Reply #26: Neurosis: Second time's the charm

[kenny blankenship]

It's also well to remember that for the Nazis, the second time was the charm too. When the Nazis seized power from the Weimar Republic, it was not the first time they had tried it. Right after they began calling themselves "Nazis" instead of "Freikorps", Hitler, Goering and others in the Nazi movement had tried to seize power in Bavaria, to break Bavaria away from the German Republic at least, or perhaps spread Fascist revolution across the entire nation. A great deal of the emotional significance of their subsequent takeover, a decade later, and the words accompanying it as justification, had to do overcoming and undoing the humiliation of their previous failures, erasing the defeated Putsch attempt that landed Hitler in prison in 1923, and blotting out the shameful memory of defeat by the Allied powers and the occupation of German lands and demilitarization (emasculation) of the German state. When Hitler demanded the Sudetenland in 1938, it was to Munich he made Chamberlain and Daladier travel to meet him, the precise scene of Hitler's previous failure and humiliation.

For Bushlerite Republicans, winning in Iraq will mean Vietnam didn't happen (the conventional meaning of VN--shame and failure--will be scooped out and waiting to be refilled with signification more in line with the Rambo-* Missing In Action-* series of fantasy movies.)
Re-establishing the COINTELPRO police-state Presidency of Nixon will mean the shame of Watergate is undone, and never happened.