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This seg­ment fea­tures the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of a Ger­man uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor who lived through the rise of Hitler. Although opposed to Hitler, the pro­fes­sor offered no sub­stan­tive resis­tance because the grad­ual nature of the rise and entrench­ment of Nazism beguiled him and lulled him into a false sense of secu­ri­ty. “Every­thing” seemed the same, “every­one” seemed to be hap­py and “every­one” to whom he con­fid­ed his mis­giv­ings about the regime pooh-poohed him as “pes­simistic” or “neu­rot­ic.” The account of his expe­ri­ences is pre­sent­ed in com­par­i­son with the sit­u­a­tion in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca and the pas­sive, unsee­ing atti­tude of those Amer­i­cans who should be resist­ing the rise of fas­cism in the Unit­ed States.

In addi­tion to not­ing a devel­op­ing civic aware­ness that is (poten­tial­ly lethal­ly) cal­lous toward the dis­ad­van­taged, the broad­cast notes the dan­gers to Amer­i­can soci­ety pre­sent­ed by an eco­nom­ic col­lapse. A seem­ing dis­tant con­sid­er­a­tion when the pro­gram was record­ed in 1995, the issue does­n’t seem so remote in 2011.

Much of the sec­ond side of the pro­gram ana­lyzes the 1988 bomb­ing of Pan Am 103, brought down by a ter­ror­ist bomb over Locker­bie, Scot­land. Appar­ent­ly exe­cut­ed in part by ter­ror­ist, drug deal­er and weapons bro­ker Monz­er Al-Kas­sar, the bomb­ing may well have been a spin-off of a “con­trolled drug ship­ment” engi­neered by ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence.

The pro­gram notes evi­dence sug­gest­ing the com­plic­i­ty of Iran-Con­tra-con­nect­ed ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence.

(Record­ed in the fall of 1995.)