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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (9848)	10/16/1998 3:52:00 PM
From: mrknowitall	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

Michelle - re: WWII and moral decline. You are partially correct but the moral decline taking place in Germany well before the war was visible in its leadership. If you read about some (actually, many) of the men that accompanied Hitler along the march to Nazi power, you can see a significant amount of moral bankruptcy. Debauchery, slavery (forced labor), stashing away stolen art, bribery, blackmail, etc., were tools of the movement. It is interesting to note that other than a handful of truly demonic, self aggrandizing sycophants, most of the senior military officers loathed Hitler but found themselves in a situation they had no way out of short of suicide and permanent internment for their families. But the single most destructive (and I'm not trying to be amusing here) moral failure was the successful use of the utterly dishonest propaganda that demonized the Jewish race. The fact that the Nazi's were able to convince so many people in only a matter of a few years that another race of people were not really humans tells us a lot about how fundamental truth has to be for a moral civilization to survive. Mr. K.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (9848)	10/16/1998 5:30:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 67261

>>> To even imply that some guy in power, be it Hitler or whoever, had some sexual indiscretions (ala Clintons "decline in morals") and that led to WWII is just insulting, in the same way that these comparisons of Caligula to Clinton are. <<< Hitler himself may even have been impotent in the last few years, due to all the amphetamines he took to stay awake, because he directed the war and the economy personally. In any event, he had Eva Braun, period, as far as anybody can tell. He was also real real big on family values. I have read some of his stuff - sounds just like Falwell - good German women stay home and raise sons for the fatherland, they stay in the kitchen and please their husbands and go to Church. Then he would slander the Jews, and compare them to these good German Christians. Mein Kampf. Read it instead of the latest Steven King thriller for a chill sometime. It was an old game in German politics for the government to blame the Jews for whatever was going on. That went back at least to Bismark, and it was easy to do, because the tight knit Jewish community took care of their own and in fact had less of the starvation and other problems that afflicted Germany at large after WWI. They were in fact more educated and more prosperous and it was easy to stir up sentiment against them. A good parallel today is the rape and muder of thousands of the Chinese merchant class in Indonesia. not for the first time the general comparison has been made, of course. Most of the turpitude, though far from all, was in the beer-guzzling populist brown shirt ranks. The ya-hoo types. Hitler had the SS slaughter the leadership of the brownshirts after they had outlived their usefullness and he had a grip on the middle class and the elites. Before the war, Hitler and the American Bund were quite popular among American conservatives, who mainly voted against helping England in WWII. You know, stay at home, it's not our problem, etc, just like with Bosnia. Don't forget that even during the holocaust America was refusing Jewish refugees, actually forcing refugee ships to turn around, because of anti-Jewish sentiments. That was not a matter of sexual moral turpitude on anybody's part, although I would agree that ethnic prejudice is moral turpitude. The clan mentality of mankind is always waiting to come out, rational people must always fight it, and economic hard times always make some power brokers think about divide-and-conquer strategies. So it was for Rome, so it is for us. All we need is another 50,000 years of evolution and I think we'll have that one licked. Cheers, Chaz

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (9848)	10/16/1998 7:40:00 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

Balderdash. It is exactly the sort of acceptance of very dubious and morally repugnant behavior such as Clinton/Caligula exhibits by large segments of the population which is exactly analogous to the situation in Nazi Germany, etc. By the time everyone figured out acceptance of such conduct did make a difference, it was probably too late to turn the tide. Clinton is a symptom of a much larger problem in our country. Honesty, integrity, etc. count for little. Winning (most often measured by how much power or money an individual has by whatever means acquired) seems to have inordinate emphasis in our society. Clinton is not the cause of the moral decline in our country but he is very clearly a large warning signal about the direction we are headed in. JLA