LewRockwell By Boyd D. Cathey
My Corner
In a recent issue of Chronicles Magazine (March/April 2022) my friend Paul Gottfried, Editor-in-Chief, writes about the perilous condition of genuine liberty in modern Germany (“Germany, Harbinger of the Abyss,” pp. 6-8). Germany has become, in numerous ways, the most authoritarian, controlled, and “woke” country in all of Europe. And each successive new restriction on personal or corporate expression, each new statute limiting not only what one can say or write in public, but what one can even think in private, is done in the name of “protecting our [German] democracy.”
As Paul points out—and has documented in several detailed studies, including most recently his volume, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (Cornell University, 2021)—this is not something that occurred over night, or even over the past couple decades. It began actually with German defeat in the Second World War in 1945 and the subsequent implementation of the Marshall Plan and the explicit and wide-ranging “denazification” and purification in occupied Germany of everything that smacked or hinted not just of “fascism,” but of anything that honored or “glorified” German tradition and heritage.
As neoconservative writer Alan Bloom once so aptly expressed it (in his The Closing of the American Mind): “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” We Americans must engage in “an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so.”
