The pretenders to supreme authority in post-WWI Europe – the Bolsheviks and the Nazis – came, in combination, to define the entire political universe and all of the political discourse in 1930s Europe.
Between the wars one was either anti-Bolshevik or anti-Nazi or anti-both. This negative political reality resulted in a civilization where one's entire ideology reduced either to the defense of the status-quo or to a subscription to one or another of an extremist political ideology.
When the sacred mitigating institutions are swept away, with them go the possibility of temperate political discourse and stances.
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