Chris Crawford
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Wow! I can’t believe that such an idiotic thesis is being presented in such an intellectually refined site as Medium. This essay gets just about everything backwards.

The fundamental error is the extremely short-term style of thinking that seems to be growing in America. I have the impression that people are less and less aware of the lessons of the past.

Yes, anger is powerful. Anger wins elections. On a time scale of, say, less than five years, anger can make good things happen. But over a longer time scale, anger is always disastrous.

The primary example of this arises from a man few Americans seem to know much about. His name was Adolph Hitler; he was a German politician, and about all that Americans seem to know is that he was a bad person who started World War II and killed Jews.

The Germans lost World War I and were severely punished in the Treaty of Versailles after that war. They suffered much from that treaty and believed that their defeat was the result of some kind of betrayal. Then the Depression hit and their anger grew even greater. Mr. Hitler exploited that anger. He stoked it, declared it to be righteous, and promised to apply it. German anger propelled him to the summit of political power, and he set to work turning Germany into a totalitarian war machine. Germany recovered from the Depression and began invading neighboring weak countries. German anger bestowed upon Germany a series of brilliant successes; right up into 1941, anger had been proven to be a gigantic dynamo of power. But then the chickens came home to roost. Germany was defeated; millions of Germans died; the country was laid waste and divided among its four conquerors. Anger proved to be disastrous for Germany.

There are lots of other examples of popular anger producing a momentary flash of brilliance followed by disaster: the French Revolution; the South’s angry response to the election of Abraham Lincoln; the many, many peasant revolts in Europe during the first half of the last millennium; the Cultural Revolution in China.

What’s especially surprising is the fact that this essay fails to comprehend what’s right in front of our noses: Mr. Trump. Here is a politician whose entire strategy is founded on the exploitation of anger. Mr. Trump deliberately stokes anger; roughly half of his tweets express anger at somebody or something. He has brought out from underneath the rocks the ugliest manifestations of anger: bigotry, racism, sexism. Hate crimes have exploded in frequency under Mr. Trump. The country is roiling with anger; we can no longer rule out the prospect of political violence on a large scale. Such violence would have been unthinkable just five years ago; nowadays there are people calling for it right here on Medium.

I note that the author appears to be a young man. I do not know anything about this person other than his general age, his gender, and this essay. However, I can safely point out that young men, in general, have lots of anger and express that anger frequently. Young men are responsible for most violent crime. Young men often project their anger onto others. Young men are the ones who turn a peaceful protest violent. In all the photos of protesters fighting police, it’s ALWAYS young men throwing rocks. Young males are the most dangerous predators on the planet. They kill for fun. Their political advice must be considered with this in mind.

Here’s what political anger looks like:

    Chris Crawford

    Written by

    Master of Science, Physics, 1975. Computer Game Designer. Interactive Storytelling. www.erasmatazz.com

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