Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.... [W]hen experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.... This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.

George Santayana (1905)

Part of this famous quote was found enshrined on Jim Jones makeshift throne, surrounded by his 900 dead followers, when his entire congregation committed mass suicide. 

Now we are living in a time when people obviously not only do not remember history, they don't even know what is happening now. Instead, they worship fairy tales from their fearless leaders. And make no mistake about, what we are witnessing is nothing other than mass hallucination, mass murder, and ultimately, mass suicide. It could even be omnicide, the death of life itself, but let's not get carried away. (a little gallows humor lingo).

Perhaps the biggest most dangerous lie is when people tell themselves, " If that ever happened to me I wouldn't drink the kool-aid. I would protest, or run away." 

And Americans, of course, are always telling themselves that they would never, ever support a man like Adolf Hitler. 

Part of this last fairy tail is that you could always tell the Nazis from the regular working Joe by the large horns sticking out of their head and their green skin. The Germans are seen as somehow inherently evil or too stupid to tell a ruthless dictator from a savior, or if they could tell, they were too callous to care. Not like us.
 
These are the beliefs that make American feel different, superior. But they are racist. Ironically, the confidence that America could never tolerate the kind of racism found in Nazi Germany is largely based on.....racism. 

Exhibet A: thousands of innocent dead Iraqis. Killed because we had to kill them before they might kill some of us. And why are some possible American deaths more important than certain Iraq deaths ? What makes us so much better than them ? 
The difference, as history has shown again and again is an illusion. An illusion called racism. 

So what about George Bush is not like Adolf Hitler ? the importance he placed on "our lives" as apposed to "thiers" ? the lies ? the power hungry clique of fanatics ? The hours and hours of propaganda on the airwaves ? Or perhaps its the fact that he hasn't yet figure out how to get rid of people like me. 

It certainly isn't his capacity for inflicing death, both practically and emotionally. What is the difference between sending 3000 huge bombs into a city in a few hours and gassing trainloads of Jews ? I don't see it. 

But I'm not surprized. I learned along time ago that there is nothing inherent about the marginal difference between the freedoms we have and those the Iraqis or the Germans had. In the beginning, the Germans were free to speak too, probably more free than we are now. And there's no understanding, among the people who run our government that freedom is God's to give and ours to protect. They think freedom is something they allow you to have.