Of course, if you weren’t already worried about The Patriot Act and the unprecedented way that the CIA is being treated as a bastion of rabble rousers, this will probably not give you the blue willies it gives the rest of us. I’m aware that there is a certain body of opinion that the word ‘fascist’ is a trademarked brand name referring to specific periods in specific European countries, but for the rest of us the question is, at what point does it become fair to characterize the US as a fascist state?
Well, it may make me a nutcase, but my answer is that it’s better to start making those comparisons too early rather than too late.
I wonder when esactly that Dr. Britt guy wrote the article - before or after the Bush administration began - before or after 9/11? The points are much more convincing if he was post-fitting his ‘data’ onto the current administration.
Truth is, we took up a collection and did stuff like this because we think it’s cute when you make Nazi comparisions. Also, whenever you do it further marginalizes you and we can move further toward the time when the two political parties in the U.S. are the Republicans and Former Democrats and the More Republicans Who Were Never Democrats and the angry left can hang out chanting in the park with the Commies where they belong.
With the exception of the one about the arts, and maybe the one about “religion” (though communist governments were “involved” in religion in the sense of officially quashing it), which of those 14 traits do you think wouldn’t be a pretty good description of North Korea, Ceausescu’s Romania, or the good old USSR.
Sounds like what you’ve got there is a dozen or so characteristics of any form of totalitarian rule, without regard to where along the left-right spectrum the totalitarian’s politics fall.
But then why characterize it as just a list of fascist totalitarian traits? I’m puzzled.
And on a completely-not-related note, who’s this Mr. Godwin I keep hearing about?
By the way, I find the billboard goofy and a waste of money, and I don’t particularly want any of our “leaders” getting too comfortable that they have some sort of mandate or unconditional popular support. But hell, maybe Clear Channel’s just sucking up to the new Administration to prevent regulation of their media consolidation and shady payola activities (if any . . . ha). In fact, that’s probably the most likely explanation – but it’s clear that neither GWB or the govt. put it up, which is the main point that distinguishes this from any non-laughable analogy ad Hitlerum.
Neither is really apt, though, and both are kind of insulting to people who were victims of real totalitarians (just as it would it be completely inappropriate to call John Kerry a gulag-loving Soviet).
Look, I have serious reservations about GWB, not least the war (which I opposed) and the Patriot Act (which I think does little to curb terror and invites governmental abuse).
But I don’t think any of us are going to be thrown into woodchippers or gassed to death in the next four years, and its unseemly to revel in the melodramatic fantasy that we are in danger of that just to accentuate political differences with the current , legitimately-elected regime.
Originally from Molly Ivins, by way of Anne Richards, in reference to Pat Buchanan’s “cultural war” speech at the Republican Convention some years past. “It sounded better in the original German”.
Texas women! Gotta love 'em. No, really. You got to!
Reeder, you better cool it on the Nazi allusions, considering that calling Sam a Nazi is what got you suspended in the first place. If you don’t start posting less hyperbolically in GD your next “suspension” may be permanent.
I’m just sitting here amusing my self by imagining the reaction if there had been a larger than life billboard proclaiming a grinning Bill Clinton to be “Our Leader.”
Somehow the image is off putting. Maybe we saw the beginnings of a cult of personality with President Reagan and the haste to start naming things after him. The idea of being confronted Big Brother like with monumental and nearly devotional portraits of Mr. Bush seems a little at odds with the republican (small R) ideal that the President of the United States is just one of many citizens who has happened to be entrusted with temporary power. I know about Mount Rushmore but hasten to point out that all those guys were dead before we started erecting Pharaoh images of them.
There is also triumphant note to this thing that is somewhat offensive. George Bush is our leader and you aren’t, neener, neener, neener. We’re Number One! Waive the big Styrofoam finger.
The day somebody wins an election and people just let it go, it will no longer be America.
Huerta88 wrote:
Salon.com recently characterized the recent overturn in cabinet positions as “Bush’s Night of the Long Knives.” I find this comparison somewhat galling. My own concerns are less shrill. As with the advent of the Department of Homeland Security, I wonder about people who so clumsily fail to avoid the easily avoidable surface signifiers of totalitarianism. What deeper lesssons did they fail to learn from the defeated and discredited “murderous ideologies of the 20th century”?
Well, he’s not. My dog Reeder is a radical. Myself, I’m on the conservative wing of the extreme left. Don’t you know the difference between a socialist and an anarcho-syndicalist?