Forgive me, this is off the cuff and a bit meandering. This article has provoked a feeling which I have, while often thought of, never attempted to put down in

Forgive me, this is off the cuff and a bit meandering. This article has provoked a feeling which I have, while often thought of, never attempted to put down in concrete terms. Contexually, whenever someone starts going on about Nazis and how it led to this undesirable outcome or another, I have begun to flash back to a book I read called Voluptuous Panic, which detailed the post-WWI era in Germany in terms of how crushed underfoot the Germans were, how devoid they were of men (who had largely been killed in the war) and how the country ended up in this mind-boggling debt, the economy was razed, and finally how the survivors were so desperate that their service economy often revolved around prostitution and degradation. The section on child prostitution is just staggering because it indicates a kind of protracted development of the "tastes" of pedophiles run absolutely wild, given license to indulge. Other abhorrent things are discussed in the book, but that was really the lowest of the bunch. One of the Sin Cities series documentary also explores Berlin of that era, although through rose-tinted glasses. In any case, it's rather easy to see that after being ground into the muck like that, the people were ready to embrace almost anyone who promised something more clean than what they had been subjected to. And of course someone comes along, they always will. But we ended up doing something notionally similar after WWII: more grinding of the Germans (this time through division, sanctions, etc), who seem to be now indoctrinated with a spirit of self-abnegation, as if the Germans of today (the locally born sort, naturally) must offer themselves up as some kind of sacrifice to repent of the sins of previous generations. Why, to prevent fascism we must destroy ... almost everything? The nuclear family, the "oppression of children's sexuality," and so on. And so the whole thing is a perverse echo of the previous post-World War episode, wherein the sentiment is that almost everything must be unmade if only to prevent the mistakes of the past ... which hardly worked the last time around. And so academics make a lot of high-sounding noise about restructuring and sexuality and deconstructing things, nevermind Chesterson's fence. I'm starting to see ghastly echoes of this sort of thing as "MAP" ("minor-attracted persons," supplanting pedophile on the euphemism treadmill) becomes an acronym I see more and more often here in the U.S., and the usual academics begin coming up with bloodless jargon describing their activities. If I had to pick a new mortal sin, I would say that inculcating someone, or a group of people, with a kind of spirit of self-loathing, a wish to erase one's own existence to extirpate a grievance that did not originate with that person high on the list. Once you have done this, you can lead them into the basest acts; nothing is off the table. And so the almighty prevention of fascism, the new Highest Good, leads to this kind of behavior, approved and encouraged even by government and scholars, who will have largely retired or died by the time any kind of momentum for justice will gather.