Roderick Stackelberg > Quotes

“The dynamic described by Thomas Frank in his book What Is the Matter with Kansas? was at work in Nazi Germany. Frank analyzes the reasons why Republicans were so successful in getting middle—and lower-middle class people to vote against their own economic interests in the “red” states. This “cultural egalitarianism,” this mobilization of anti-elitist resentments, is not socialist; it`s fascist. It is anti-socialist.”
― Roderick Stackelberg, Into the Twenty-First Century: A Memoir, 1999 - 2012

“superior morality. The closest relative to Nazism today is the religious right, the kind of moral and religious absolutism, fanaticism, and fundamentalism that seeks to impose its ideals on society and suppress deviance (or, for that matter, diversity), by force if necessary. In the name of this kind of idealism the most heinous crimes and atrocities against deviants (today, for example, against gays, against Muslims, against the homeless, against illegal immigrants, against doctors who perform abortions) can be committed in good conscience. Membership in a “moral majority” and the true believer’s conviction of possessing absolute moral truth give the religious and nationalist right that sense of unshakeable righteousness that if given free rein is eventually bound to culminate in tyranny.”
― Roderick Stackelberg, Into the Twenty-First Century: A Memoir, 1999 - 2012

“All morality presupposes a universalizing principle. As Immanuel Kant put it, “Act as if the maxim through which you act were to become through your will a universal law.” The absence of this universalizing principle, the refusal to respect the principle, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” should have rendered Nazi policies recognizable as immoral from the start, just as we should for the same reason recognize US policies as immoral today. This Kantian principle is expressed in Martin Luther King’s famous maxim, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
― Roderick Stackelberg, Into the Twenty-First Century: A Memoir, 1999 - 2012

“Perhaps the greatest parallel is my recollection of childhood in Germany: The war was far away. Life was tranquil. One felt secure. There was an air of normalcy that one somehow knew didn’t exist anywhere else. We were a favored nation. We were the beneficiaries of all that bloodletting. We were the ones for whom it was being done. Even as a child I could sense that one didn’t have to feel guilty about our enjoyment of life, because that was precisely what gave all those military actions their purpose. The normalcy of the home front was the legitimation for the war. In carrying on as always we were playing our part in justifying the war. Nothing could happen to us because then the war would no longer make any sense. The unreality of it all—and the suffering it inflicted on so many people—did not come home until later.”
― Roderick Stackelberg, Into the Twenty-First Century: A Memoir, 1999 - 2012