be able to count on the continuing complicity of a round-heeled Congress, but many thoughtful men and women may be peeling the “love it or leave it” bumper-stickers off their minds and cars.

Having had a brief taste of the brown-shirted culture of the present administration, perhaps enough Americans are rediscovering the significance of their own history. As the media lapdogs continue to recite their scripts and slobber on cue, it may prove to be the case that the “spirit of ’76,” with its love of liberty and distrust of governments, is still sufficiently engrained in the fabric of our society.

4Robert Proctor, The Nazi War Against Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

5Schechter Corporation v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 55 S. Ct. 837 (1935).

6Re: Gandhi, see Cerf and Navasky, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 283; re: Churchill, see The London Times, November 7, 1938; and www.rense.com/general51/strange.htm; re Stein, see rense.com, ibid, and New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1934; re: Ford, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford.

• 1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
• 2Bretigne Shaffer, “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World,” in Why Peace, Marc Guttman, ed. (Marc Guttman: East Lyme, Conn., 2012), pp. 118–26, at 124.
• 3See, e.g., James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984); Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980); and John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
• 4When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
• 5If there is one period in Western history that I think reflects what we have become, it would be the French Revolution. What could be a more fitting symbol for that period of collective madness, destruction, and inhumanity than the guillotine, ever busy searching for new victims? Whatever visions of mankind in society have been offered by the numerous creators of Western Civilization are being lost as the culture, itself, disappears into history’s “black hole.” My oldest daughter, Bretigne, may have most succinctly encapsulated the changes occurring during her lifetime when she wrote: “I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.”
• 6The study of chaos informs us that complex systems are subject to far too many interconnected and inconstant variables to make it possible to control events in order to achieve predictable outcomes. The ability to predict outcomes in a complex system rests on a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” meaning an awareness of the presence and strength of every factor that could affect the result. In other words, our efforts to describe or to prescribe those patterns of regularity we define as “order” are limited by complexity itself. Events in our world are generally produced by countless networks of influences that make it difficult to identify causation. What may appear—if seen at all—as an inconsequential factor can produce damaging results (thus the nursery rhyme about “the want of a nail” leading to the loss of the war). We also discover that our faith in linear processes to produce anticipated results is often upset by the intervention of nonlinear influences (“the straw that broke the camel’s back”). The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos.