In 1982, Dr. Leonard Peikoff published âThe Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America,â which sounded a warning that the United States was moving âas Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same philosophical reason.â That direction toward which we are moving is fascismâthe same poisoned ethos that drove Germany beyond the brink. Most Americans are haughtily unaware or diffident about the reality that what happened in Nazi Germany is happening here. To that point, Peikoff cites a number of dangerous trends: political parties devoid of principles or direction, each demanding still more controls; an anti-intellectual educational system that . . . creates students who can't read or write . . . students brainwashed into the feeling that their minds are helpless and they must adapt to âsociety,â that there is no absolute truth and that morality is whatever society says it is; a pervasive atmosphere of decadence, moral bankruptcy, and nihilist art.â
In the last two decades other warning signs have appearedâworship of the warrior; belief in the primacy of The Stateâboth attitudes deeply entrenched by terrorism or the threat of terrorism from without and within. And how much was executed with state complicity?
But beyond that possibility, Peikoff maintains that the deepest roots of German Nazism lay ânot in existential crises, but in ideasânot in Germany's military defeat in World War I or the economic disasters of the Weimar Republic that followedâbut in the philosophy that dominated pre-Nazi Germany.â Peikoff further contends that German Nazism âwas the inevitable climax of a centuries-long philosophic development, preaching three fundamental ideas: the worship of unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice [warrior worship] and the elevation of society or the state above the individual [statism].â
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