Cont’d
The Leader’s oligarch buddies and their media machine, along with his well-indoctrinated followers, promote a law-and-order crime ideology that results in high levels of incarceration, heavily militarized police, and a disregard for the general rights of the average citizen, particularly racial and religious minorities.
As “future dystopian” as all this may sound, there are more governments in the world run this way today than there are democracies. It’s “normal.” And once established it’s almost impossible to dislodge without a crisis like the death of The Leader or an actual revolution. Just ask any Russian. Or Spaniards who were alive in 1975.
Some of the governments around the world that are structured like this were democracies that turned fascist, like Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But many have been this way for centuries, including the hereditary kingdoms in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
So, how do the democratic countries that make the transition to fascism allow that to happen? And what is life like in those countries, both during and after the time that it’s happened?
We can’t say we weren’t warned by our own people, our own politicians, the most senior members of our own institutional power structure.
In a speech that was hysterically criticized by Republicans and Fox “News“ pundits, former President Barack Obama in December of 2017 came right out and said it:
You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we’ve seen societies where that happens.
Yes, the former president of the United States invoked Nazi Germany six years ago while Donald Trump was president, adding:
Now, presumably, there was a ballroom in Vienna in the late 1920s or ’30s that looked and seemed as if it ― filled with the music and art and literature and the science that was emerging ― would continue into perpetuity.
And then 60 million people died. And the entire world was plunged into chaos.
Americans have been shouting about it lately, in venues like The New York Times, Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s book, and speeches from legislators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And now the president of the United States warns Americans that a fascist movement within our own nation is at our door, and will either be soundly defeated in the next election or will seize power and end our form of government:
What we’re seeing now is [either] the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.
Biden’s comment got only a passing mention in the news.
But, still, how do we know? Is there a sudden proclamation by The Leader that the nation is now “officially fascist”?
After World War II, a Chicago reporter named Milton Mayer struggled to understand how Hitler was able to flip one of the world’s most stable democracies into fascism.
An American Jew of German ancestry and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany seven years after Hitler’s fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.
His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.
A German professor who made it through the war by avoiding politics told Mayer:
But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
The warnings have been there all along. I wrote of this in 2005, quoting Mayer and going off on Bush and the PATRIOT Act as the prequel to fascism.
In the next election, many of us will no longer be able to know if our voices, our attempts to vote, will actually decide who leads our nation.
Many Americans will show up at the polls to discover they are no longer registered to vote. Many of our mail-in ballots will be “challenged” by Republican vote “observers” and we won’t learn about it until after the election is long over.
Five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that you can be purged from the voting rolls on a whim. In the majority of US states Republicans can take over electoral precincts, install their people (as we just learned they are doing right now) and run them under whatever rules they want.
Already in some states the GOP inflicts 10-hour lines to vote on people in Democratic districts, for example, and you go to jail if you bring them water. If you make a mistake on your voting registration or ballot, or help another person register to vote, in multiple red states the governors can choose to send you to prison for five years or more.
Somehow, of the many people from both parties who are busted for this, it seems only the Democrats end up going to prison.
And yet everything seems “normal.” As Mayer’s professor friend told him, when The Leader finally seizes control of all the levers of power, from political to economic to spiritual, everything changes but everything also stays the same:
The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.
Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.
We’re already quite a ways down this road, which is why both our media and our democracy have been rated by numerous international groups as being “at risk” or similar designations.
Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the proliferation of phony media selling right-wing propaganda as “news,” armed militias on our streets (and the GOP recruiting them for “election monitors”) are the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg.
“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?” Mayer’s friend asked rhetorically.
And, without the benefit of a previous, recent, and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, Mayer had to candidly answer: “Frankly, I do not know.”
That was 1954; this is 2023. We now know.
Lead Belly, New York, 1946
Lead Belly on guitar playing music with Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, and Alcide Pavageau, Stuyvesant Casino, New York City, in 1946. Photo credit: LOC
We know how the poisonous hate that animates fascism seeps into a society because we saw it ourselves during the four years of the Trump administration.
We’re watching it in red states across the country as MAGA Republicans replace honorable Republicans like Cheney and Kinzinger.
We know how easily a government can be toppled and how close we came on January 6, 2021: If just five Republicans hadn’t refused to go along with Trump we’d be well into this fascist dystopia today.
MAGA Republicans across the country are calling for a Franco-like government as you’re reading these words. They believe so long as they’re loyal to The Leader and Party everything will be good for them and theirs, and, generally speaking, they’re right.
As President Biden said last year:
We can’t take democracy for granted any longer. … Make no mistake. Democracy is on the ballot.
The only way we can avoid repeating the experience of Spain, Germany, Hungary, Russia, and Chile (among others) is to overwhelmingly repudiate — defeat — Trump and the MAGA Republicans’ movement at the polls.
And the first step to that is to wake up everybody we know. As the storied blues-folk-master Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, famously said, “Stay woke!”
Cont’d br The Leader’s oligarch buddies and their ... (
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