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Just wow! Not sure how I missed this last year, but there is so little "meat" on the forum these past years that I have gotten sloppy on staying alert.

I appreciate the email heads-up pointing me here... I will have to read your essay a couple more times before I comment specifically.

However, at first reading it is an excellent throwback to the pre-2000 years when such thought-provoking original essays were common on FR. Often on opposing views of the same subject, prediction, or concept, yet usually well thought out, intellectually stimulating, and "fiercely" defended.

The book may require a ceramic cover...{:-) IMHO, Hitler-redux and his book burners are already assembled and waiting in the wings...

Yeah, I think I might have to publish on asbestos pages - I'm calling things by their proper names and exploring the rise to supremacy one of the darkest aspects of human nature. This will please no one who seeks power, and it'll genuinely piss off the roses, puppies and unicorn optomists who think everything's going to be just fine. It isn't. That's manifestly not what a dispassionate look at history and human nature teaches us.

A couple of authors have come close, but still choose to dance around the subject. Check out Chantal Delsol's landmark Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century. It's a distinctly European point of view, but it holds true for all of that. She does however, overlook our unique but waning American sanse of exceptionalism, optomisnm and strangth of character. For example, take this excerpt from Unlearned Lessons where she deftly exposes the roots of the Left's irrationalism.

Vital resistance and resentment are the two main responses to the events of 1989. Vital resistance: the mind realizes its mistake - it admits, for example, that nationalization of the means of production does not produce a happy society, but rather laziness and constant shortages; it refuses, however, to let go of the idea because of its passionate attachment to it. Existence - adventures, friendships, successes - is nourished and permeated by this belief to such an extent that the belief becomes an identity; the individual cannot renounce it without committing a kind of symbolic suicide. No one can admit... that his existence reflects the echo of a failure.

In other words, no one wants to admit that the premises upon which one has constructed their entire raison d’etre is an empty, shrieking fraud. This goes a long way towards explaining the tortured mental gymnastics and pretzel logic employed by the liberal Left in this country. Strongly recommend this author.

Lee Harris - another brilliant writer concludes his Civilization and Its Enemies with this:

"...we must all struggle to overcome the collective tendency of civilized men and women to forgetfulness. For that, in truth, is the ultimate question facing us today. Can the West overcome the forgetfulness that is the nemesis of every successful civilization? If it can, then there is hope that mankind will be able to move forward to a higher stage of historical development. If it cannot, then the next stage of history will be one that we once hoped never to see again."

I know the answer to that question. The memory of how we got here, how we achieved our freedom and at what cost has been systematically purged from the general consciousness. Not necessarily from ours, but from that of many of our countrymen. Harris' concluding sentence is the price that we will all pay for that forgetfulness - particularly so, as so-called progressives' view of history reads like a cut and paste ransom note.