Historical memory is short: it was the horror of total war and the unimaginable crimes of crazed totalitarian or authoritarian ideologies that made the post-war West so selfsecure in its liberalism and social market economy. Reason and progress seemed very inviting after the feverish nightmare. But all nightmares are far gone now: the world has been made secure for the free movement of capital, for consumerism, for materialism. Liberalism is at most half-understood and thus half-heartedly defended by the technocratic elites adviced (or is it instructed) by the financial sector while increasingly large sections of population is left out, discarded.
But it wasn't capital and materialism that was to be secured after the Second World War, it was the people - naturally often helped by those things, as tools for safety and progress, securely harnessed to the welfare state. And liberalism itself, the hollow ideology: made for discussion, polyphony, tolerance and rational scepticism, made for no particular end - safe to protect the people from the fanatism and hatred of extreme ideologies that our human nature is so easily prone to.
And now we rehearse the 1930's again.
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