"A society shaped by collectivism, in which the only effective means of survival is the group or the state, leads many to feel that the ideas and the personal independence appropriate to an individualist era are no longer possible or relevant.
" A society shaped by irrationalism--a society dominated by incomprehensible crisis and inexplicable injustice and the constant eruptions of a senseless, nihilist culture--leads many to feel that the world cannot be understood, i.e., that their own mind is inadequate,
" and that they need guidance from some higher power. ... The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but in cannot withstand this kind of undermining indefinitely. ... Nonintellectual rebels cannot challenge the fundamental ideas they have been taught.
"All they can do by way of rebellion is to accept a series of false alternatives urged by their teachers, and then defiantly choose what they regard as the anti-establishment side. Thus the proliferation of groups that uphold anti-intellectuality as the only alternative
" to today's intellectuals ... Christian faith as the alternative to nihilism ... racism as the alternative to egalitarianism; sacrifice in behalf of a united nation, as the alternative to sacrifice in behalf of warring pressure groups.
"The type of mentality produced by these choices -- activist, religionist, racist, nationalist, authoritarian -- would be been familiar in the Weimar Republic.
"If it happens here, the primary responsibility will not belong to the people, who still reject such a mentality and are groping for a better kind of answer.
"The responsibility will belong to those who banished from the schools all knowledge of the original American system, and who would have finally convinced the nation that men's only choice is a choice of dictatorships.
"No one can predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed. No one can know what concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, would finally break the nation's spirit
" and system of government. No one can know whether such a breakdown would lead to an American dictatorship directly--or indirectly, after a civil war and/or a foreign war and/or a protracted Dark Ages of primitive roving gangs.
"What one can know is only this much: the end result of the country's present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural political signs for many years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular.
"The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism." ~ Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 1982
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