You know who else liked them?
The Nordic landscape cries out to be traversed by rails over which express trains can speed. It is a characteristic of all Nordic vehicles to increase their speed. Ever-increasing velocity is a built-in characteristic of the rails themselves, the rails by which, in the Nordic experience of the world, the whole world is penetrated. Rails that are already in existence and those that must constantly be constructed for ever newer, ever faster vehicles on which men who experience the world Nordically may strive toward ever new goals. The Nordic soul experiences its world as a structure made up of countless thoroughfares — those already at hand and those still to be created — on land, on water, in the air, and in the stratosphere. It races like a fever through all segments of the Nordic community, a fever of speed which, infectiously, reaches out far beyond the world of the north and attacks souls who are not Nordic and for whom, at bottom, such action is contrary to their style and senseless.
Take a guess. Of course, he was militantly opposed to smoking and a vegetarian, too.
[Via Althouse]
I enjoy a good workout on my Nordic Track, too…
Let me guess. It’s either Hirohito or the guy who build the Autobann. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Walt Disney.
The only prominent public figure I can think of during the last couple of centuries that really didn’t appreciate railroads was Charles Dickens, and he actually got involved in a train wreck late in his life which probably provides some retrospective justification …
Hitler wrote about the nationalized rail in Mein Kampf:
The persistent war against German ‘heavy industries’ was the visible start of the internationalization of German economic life as envisaged by the Marxists. This, however, could only be brought to a successful conclusion by the victory which Marxism was able to gain in the Revolution. As I write these words, success is attending the general attack on the German State Railways which are now to be turned over to international capitalists. Thus ‘International Social-Democracy’ has once again attained one of its main objectives.
…
What other country in the world possessed a better-organized and administered business enterprise than the German State Railways, for instance? It was left to the [German Revolution of 1918–19] to destroy this standard organization, until a time came when it was taken out of the hands of the nation and socialized, in the sense which the founders of the Republic had given to that word, namely, making it subservient to the international stock-exchange capitalists, who were the wire-pullers of the German Revolution.
Of course, the “international capitalists” were the Joooooos.
Didn’t Ayn Rand also like high-speed rail?
If high-speed rail is at one end of the spectrum, what is at the other end? I posit that is would be home-built aircraft. The state tends to dislike these types of vehicles: lots of freedom and speed for individuals, little or no control over where and when they go, etc., could be “dangerous”.
Its going to be difficult for state institutions to deal with the coming age of homebuilt aerospace planes: plasmawind.typepad.com/files/eaa-pres.ppt
That’s a pretty good segue, john. If only more spammers could figure out how to do that. It is worth noting that home-built aircraft have been built ever since the first successful airplane. So I’d have to push back the start date of the Age of the Home-built Aircraft to the beginning of the 20th Century.
It’s worth noting that Clauss (the Nazi propagandist/idologue quoted above), like other HSR enthusiasts, rode on trains paid for by OPM (the nordic countries all having nationalized rail lines by the time he would have been riding on them). That is, he got a great train experience on another’s dime.