Answer: The same thing that brings everyone down – believing a lie. For leaders it is believing a lie about oneself. The Big Lie.
Hitler:
He believed the Aryan (white) race to be superior and based his war plan on that assumption. Seeing all-white England, he fully expected the Aryan message to eventually cause the Brits to bend to his superior will. He even entitled his book Mein Kampf, German for My Will, or my struggle or fight. Looking back you must wonder how an entire nation could subscribe to the fight of a single person, but they became caught up in someone else’s war and that brought the whole nation down.
Hitler was so convinced of Aryan superiority that when the Germans had a chance to defeat Britain they waffled, and the little boats were able to save the British troops crossing the English Channel at night at the Battle of Dunkirk. Hitler believed this enough to tell his military men to be cautious. Germany could have wiped out England very quickly otherwise. Hitler believed his own theories.
The American Civil War:
Cautious tolerance for slavery was recognized in the US Constitution from the early years of the colonies but tolerated is all it was. Most men realized that slavery had to go; they just didn’t know how to pull it off.
Jefferson altered the Declaration of Independence
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 25, changed the original words “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” because he feared that human beings, slaves, would be considered property in perpetuity and the Constitution was intended to be a document for the ages. He was right as it turned out.
States Rights was the Known Grievance
The war that ensued 100 years later brought the South to the table because they believed in “states rights.” The Constitution had been originally signed by all the states with that understanding – the states rule over federal law. The Constitution for the Confederate States included the provision that slaves would as usual be treated as a 3/4ths of a person. This violated some laws in other states. So the issue of the Civil War was not actually states rights but slavery. If the Southern states had given slaves the right to be a whole person, and free, the Civil War would not have any moral standing. So the flaw in the war ultimately was the issue of slavery.
While Yahweh does recognize states rights, He does not recognize “states wrongs.” It is a violation of divine law to consider any human being less than 100% human. Yahweh’s law always trumps man’s laws, in the end, even if we are not cognizant of it at the time.
The Emancipation Proclamation energized the North
The civil war ground on year after wretched year until in 1963 the Emancipation Proclamation document became law, and the slaves were freed. The war then gained some steam and was won a year and a few months later.
Yankees, that is the Northerners, were lukewarm about fighting the war over simple property laws, but when it became a matter of human life, they were more interested in winning. Also some much better Northern generals were given the leadership. The big lie the South believed was that their states rights were more important than human rights.
We have a new lie worldwide – that socialism is the best answer to our political problems. A thorough review of history will disabuse people of that notion, but history is not well taught these days.
Belief in socialism is the hidden iceberg that can take the ship of state down with it, as it has already done. The Titanic architects said it was indestructible. The mighty ship didn’t not complete one entire journey.
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