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Are you a legacy Democrat, Democratic Socialist, Republican, libertarian, Marxist, progressive, conservative, fascist, all or none or a combination of them? Where do you fit in?
Do you occupy an ideological niche? Are you mainline, a mutation, an outlier, an anomaly, a non-dogmatic utopian, a rainy-day or fair-weather sectarian, a zealous guerilla, a mercenary demagogue or an unclassifiable hodgepodge?
Have you a blank slate or a closed mind, or are you an opportunistic believer in whatever is cool du jour?
Is your integrity solid or liquid? What red lines will it not allow you to cross, regardless of your self-interest and the lessons of history?
Reflect at your own peril and embrace the danger. Is it unthinkable that you have much in common with the sworn mortal enemies of your core beliefs?
Read the following direct quotations. Their authors are among the murderous villains of history. They are polar opposites on the ideological spectrum, yet they are not fundamentally contradictory.
All tyrants are ideologically compatible. They converge in an indictment of the human equation. There is no escape.
No doubt none of these tyrants are your ideological bunk mates, kindred spirits or spiritual mentors. Their loathsomeness will resonate until the end of time.
Yet these devils had insights that are as irrefutable as they are cringeworthy. And there's no guarantee that cynics and bigots who hold them would be rebuffed at the ballot box of a modern republic, even sans tattoo.
"Naturally, the common people don't want war. ... But it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship. ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo and head of the Nazi Luftwaffe in World War II.
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin, Soviet dictator, who deliberately used famine and repression to kill an estimated 20 million people.
"A potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of life for the great majority of its citizens." - Mao Zedong, whose "Great Leap Forward" and Cultural Revolution took a toll estimated between 15 and 80 million lives
"...consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one sentence: it is right to rebel." - Ibid
"Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent." - Ibid
"The receptivity of the masses is very limited. Their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. Therefore, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last members of the public understand." - Adolf Hitler, the sole immediate cause of World War II, and the Holocaust.
"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth." - Ibid
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." - Ibid
It's said that "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Truer is that the further apart the rival totalitarian "isms" are, the closer the embrace of their systems' mutual techniques of oppression.
As current events unfold, we see continual replication by lesser autocrats around the world. The names, titles and regimes have changed, but the old tricks of dictators are still working and are operational across political structures.
They still conjure false enemies, corrupt aspirations and raise specters of global menaces. They still try to jumpstart nationalism by visualizing "existential threats," fostering balkanization, exploiting cultural differences or seeding rivalries among them, capitalizing on the absence of civics training and cultivating mass ignorance that acts like an ozone layer to repel enlightenment and conciliation.
When the above quotations are analyzed, point by point, it is questionable whether we have learned a lot from history, especially its dark sides. Those lessons do not teach us how to root out the harshest instincts that wanton human nature lends to governance.
Instead, they coach how to consolidate them in models of political power.
Just as it's true that in this life, it's a matter of pure chance whether righteousness is rewarded, and depravity is punished (or even attracts any interest), it's also true that some of the most astute perceptions about psychology come from supremely malevolent leaders.
They have found a way to disable our subconscious paths of resistance and mute our cries for help.
They have also attracted many two-bit know-nothings in academia, legislative chambers and social media, who, with reckless abandon, compare current public figures to the worst slave drivers and flame throwers of history.
The masses are all susceptible to miseducation.
There are no "supreme leaders" on the scale of Hitler, Stalin or Mao today. Until quite recently it seemed that they had left no intellectual heirs. No party platform, political endorsements of campaign literature allowed berth to any suggestion to the contrary. But tyrants are auditing the landscape.
When World War II ended, catchwords, tag lines and tropes invoking nostalgia for genocide were unthinkable.
Times have changed. Now they're pervasive.
There has not yet been a restoration, but there is a reawakening of the capacity, and in some cases the readiness, of much of the world to advocate, or rationalize, stay neutral or shrug off a future holocaust.
There will be new targets. Some will remain the same, perhaps including those of us with a traumatized ancestral memory. In a warped quest for inclusion, they may form a bond with their persecutors, even quoting their libels, in the hope of being spared their wrath and their rockets.
Is there such a thing as a global conscience? Is the world's moral compass no more expedient or worthwhile than our tonsils, appendix or coccyx?
The ghosts of Hitler, Stalin and Mao are in the Green Room, waiting to be called to the set.
"Just one more thing," as detective Columbo used to say.
Who said, "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it and will even come to believe it yourself. It will become the truth"?
That was the Nazi Minister of Popular Enlightenment Joseph Goebbels. What he postulated about lies applies also to the mal-embrace of definitions, such "social justice," which we preponderantly hold as an ideal.
Ever heard of Charles Coughlin, the priest? He was a wildly popular U.S. radio broadcaster of the 1930s, who received around 400,000 letters every week, and had a listenership of approximately 40 million, which is double Johnny Carson's best ratings decades later.
He not only gave aid and comfort, but practically showered Adolf Hitler with adoration for their mutual rabid and relentless Jew-hatred. Until his death at 88 in 1979, he never recanted or retracted, and he was never formally condemned by the hierarchy of his Church, which is nonetheless not an indictment for complicity or approval.
At the peak of his notoriety, Coughlin supported a militialike group that sought to boycott Jews and divest them of influence in every area of society. He also founded a newspaper called "Social Justice" which had an estimated circulation of 250,000, was sold on the streets of New York City and elsewhere and was printed by Morris Steinberg, who some critics view as a forerunner of what is, by some individuals, "the self-hatred" phenomenon of the present.
No band of brothers and sisters has a monopoly on truth and lies or on the definitions of the ideas that drive us to and from innocence and guilt.
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