Constitutionalism, Nationalism & the Dismantling of Democracy, Part Four.

The cause of democracy & the pursuit of equality are often used as political cover by ruthless Western governments as they implement anti-democratic policies against both their own people and those of other, poorer nations, that seek to maintain and sustain an unequal balance that keeps power in the hands of elites.

Peter Winn-Brown
22 min readSep 16, 2024
Perhaps one of the most famous of Nazi era photographs. The one man, later identified as August Landmesser, who would not join the masses of shipyard workers in Hamburg (1936) in their Nazi salute to Adolf Hitler. Perhaps foreseeing the demise of German democracy, or perhaps even the wartime horrors and the collapse of Germany ahead; no one knows, but this brave man was alone in his resistance.

‘More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States, a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion the world’s first democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage…/…they took pre-existing notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom, and who was in between. There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe with rungs inside that designation, the English protestants at the very top with their guns and resources would ultimately prevail…

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Peter Winn-Brown

The past can illuminate the present if we shine the light of inquiry openly, truthfully, with attention to detail & care for the salient facts.