[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: We don’t know but we can look at other examples from history. A brutally pessimistic and also optimistic example is Nazi Germany. Germany broke irretrievably under Hitler. All social and moral norms were violated and a dictatorial criminal government took over and devastated the country. And there was no recourse to any democratic or ethical norms. It was broken as badly as a country has ever been broken in history. But once Germany was conquered, at great cost to its people; I read that 80% of all dwellings in Germany were destroyed. Germany at the beginning of World War II we had about 60 million people, I don’t know how many million people died during the World War II era.
Hitler slaughtered 11 million people in the death camps and in other mass murders but most of those people weren’t German; there were Poles, they were people from all over conquered Europe. So I don’t know, maybe three million or four million Germans died during the World War II era. I guess less than 10% but that’s still huge. 7% of a nation is still a huge percentage, and living in poverty for the next decade. It took a long time to rebuild Germany but after it was totally destroyed, Germany is one of the better countries on the planet now; economically successful, reasonably well governed, Germans are nice for the most part, you still have racist factions but there are a bunch of laws in Germany to keep that tamp down.
Germany is a success story but after being the worst country in the history of the world. People, I think imagine the United States being irretrievably broken. I think they imagine a fascist fake democracy being installed and continuing indefinitely. Once the fascist systems are in place, it’s hard to see how you can get them out if the fascists control voting which means they can install their own president and their own senators and Congress people and own Supreme Court; it’s hard to see how that is reversed.
I was surprised, I thought of Mussolini as a World War II dictator. Fucking Mussolini took control of Italy, I think in 1923. So, even before World War II, Mussolini had a fascist government in place for 16 years and nobody was able to dislodge it. And the life of the country went on. The ‘20s and the ‘30s were pretty good for Italian design. They did a lot of good stuff and the ‘20s were great for German Cinema as was Germany was sinking into hyperinflation and increasing fascism. Hitler took over in I think ’33, so you had fascism under Hitler, increasing fascism and crackdowns on Jews etc for six years before World War II began. And so I think when people think of an irretrievably broken United States, they think of fucked up countries that keep going in their fucked up-ness without some breaking point that leads to reconstitution of the country.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 