At the end of World War I, the Kaiser abdicated and loser Germany became a republic, known as the "Weimar Republic." Infamously, it morphed into Hitler's Germany through a series of steps which are well-documented and widely studied.
One of the major steps in Weimar's disintegration was the formation of violent street gangs on the right and left, Adolf Hitler's Nazi brown shirts vs. "Red" Rosa Luxemburg's Communist bully boys. These fought pitched battles in the streets.
We now see armed, angry street-fighting groups emerging on left and right in the U.S. It is time for all sane people to worry that, failing to remember history, we are doomed to repeat it. We really don't want to go down that road.
