"History is a vast early warning system"

I try hard not to fall for conspiracy theories. Series of events which lend themselves to be woven into such theories are fairly common. Like an optical illusion picture which looks like one thing viewed one way, a squinting of the eye brings something else entirely into view. Sometimes though, a series of events, conversations or coincidental reading of something quite unrelated to the original topic, link up and one thinks...."HUH?....Hmmm!" Synchronicity - or something.

This happened to me a few days ago. Following the debt ceiling debacle in Washington DC, reading some comments on an article at at Common Dreams, I came across this from commenter "Diana" (I've added dates):

The SuperCongress is the most frightening act of governance I've heard about in my lifetime, the final phase of the coup (coup d'etat.)
Phase I could be any number of timepoints, but starting with contemporary politics, I'd say it is:

Phase I = the Supremes giving the presidency to Bush (2000)

Phase II = 9/11 (2001)

Phase III = Neoliberals/corportists install the perfect trojan horse obama into office (2008)

Phase IV = Citizens' United (2010)

Phase Out = SuperCongress (2011)

I responded:
"Diana ~ The Super Congress is the thing that started loud alarm bells ringing for me too. I hadn't yet linked it to the progression you suggest, but it all fits; and one doesn't need to be a conspiracy theorist to see it."
(This "super congress" was mentioned in Wednesday 3 August's post.)

A little later, while looking for something quite unrelated, among entries on a page of quotes, I saw this:

"What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. ...Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . (was) worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.” -- Excerpted From Milton Mayer’s book, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

I felt a cold shiver. I haven't read that book, a study of the lives of a group of ordinary Germans under the Third Reich, but intend to seek it out.

Deciding to investigate any astrological similarities between Germany in the years around 1933 and USA in the 21st century, Google led me to an archived post (Feb. 2011) of fellow astrology blogger Jude Cowell at Stars Over Washington Jude has set out the situation better than I ever could:
I'll copy a few lines here, but a reading of the post in full is necessary to get the whole astro picture:

The spiritual emphasis of the events and social conditions of 1933 resonate with those of 2011 through the sharing of a generational Uranus/Pluto square (to be discussed more fully below) and which undergirds the upheavals and protests now occurring throughout the world, and made easier to organize with the tech aid of Twitter and FaceBook.............................................................

As a message to us in 2011, 1933's Uranus to Neptune (in Aries, sign of uprisings, riots, strikes, protests, and pioneers - tr Uranus approaches the Aries Point as I type) transit typifies an era when a spiritually-inspired aspiration to fulfill high ideals is needed by the people, yet the freedom to express social, political, religious, artistic, musical, divine, and/or other ideals is suppressed, potentially disappearing altogether.

Neptunian circumstances of loss and grief were a long time coming (then as now) as traditions and bonds of family, church, communal sense/commonwealth, marriage, partnership, etc, were slowly eroded making them easier to topple (then as now; Hitler's desire to establish a worldwide 'new world order' shows him as the military arm of a long-standing movement toward global fascism and one-world-government - as you have noticed, they're baa-a-a-ack... - never having really gone away.)

I'm not sure how to wrap this up, except to finish, as I started, with the heading:

History is a vast early warning system.
~Norman Cousins