Attacking the Whole Body

This writer is not the first to observe that a society or country consists of three crucial parts: Head, Heart and Hands. The Head is the government. The Heart includes Education, Religion, Societal Norms, Beliefs and Compacts. The Hands are the working people who produce goods, services and wealth, the police and soldiers who work to protect the population and the land, plus the financial sector. All three elements are critical to the country’s health. Damage to any of them is a crippling injury; damage to two or all three could destroy the country, if left uncorrected.

Germany in the 1930s is a good example of what happens when all three elements suffer severe and deliberate damage. In the late 19^th century Germany was an emerging powerhouse of industry and military capability – a union of twenty-six states governed by a parliamentary system, with an emperor as head of state. The states (Prussia, Bavaria, Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, the Rhineland, etc.) were formerly separate mini-countries, but the big dog was Prussia, whose military prowess led the unified nation’s politics and foreign affairs. That capability produced Prussia’s victory over France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and led to formation of the Second Reich (empire), with Prussian King Wilhelm as its first Kaiser (emperor) and Otto von Bismarck as its wise and experienced chancellor.

The notable military success over France capped a series of small military adventures which had added to Germany’s territory and convinced its leaders that small wars could be successfully waged without overtaxing or endangering the nation. This dicey conclusion ultimately led to the mother of all miscalculations, when German military leaders got their empire involved in a ruinous two-front war against the Russian Empire in the east, and France and the British Empire in the west. Ultimately, the Central Powers – i.e. the German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria – fought an alliance of twenty-seven nations.

Four bloody years of destructive modern warfare cost the world some 20 million deaths, another 20 million wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Germany came close to prevailing on several occasions, but soldier-fatigue, civilian frustration, starvation, and financial ruin finally forced its leaders to request an armistice. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires were broken up, and the maps of Europe and the Middle East were radically changed. For Germany, it was a disaster of the first order.

The post-war period was disruptive and unsettling for Germany’s government, society, education and security. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles limited the once-powerful nation’s Wehrmacht to 100,000 soldiers, no navy and a very limited air force. A weak, inexperienced central government known as the Weimar Republic – ostensibly formed along democratic lines – attempted to hold the country together. But staggering inflation – engineered by financial interests to trivialize the war-reparations debt assessed by the Treaty – crashed the Deutschmark down to 1 trillion marks to the US dollar by the end of 1923. All holders of German savings were ruined. Citizens brought wheelbarrows full of currency to buy a loaf of bread, while rich Junker landowners paid off their million-mark mortgages with postage stamps.

On the political scene, socio-political groups like Ernst R hm’s Sturm Abteilung (SA) – a gang of a million-plus brown-shirted thugs – and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (i.e., the Nazis), led by Adolph Hitler,emerged to stir the political pot. Their message to the German populace – particularly to the millions of dispirited veterans of the Great War – was that they were not defeated in the field, but had been “stabbed in the back” by traitorous Jewish financiers. In late 1923 the SA and the Nazis launched a joint attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government, with the long-term objective of taking control of the entire Weimar Republik. The attempt was defeated by police and military forces, however. Hitler was tried for treason and sentenced to six months in prison by a sympathetic judiciary. He spent his prison-time dictating his magnum opus, Mein Kampf, and emerged refreshed and full of big plans.

The Nazis worked under the radar for the balance of the 1920s, while the country settled down to an uneasy peace under the Weimar government. But Hitler and his party were re-awakened to new influence when the worldwide Great Depression struck in 1929 – idling millions of workers and causing voters to look for a savior who would put the train back on the rails. The Nazis became significant players in the German parliament – i.e., the Reichstag – and eventually won enough seats for President Paul von Hindenburg to name Adolph Hitler as chancellor in 1933.

Thus began the Nazis’ long march to disaster, which included:

• Antisemite laws;
• The beginning of rearmament;
• Reoccupation of the Rhineland;
• Establishment of concentration camps – which later became death camps;
• Krystalnacht – the 1938 national temper-tantrum which destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and sent 30,000 Jews to the prison-camps;
• Annexation of Austria;
• Partition and eventual absorption of Czechoslovakia;
• Conquest of Poland and most of Europe;
• Blitz on England which killed 40,000 citizens and wrecked much of London;
• Destruction of large areas of the Soviet Union; killing of 20 million of its citizens;
• Assembly-line murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables”;
• A 6-year world war which killed 55 million people;
• Complete defeat and partition of Germany;
• The Nuremburg trials and executions;
• Long-term occupation by foreign armed forces;
• Decades-long pursuit of former Nazis, including Israeli agents’ 1961 capture of Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, culminating in his trial and execution.

Thus the great nation of Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Baron von Steuben, Hindenburg, and other notable patriots through several centuries was brought to complete destruction – first by internal forces which mortally damaged its Head, Heart and Hands until it was no longer recognizable; then, finally, by external forces which responded to Germany’s wicked deeds, world-wide.

I rehearse the history of this 20^th century tragedy – hardly known now by younger generations – because it illustrates what can happen when a nation stops paying attention to what is being done to its three constituent parts. You don’t have to be a Ph-doctor in history or sociology to see that the destructive work is already well under way on the “body” of our own great nation.

Head. Can anyone fail to see how the nation’s government arms are under attack, and in some cases have become unrecognizable? Consider the following:

• What happened to our unwritten governmental “compact” by which political parties give elected officials of either party the space to govern without undue opposition?
• How did it become acceptable for agencies of our government to wage “lawfare” on candidates and elected officials of a political party or faction that is disfavored by employees of those agencies?
• When did it become acceptable for a sitting president’s FBI to raid the home of a former president of the opposition party and charge him with mishandling secret documents?
• What’s the deal with local and district judges blocking presidential executive orders with edicts that those judges expect to be obeyed, nationwide? If you want to stand the country’s entire system of government on its head, you could hardly do it better than to stay on this track.
• A previous administration’s willingness to allow millions of illegal immigrants to enter the country and disrupt local governments and elections is another damaging aspect that will be difficult to correct with one of the political parties opposing it.
• Orchestrated riots opposing the enforcement of national immigration laws is a finishing touch on the poisonous brew being poured down our throats by our enemies, foreign and domestic.

Heart. Numerous writers have chronicled these matters in more fulsome form than we can do here. I’ll simply list the attacks on the nation’s Heart which are obviously occurring;

• Attacks – riots, really – on good order in universities;
• Attacks on Christians and Jews, including outright murder;
• Insertion of sexual perversions into Judeo-Christian doctrines and practice;
• Pronouncing Scripture “outdated,” and abandoning it as foundational by some Christian denominations;
• National campaign to “kill all the Jews.”
• Protestant denominations championing abortion and transgender mutilation of children;
• Large-scale Chinese funding of American higher education, with Chinese agents gaining influence and control over universities’ research.

Hands. Damaging initiatives including the following:

• Mass nationwide movements to defund the police;
• Attacks on ICE agents trying to enforce immigration laws;
• Impose diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) protocols which degrade the performance and effectiveness of police, armed forces, government agencies and civilian workforces;
• Attacks on urban centers of business with riots and property damage;
• Continued uncontrolled federal deficit-spending to generate deliberate inflation which produces high interest rates that hurt housing and other industries.

Right now we’re in a real mess. The jury is still out on whether it can be corrected, but the first meaningful step in doing so will be realization by The People of what’s happening. If enough of us care about the country, the Titanic can be turned before it hits the iceberg of fiscal and social ruin. Otherwise, man the lifeboats.