Recent developments in our nation's capital are getting more and more alarming. Now Trump has taken over the military, telling officers at a meeting in the Pentagon, "If you don't agree with me, you can walk out--and lose your commission." In other words, his favorite line: "You're fired!" Anyone who knows what happened in Germany with Hitler in the 1930s should be alarmed at the parallels. Now the military that is supposed to defend our country will be turned against US citizens to "control internal terrorists"--in other words the people who oppose Trump. Our freedoms will be a thing of the past, while the military becomes Trump's new Gestapo. There's more. Now he's telling schools that depend on government funding that they have to teach his version of history and philosophy. If they don't, he promises to cut their funding. Again so parallel to Hitler's early moves in Germany. By the way, he's already cut funding to the independent news voices PBS and NPR. If he can find a way around the FCC, he'll start cutting networks, too. It could happen. Look what he's already done to the departments supposed to protect our health and welfare.
How has he gotten away with this? I see several reasons. First, he has some kind of power to make people believe anything he says, whether it's true or not. (Like what Revelation says the Anti-Christ will do, even to believers.) Next he's managed, through force, threats, and plain fear to cripple Congress, and get the Supreme Court in his pocket. The Balance of Powers our forefathers put in the Constitution is being dismantled. Intimidation has made this possible, and some of our forefathers foresaw this possibility.
The other reason I see for people's blindness is the misplaced belief that America is God's chosen people. We're not. The Bible never even hints at that. In fact a careful reading of Revelation doesn't show any hint of a world power that resembles the United States. Perhaps God's plan is to use Trump to take us out of the picture completely. After all, the main thing Hitler accomplished was the decline and fall of Germany. It would not be the power it is now without NATO and the Marshall Plan. Meanwhile, the rising powers appear to be Russia and China, and powers resembling them are seen in Revelation--"the King of the North" and the "Millions-man army of the East".
The most disturbing reason I see for so many people's ignorance of what is happening right under our noses is poor knowledge of history. History has been the most neglected and poorly-taught subject in too many of our schools. World history dwells on Egypt, Greece and Rome. US History starts in the "glory days" of the colonies and the American Revolution. If they're lucky they get up to the 1800s and the Civil War, or perhaps World War I. I had to read about World War II on my own. I was one of the strange ones who found history interesting. In seventh grade, I read every single book my junior high school library had on World War II. Including the ones about the Concentration Camps, and yes, "The Diary of Anne Frank."
So most Americans haven't a clue what went on in Germany between World War I and World War II. I find it so upsetting that the things imposed by the Allies on the losers of World War I merely set the stage for the next World War.
The average American doesn't know about how parallel the 2020s are to the Roaring 20s of the 1920s. And a few may have been told of what came next, the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the people who lived through that time are almost all dead and gone now. Memories are short and getting shorter. And the 1940s brought World War II. Most of the participants in that are dead and gone, too. I can't help but fear that this time the next World War won't wait until the 2040s. It may be just around the corner.
In conclusion, all I can say is our education system has been so concerned with the future, STEM--science, technology, electronics, and math--that history is totally neglected. And this is a tragedy, for as Mark Twain once said, "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And that's exactly what is happening now.
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