First, been busy selling our house (we have accepted an offer, but haven't closed, so there is always the chance the deal will fall through, which has kept me away from blogging. Apologies to my vast audience of readers.

Reading another book on the Holocaust (a subject one cannot study too much) and I'm struck again about the comparison between Germany then and the US now. Not so much between Trump and Hitler, or the GOP and the Nazis as (again) between how much and how little it took our respective voters to leap off a cliff. Germany, a nation with no democratic traditions, took a lost world war, multiple revolutions, hyper-inflation, depression, and international humiliation to turn to extremists (mostly on the Right but also the Left). The US, a country with hundreds of years of democratic tradition, took a severe but hardly historic economic downturn, some mediocre leadership, and the horror of a black man being succeeded by a woman to turn to extremists (again, mostly on the Right but also on the Left). American exceptionalism indeed.

Or perhaps not: the US and UK seemed locked together in mutual stupidity lately. Isolationism, inequality, a turn to the extremes.

Liberals (again, I use the term in the American sense) in both countries are fighting back, and perhaps we will prevail, but we shouldn't be here to begin with. And in both nations, the press, and especially but hardly only the Murdoch press, bears a large share of the blame. Still in the bad journalism contest the US wins pretty handily. The BBC isn't CNN or MSNBC, and the Guardian isn't the NY Times.

But again, there are intelligent voices. Here is one over there worth listening too that has obvious relevance here:

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/politics-needless-death/#

Go. Read.