I don't expect that hosting the Olympics has much of an influence with turning to totalitarianism. Seems an odd thing to remark.
Weird coincidence. I find it odd that history is repeating to such an extent. The president and his wife don't really have an influence either, but it's odd that FDR was the first disabled president and had a very active wife, and Obama's the first black one and has a very active wife.
At any given point in time, there's
quite a lot going on. More so the closer you get to the present, since you have more people to do things. A large enough number of things that we should expect that, picking two time periods under any criterion, they would
entirely by coincidence have a number of similarities unrelated to the criterion of choice. As exemplified above, twice.
Which is to say: a lot of things were true about the thirties, and a lot of things are true about nowadays. So, if you find some reason to bring to your attention these two times (for example, the analogies you have drawn between Germany and Russia), and then you look for other things, then by law of large numbers, you will find some things that are true now and some things with a certain similarity that were true then, regardless of whether this is at all related to the original thing that brought them to your attention. The broader you are willing to cast your net, as it were, the more similarities you will find (and "First X president, with very active wife, for some interesting values of X" is a broad net to cast)
Which is to say (again), that I don't think there's anything particularly interesting relationship going on between your observations regarding FDR and Obama, or the Olympics thing, and your observations regarding Germany and Russia. It's a coincidence, as coincidences are bound to pop up, if you consider something as big as the number of things that are true in a period of time.
Or, as put by someone much funnier than I am:
So to presume that your one-in-64-million chance thing is a miracle, is to significantly underestimate the total number of... things... that there are.
(relevant part at around 1:50)
