Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 9, 2020:
An Open Letter to the Most Honorable President-Elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Dear President-Elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr.:
Congratulations of winning enough electoral college votes to decisively defeat President Donald ("Tweety") Trump, the Republican incumbent! Congratulations as well on the record-setting popular vote you received!
As a practicing Roman Catholic, you believe in the communion of saints. I imagine that the saints from your family and from the Democratic Party in heaven are smiling down on you as you celebrate your victory and prepare to take over as the President of the United States of America after your inauguration in January 2021.
As you prepare for your Presidency, I want to urge you to take to heart two of Judaism's life-changing ideas that a new Jewish saint in heaven inscribed when he wrote his second new 2020 book here on earth, the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) - may his name be a blessing, as the Jews say. His second new 2020 book is titled Judaism's [Fifty-Six] Life-Changing Ideas: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible. Here are the two life-changing ideas that I want to urge you to take to heart:
(1) Life-Changing Idea #18: "If you seek to change anyone's behavior, you have to enter into their mindset, and then say the word or do the deed that speaks to their emotions, not yours" (page 95).
(2) Life-Changing Idea #53: "If you want to change their lives, speak to people's feelings, not just to their minds" (page 302).
Because Rabbi Sacks' fifty-six Life-Changing Ideas obvious speak to people's minds, I will leave it up to you to judge whether or not he also practices what he preaches in Life-Changing Idea #53 throughout his second new 2020 book. However, in my estimate, he does.
Now, because President Tweety Trump has been such a divisive person, to say the least, he has aroused serious concern among many people - including no doubt many people who voted for you. Certain concerned critics have even gone so far as to say that he is a fascist. But I cannot imagine that you would ever call him a fascist publicly.
For the record, I want to say here that I consider Adolf Hitler to be one of the greatest monsters of the twentieth century - and I consider the Holocaust to be the greatest monstrosity in Western culture history.
Nevertheless, I would draw your attention to Columbia's Robert O. Paxton's accessible 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism. In it, he constructs what he refers to as his anatomy of fascism by deducing from the actions of so-called fascists what he refers to as "mobilizing passions," which he lists as bullet points (but I'll number here) as follows on pages 219-220:
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