[Moderator Hat ON]
That’s quite enough namecalling, LonesomePolecat.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
cough Joe McCarthy cough
Joe McCarthy is dead, tracer. This is 2003.
Regards,
Shodan
But his spirit is alove and well and living in talk radio.
Geez, Evil Captor, just because you guys can’t branch out beyond NPR, don’t complain to me.
Regards,
Shodan
Instead of worrying about what will happen, let’s take a look at what actuall DID happen in the past. US history shows that we are not in danger of becoming Germany 1935.
Germans, of course, thought the same thing about themselves. They were a highly refined, cultured people. Lovers of Beethoven, opera, a culture deeply respectful of professors and all fields of intellectual thought. Yet they descended into pure hell within one short decade.
Humiliated in world war I, the economy shattered by unemployment and inflation–so they wanted a strong leader and raised their arms in salute.“Heil Hitler” was on the lips of everyone, and embedded in the hearts of many. So who did they elect? --not just a leader, but a Fuhrer, a guru to follow blindly.
America–in the same years: economy ruined. Millions of homeless, HUNGRY and desperate people. A very strong Ku Klux Klan in some local areas. Rabid anti-semitism preached in the mass media (radio) by Father Caughlin. Lynching of niggers was as legitimate as hatred of Jews was in Germany. So who did we elect? Franklin Roosevelt. And we elected him over and over again.
In 1973, there was a critical gasoline shortage. Our freedom, our personal lives were severely disrupted. The government seriously planned to begin gas rationing. And what did the public do? We turned down the thermostats, bought smaller cars, and accepted the rule of law.
McCarthysm appeared only once in our history. It was made possible by a culture at the time that believed it was the government’s job to control our morals and social habits. Teenagers went to parties with chaperones. Girls were afraid of having their reputation “soiled” if they came home too late. Being divorced made you a social outcast. Those days are gone, and won’t return.
Yes, modern technology allows surveillance and keeping data-base checks on all citizens. But most of us WANT that–we call it “having a good credit record at the bank”. If a hospital loses our medical records, we threaten a lawsuit–“the doctors should have known I am alergic to that medicine, because it’s in the computer”
We like to see itemized phone bills listing every call we made.We are willing to see faces of missing children mass printed on milk cartons.Back in the days of the cowboys, nobody would have imagined that it was the government’s responsiblity to provide old age pensions.Today, we demand that Social Security provide us with a detailed printout of our salary over 40 years.We want our privacy–but we want records of it, too.
The technology can be abused–but you wont see masses of Americans goose-stepping and chanting “Heil Bush”. You will see legitimate use of civilian police forces to fight terrorism.
I’m not afraid.
I think America has had a lot closer brushes to fascism in the past.
Lincoln Suspends the Constitution and the Laws
many people went up for sedition during WWII
Interment Camps
Blacklists and McCarthy
This crap is just a bee sting compared to the black eyes freedom has gotten in the past. Hopefully we’re not allergic.
er what chappachula said better then me.
Fascism isn’t something that comes creeping up on us and takes us unawares in the middle of the night, or when our backs are turned. Fascism is a ruling-class response to a social and political crisis. The working class is pissed off because capitalism has brought society into a dead end and has no real solution to it. The capitalists are scared shitless because they don’t have a solution to the problem and their usual tools of keeping the working class quiet - the police and the army - are more sympathetic to the workers. The potential for fascism can arise only under these circumstances - a group of arch-conservatives who take it upon themselves to organize to smash working-class resistance and rescue the capitalists from their self-induced paralysis. There are people on the US political scene right now who, under those circumstances, would certainly become part of an emergent fascist leadership - but those aren’t the circumstances we find ourselves in right now. Which isn’t to say those conditions are completely impossible sometime in the relatively near future. The Great Depression wasn’t an aberration.
Bush isn’t fascist. He’s a figurehead. The Patriot Act isn’t fascist - no more than the Sedition Act of 1798 or the Dred Scott decision or any one of a whole pile of legislation that’s a slap in the face to human decency. Calling them “fascist” diverts attention from what fascism really is and deadens people to the term. Exactly like the fable of the boy who cried “wolf”. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole mass of other perfectly good reasons why Bush & Co. and the legislation they’ve shoved down our throats since he was “elected” should be opposed at every step.
Since I was the OP, I thought I would weigh in on what I have read.
Like all societies, there are those who believe and those who don’t. The fact that some civil liberties are suspended (and I hope temporarily) doesn’t hide the fact that these liberties are well guarded by many people, in fact every post (except one) implied that they would not stand for too much trampling of those rights. We seem to differ on at what point to stand up and say no. I am heartened by the fact that people care enough to render an opinion.
So let me change the tone to how do we know when enough is enough? What will be the point that you do stand up and say no?
I look forward to everyone’s opinion.
Part of the problem is that the idea that facism can happen here is so utterly terrifying. Rather than recognize the possibility, people deny it, as it’s too painful and disturbing to accept.
Since they reject the idea that “it can happen here”, clearly they’re forced to the conclusion that it can’t. Therefore, any actual form of facism gaining power has a tremendous advantage, as people will claim that it can’t be facism because it is happening here.
This is the most naive thing I’ve read all day. Do you not recall Ed Meese? Tipper Gore? Ashcroft and Bush? There are plenty of people in both parties who think it is the government’s job to control our morals and social habits.
toad,
Don’t you see how you just proved his point? Tipper Gore certainly wants me to not listen to say Gwar (or whoever) what has she succeeded in doing? Warning labels that do nothing other then help sell albums. She didn’t destroy my career, blacklist me, ruin my life, and my marriage (if I was married) Get me to identify anyone else who might have attended a concert with me and testify against them. Just b/c there’s people in the world that want to control your life doesn’t mean they’ll have the power to do it.
dewizeowl,
As for how far I’m wiling to go I don’t know. My current attitude is to wait out Bush and hope someone who can balance the safety/privacy issue better. That’s one good thing about our system there’s always hope the next election will be better. If he announced a state of emergency and suspended the next election I’d be heading down to the store for some ammo…
One pig point I should make is that I don’t believe that Bush or the current government is likely to “overthrow” the government or declare a state of emergency. The problem is that the using the policies of President 1-50, the fifty-first president will need to override the current environment and declare a state of emergency. As each government adds a little more onto the Patriot Act (or what ever bill and emergency is popular at that time), eventually it becomes easier and easier. So could President Bush or some shadow government do this now? Highly unlikely.
I mean they wouldn’t let me keep writt. elkrj. t knyt tn tn n
A slow erosion of our rights would be directly against the trend so far. We’re far freer to say and do what we want then even 50 years ago. We would have to have a massive depression or some other type of sustained upheaval for that to happen IMHO.
No, the scenario in Lewis’ novel is NOT like what is happening now.
The plot of It Can’t Happen Here was consciously modeled on recent history of fascism’s rise in Germany and Italy. The book was written during the Depression, when it seemed possible that the country might go in any of several radical directions. The main enemy that Buzz Windrip preached against, however, was big business, which he blamed for the poverty of the “forgotten men”; next in rank for blame were the blacks and Jews. Windrip is modeled more closely on Huey Long than Hitler or Mussolini. Those real-life fascists were autodidact intellectuals, within certain limits, and in their own minds they were not mere gangsters, but visionaries. Windrip is not any kind of intellectual or visionary; he is a cynical, greedy, pseudopopulist manipulator of the masses, nothng more. When he comes to power he clamps down hard on the Jews and blacks but allows big biz to make as much money as it wants (which is pretty much the way Hitler went, too, after the Night of Long Knives). Like the European fascists, Windrip organizes the “Minutemen,” an armed paramilitary branch of his Corporatist Party; and after he is elected president, he uses them to stage an effective coup against the Constitution and make his power absolute.
Now, you can accuse George W. Bush of a lot of cynical manipulation, but NOT of blaming big business for the people’s troubles. He is a man of the business class and has never pretended otherwise. Nor has he even hinted at any kind of radical transformation of society. He is a pro-business conservative and a foreign policy neoconservative. Neither of those things makes him a fascist.
We use the word “fascist” loosely nowadays to describe any arbitrary, militarist, or totalitarian regime. We should keep in mind what fascism was and is: A synthesis of several elements and traditions, including militarism, a kind of radical mystical nationalism, and racism; but also a desire for an overturning of the existing social and economic order, radical transformation of society, and the creation of a genuine, classless, national community. It is anti-Communist but drinks from some of the same wells; Mussolini started out as a Communist, remember. The core difference is that Communism is a rationalist philosophy, in an intellectual tradition that can be traced to Voltaire; and fascism is anti-rationalist and romantic, in a tradition going back to Rousseau. Fascism even has tendencies to mysticism and occultism, although Lewis left that out of ICHH.
But none of this has anything to do with what Bush is doing. Bush does not even have the IMAGINATION to be a fascist. Neither does Ashcroft or Cheney or Rumsfeld. They are militarists, they are authoritarians, they are pro-business, pro-elitist conservatives, and they will do whatever they can get away with to perpetuate themselves in power; but all of that is far too ordinary to be counted as fascism. Nor do they have any movement on the ground that resembles any fascist movement of actual history or Lewis’ novel. Nor, do I think, are they capable of openly staging a coup and establishing a dictatorship. They might cheat at the political game but they won’t try to turn over the table.
He doesn’t need to “hint,” he’s doing it. He pushing a massive shrinkage of the federal government in the area of social programs we inhertied from the New Deal and Great Society. Whether you agree or disagree with his agenda, if successful, it will indeed be a radical transformation of society.
Just for perspective -
The Boston Globe (and several others) reported today the grand total of times the Patriot Act has been used to search library and business records.
Zero.
If Ashcroft is really so avid to rip away our civil rights, he better get cracking. It’s been almost two years.
Regards,
Shodan
BrainGlutton is right on target about the context and message of It Can’t Happen Here…i.e. the possibility that the U.S. might follow Germany and Italy into fascism, given the volatile mix of depression, bigotry and populist demagoguery that also existed here.
None of those elements are now present to any significant extent.
Battling erosion of basic freedoms occurring for various reasons (war, fear of Communism etc.) is a repetitive theme in American history, and not something that leaped onto the radar screen with the advent of the Bush Administration. A new, more severe terrorist attack will threaten to further erode those freedoms, as occurred previously in wartime, then abated as outside threats were conquered.
The Chicken Littles who are now crying wolf (to mix fairytale metaphors) will be ignored altogether if they can’t learn to distinguish reality from hysterical overreaction.
Oh, come on. The notion that America can ONLY slide into dictatorship via the EXACT SAME route that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy followed and any deviation from that route proves it isn’t happening and CAN’T is obvious twaddle. There are a lot of roads leading to hell, and all of them are paved with concerns for the "safety and security of the citizenry.
It seems to me that if we wait until EVERYBODY is DURNED SURE and CERTAIN that dictatorship is a clear and present danger to the Republic, we may be just a wee bit … LATE!!!
Finally, wrt Ashcroft not using library searches yet … I must have missed the part in civics class where it’s OK for someone to get the power to violate privacy so long as they don’t use it right away…