The Gary Null Blog

SALON.COM   Tuesday, Dec 13, 2011

Gingrich's bizarre obsession with civilization-ending threats

By Justin Elliott

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/13/apocalypse_newt/

Newt Gingrich has changed a lot of positions over his many years in public life, but there are a few things about his worldview that are consistent. One is an obsession with apocalyptic or civilization-ending threats, often paired with the idea that Gingrich himself is alone (or nearly so) in recognizing the scale of the danger and in being equipped to deal with it.

My favorite example of this genre of Gingrich studies is a 1994 interview in which he declared “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”

That line became an instant classic for Newt aficionados; less well-known is that Gingrich elaborated on the theme — at length — in the same interview, conducted by the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“I see evil around me every day,” he says. He cites the widespread slaughter from Bosnia to Washington D.C. The German tourist killed by what Gingrich calls “a savage” from the urban jungle of Miami.

“We are at the edge of losing this civilization,” he says. “You get two more generations of what we had for the last 20 years and we’re in desperate trouble …