Mon Feb 21, 2022 – 2:41 pm ESTMon Feb 21, 2022 – 1:47 pm EST
(American Thinker) – One of the most challenging obstacles working against ordinary citizens in the West is the self-satisfying presumption that Western institutions and philosophies are inherently immune from the rise of totalitarianism. This is an understandable blind spot. Their identities have been forged, to various degrees, in the great traditions of Enlightenment notions of liberty, free speech, and natural rights.
Surely the victors over communism, fascism, and Nazism cannot then fall victim to the madness of those same philosophies collapsing their systems from within! This “Us/Them” self-delusion has kept the citizenry from recognizing tyranny inside its gates.
It is good for people to take pride in the achievements and histories of their nation-states. It is natural for the inhabitants of countries founded in fights for freedom to assume that the costs of obtaining that freedom are behind them and not ahead.
And it is easy to self-define the victors of WWII as cultures standing firmly opposed to authoritarianism, to believe that nations not bound by the Iron Curtain would never choose to build their own and to assume that millions of graves and monuments
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