From time to time, a blogger or a commenter compares something to Nazism or to Hitler. As sure as night follows day, there will be outraged comments saying that any invocation of Nazis and Hitler is strictly forbidden, intolerable, unacceptable, verboten.
I disagree. I wrote a book in 2003 called The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, about efforts to censor what appears in textbooks and on tests. Everybody has some words that they want to ban, some topic they find execrable, some illustrations they can’t abide, some depictions that they consider stereotypes. The publishers are so fearful of controversy that they have written guidelines with long lists of words, topics, and illustrations that may not appear in textbooks or on tests. I learned about these guidelines when I was on the National Assessment Governing Board. That is when I discovered that every education publisher runs their material through a “bias and sensitivity review panel” to make sure that nothing appears that anyone might object to. You will never see an owl mentioned on a standardized test or witches or evolution or stories with disobedient children or any reference to a landlord or a cowboy. You will never see elderly people with a cane or sitting in a rocker. You will never see a mom making dinner. Instead, you might see a drawing of grandpa on the roof nailing in shingles and a female truck driver. You will see no reference to poverty or cancer or roaches or rats or nuclear war or suicide or abortion. No rainbow flags. No anatomically correct cows. Everyone is happy. Everything has been carefully scrubbed to avoid offending anyone, any group.
I don’t like censorship. It is true that I don’t permit certain well-known curse words on this blog, but I am not imposing my views on anyone else.
As for Hitler and Nazis, please see Mel Brooks’ movie “The Producers.” Mel Brooks said that the best way to deal with Hitler today is to laugh at him, to make him a fool, and the movie indeed made him into a butt of Brooks’ jokes. I also suggest the classic comedy “To Be or Not to Be,” with Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, and Robert Stack; it was made in 1942 when Hitler was no joke. But they made him into a laughing stock. The movie was remade in 1983 by Mel Brooks and his wife Anne Bancroft. Brooks turned it into a fabulous musical in 2001, which won multiple awards and was turned into another movie. Brooks told the German publication Spiegel that comedy robs Hitler of his posthumous power. Those who are afraid to speak his name confer power on him.
To those who say, “You can’t say that,” I say “Yes, you can, and so can I.” If you are afraid to use Hitler and Nazis as metaphors, that is your choice. It is not mine. If Jack Benny could do it in 1942, if Mel Brooks could do it in 1968 (To Be or Not to Be) and again in 1983 (The Producers), well, I say, let freedom of speech ring.
Amen to this.
Indeed; AMEN!!!
Good to see you Bob…missed you. For years I looked to forward to your comments and learned much from you. Please comment here more often.
Newdog’s Law —
As the percentage of Nazis in a population increases
the probability that someone will notice approaches 1.
+1
Heh! Definitely stealing that one!
It should have been spelled “Niwdog”, but the fingers and/or autospellers tend to run in familiar ruts.
Two of my all time favorite movies…watch them at least once a year…great analogies Diane. Thanks.
My niece, who teaches at a large university, commented that millenials , young people, really don’t want or support free speech.
I think she’s right, and I would add to the list some of my colleagues on the left.
Peter Smyth: simply my POV but…
In my experience what you describe is nothing new. I’ve seen it all my life. The adherents of “ignorance is bliss” (and the best protection against what they consider the uncomfortable or horrific realities of life) include folks of every type of belief—philosophical and religious and political and you name it.
Perhaps some will be offended, but in all honesty I think it is a fundamental tenet of one of the most inclusive groups in existence whose slogan is “I Only Want To Hear Happy News.” *”Happy” of course means “What Makes Me Happy”—if it offends or horrifies you or anyone else, “[expletive deleted] you.”*
My attitude? I was raised in such a way that, if I wanted to know what Hitler and Nazism and such was like, I was encouraged to start with books like William L. Shirer’s THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH and Hitler’s MEIN KAMPF. Plus talk to (as fully and honestly as possible when opportunity presented itself) people who lived through that time about their personal experiences—whatever they were, good or bad or indifferent.
IMHO, a genuine American hero nailed this to the wall:
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
Frederick Douglass, still making people unfit in the best possible way…
Thank you for your comment.
😎
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/11/false-alarm-on-millennials-and-free-speech.html#
So Krazy…I have long suspected, we had the same parents. My son who was in kindergarten at the time I read Shirer, saw the swastika on the cover and asked about it…a teachable moment. Then within that week, one was painted on a wall near his school. He suggested we wash it off, and we did as school let out. Kids thought we were defacing the property…but, aha…another teachable moment.
Ellen Lubic: Imagine that!
My long lost sister!
Wow…
This blog is really da bomb!
😎
@John: great cite, which shows a number of polls over the yrs in which a huge majority of Americans approve of free speech, yet simultaneously 40% or so (exactly as per the recent poll trying to make out Millenials as anti-free-speech) would prefer the gov censor this or that [fill in current unpopular stuff].
I particularly liked this preference from a ’90’s poll, which reminded me of Al & Tipper: “more than half said the government has the right to ban the sale of recordings that favor drug use or broadcasting of sexually explicit lyrics.”
Obviously those folks’ wishes were not met. If you peruse rap/ hip-hop lyrics as they have evolved sans censorship, they have inevitably honed in on viable social issues. The other crap is still out there for those who buy for mere tittilation, but the rap/hip-hop movement itself has moved on, & today influences many mainstream music/dance styles, & also has taken the place of ’60’s folk as a medium which expresses lots of truths the PC would prefer to ignore.
Invoking Nazis when the comparison is ridiculous and cheap is what has come to be known as ‘reductio ad Hitlerium” and is related to Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches —that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.”
Of course, there are situations in which it is appropriate and reasonable to compare something or someone to Hitler, the Nazis, etc. But to do so groundlessly, simply because one dislikes the other person’s views is not exactly valid.
And I am reminded of the intriguing slogan of the radical “left” group BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): “No free speech for fascists.” That should give any reasonable person an irony overdose.
Agree with you MPG….100%, that there is NO comparison between the micro-aggressors determined to destroy most free speech on the hue and cry that it is hurtful to someone (but then, I agreed with Mario Savio and Peoples Park and complete freedom of speech, and with Bob Dylan, and with Dalton Trumbo). And using the Nazi epithet to prove their false comparisons shows ignorance of real history.
e.g. Trump may be a egotistical manipulating fool, but calling him a Nazi is ridiculous.
Also disagree with the media reporting on the Syrian refugees and comparing them to the Jews in WW2 being turned away from the US. The Nazi extermination program for all Jews in Europe who were peaceful citizens and were condemned to death for both religious bigotry and property theft is far different from the current and on-going Middle East battles…. and Syria with Assad being protected by Russia. We are on the verge of WW#. Also, agree that the young male Syrians really would do more for their country if they stay and fight.
The rationale that all immigrants to the US are completely vetted is propaganda. Remember the Boston bombers. There is no way to vet people who have NO documents, and whose country is so disrupted by multiple internal, and external, attacks by various interlopers with varying goals, is impossible.
Media (and the general public) has forgotten that in France where Islamists have been welcome for decades, mainly for cheap labor, and are now over 20% of the population), there have been multiple attacks on Jewish venues for many years. It is only now when ‘others’ have been slaughtered that the world’s media has paid attention. When it was attacks on Jewish temples, restaurants, people, it was gone from the news cycle in hours. Jews lately have been attacked in the streets and buses not only in Israel, but also in the Netherlands and in Ireland and all over Europe, but this info is only a paragraph on a back page. For the past few years, many French Jews have applied to come to the US.
Here is a Reuters report which just came to me.
(Reuters) — The ringleader behind the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris had plans to strike Jewish targets and to disrupt schools and the transport system in France, according to sources close to the investigation.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national of Moroccan origin, also boasted of the ease with which he had re-entered Europe from Syria via Greece two months earlier, exploiting the confusion of the migrant crisis and the continent’s passport-free Schengen system, the sources said on Friday.
Their comments, confirming excerpts from a confidential police witness statement leaked to a French magazine this week, fleshed out a picture of the Islamic State militant who spearheaded the Nov. 13 attacks targeting cafes, a concert hall and sports stadium in Paris in which 130 people were killed.
——————————————————————–
SO, in the spirit of free speech…I tend to think what I wrote about years ago. The Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds probably would do better with each having their own lands, as with the various Stans (remember Kosovo and the Islamics v. the Christian Serbs in the 90s). And if the US accepts Syrian refugees, it might be prudent to accept women and children, but to limit men. Sounds harsh…but we sent back all those mothers and children only last year who fled mayhem and poverty, from Mexico, Central and South America. Why should Syrians be treated differently, particularly men who may be sleeper radicals like the Boston bombers?
as dutch woman whose parents suffered under nazism, as a student of history and politics AND as a business/marketing consultant well versed in the use of strategy and language to manipulate people, i ‘recognised’/called both the current political/economic system AND public ed deform as fascism a long time ago….
IF one takes the time to look and has an open mind and is unafraid, THEN one sees the pattern…
people hate, hate, hate having the parallels to nazism and hitler that exist pointed out…. i got/get called a conspiracy theorist, a nutjob, crazy, accused of engaging in hyperbole…
i’m sorry, but GODWIN’S LAW is total crap — it’s a cheap shot designed to shut people down when the conversation or dialogue goes into uncomfortable territory…
we dont seem to be able to handle the fact that we havent really evolved since the horrors of WW2, that the same factors/factions/people are still doing their fascist thing, just wearing different nametags…
the play is still the same – the setting has shifted, the actors wear different makeup/costumes but the plot hasnt changed… and we’re scared silly about that…
It seems obvious that both MPG and Sahila have legitimate points of view and are entitled to express them. That is the point. We don’t have to agree with someone; we can even express our disagreement. They still have the right to say it. I don’t know if the framers of the Bill of Rights realized how smart they were in outlining our freedoms.
Ellen — your islamaphobia is showing… which is maybe why you dont see the rather large fascist/nazi/hitlerish-shadow Trump is casting…
not sure how all those “stan” groups can get their own homeland; look at the sad/sorry mess that is the jewish-palestinian situation — steal one group’s homeland to give that land to another group in need of one… how many (on both sides) are STILL dying thanks to that benighted idea and its clumsy implementation?
also not sure why you single out islamic people as being particularly violent and why you think islamic extremists single out jewish people/groups – it seems to me they’re pretty even-handed in who they target — anyone who isn’t fundamentalist muslim….
and IIRC the jewish defence league has been listed as a terrorist organisation and has been responsible for violence both within the US and internationally…
as with many people who frequent the net, i am flabbergasted by jewish resistance to the entry by refugees to the US; this country is made up almost entirely of refugees, escaping one form of discrimination/hardship or another…
a common meme doing the rounds is that Anne Frank died because the US wouldnt accept her application to enter as a refugee… and history tells us that many countries were unwilling to take large numbers of jewish refugees in the lead up to, duration of and after WW2….
why would you advocate that today’s refugees – no less in need now than the jews were then – should be subjected to the same cold, calculating inhumanity? because it was done to jews, it should be done to others?
@Sahila, your comment seems a bit over the top to me. Granted, there are strong parallels between US 1938 refusal to admit Jews fleeing Hitler: in an economic downturn (back then, the Great Depression), immigrants are seen as job-stealers, & xenophobia in general is exacerbated. You probably could also draw the parallel that in 1938 the U.S. was still very much against joining the European war, & today many are against further boots on ground in the Middle East, which might lean against taking any position in Syria suggested by taking in its refugees.
But one cannot ignore the obvious. On 9/11 & in multiple anti-Western jihadist actions since then, including just yesterday Paris, and last year Boston, violent actions have been carried out against innocent Western civilians by ‘sleeper’ fundamentalist Muslims. Legal visa-holders in 9/11 acquired US pilot-training in order to carry out the 9/11 travesty– today we see next-generation actors, radicalized after their families’ legal emigration to Western countries (that’s Boston & Paris).
Meanwhile we have a large, active, productive population of Muslims in the U.S. We are clearly not anti-Muslim.
Taking in refugees from Syria’s civil war is not a clear & easy decision. On the one hand, U.S. had an active hand in exacerbating that civil war through wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, so we have a moral obligation to accept refugees fleeing from the consequences. On the other hand, we understand that those fleeing Syria may represent any number of political persuasions, & that they or their progeny might include many who could become radicalized here, simply by undergoing the social difficulties of adapting to the often-xenophobic climate challenging new emigrants into a challenged economy.
So don’t be so hasty to assign pro-Judaic, anti-Muslim attitudes to those who recommend a very careful look toward accepting Syrian refugees.
I, for one, am satisfied that our federal procedures require long & careful research of prospective Syrian refugees.
Thank you Bethree for your well conceived, measured, and educated reply to Sahila.
Bethree…
your logic is really convoluted…..
what you said, at the core was:
we should ban people in need of refuge cos this country is so xenophobic and unwelcoming and bigoted that the process of settling into this country is made so painful for immigrants that some of them MIGHT become ‘radicalised’ and ‘terrorists’….
you would rather deny refuge to people than deal with this country’s racism and xenophobia and social inequality/poverty and the fascist corporate state that creates/exacerbates those problems…
OK then….
i’m kinda concerned that these sentiments come from teachers, who have so much influence over our children…
Let’s add Jerry Seinfeld and the Soup Nazi: “No soup for YOU!”
I’m thinking of Stalin, Pol Pot, and others. The problem with the Nazis is that they were white.
Howard, surely you know that Pol Pot was not Caucasian?
So skin color is an issue here and not content of character?
I really don’t get what you are saying, Howard.
I was contrasting the Nazis, very white and Aryan, with Pol Pot, not white, and Stalin, not very white.
Howard,
Evil has no skin color! Jeez!!!!!
>doh< come on, your theory doesn't hold. Stalin was SO white. & that was hardly the hurst of his pages, anyway!
A cowboy? Please explain to me what is wrong with a cowboy in a standardized test. Is it that the urban children do not understand what a cowboy does or would not understand that reference? Then why is it okay that there are stories of large cities, amusement parks, beaches, and other places or things which our rural children do not see daily? This is a perfect example of why standardization will simply fail. There is no standardization even in the places that we live and work, much less in the way that our children develop.
crazyoaks, everything is explained in my book “The Language Police,” which includes a list of hundreds of words, phrases, and images that will never appear on a test or almost never in a textbook. “Cowboy” is considered a sexist term, as is “landlady” and hundreds of others. It is unacceptable to show an elderly person with a cane or a walker (that suggests that older people are old), but it is okay to show grandpa on the roof repairing a few loose shingles. It is not acceptable to show a rainbow, as that implies a gay theme. Nor can you show a dog or cat on a sofa, as someone might get the impression that this is okay. It is also forbidden to show disobedient children as that might encourage children to be disobedient. Under no circumstances may one mention evolution, Halloween, witches, suicide, cancer, nuclear war, rats, or rodents, as this might frighten children when they are taking a test.
As in Cowpersons ride gender neutral horses when roping gender neutral steers??? Need a few martinis to keep up with all this.
Crazyoak, one of my favorites is the transformation of chairman. The 21st century version is chairperson, but it’s ridiculous, so people use the benign sounding “chair of the math department”. For an outsider, this means a piece of furniture is leading the math dept.
Nowadays, only standups can use the word “fat”.
How about African American? A double adjective is supposed to induce respect? A visitor from Uganda is automatically called African American. Why? Because of her skin color. Here, in the South, you meet people all the time who say stuff like “you know how THEY are” and make a face.
It’s not the word but how you say it.
OK, got it? ‘Cowboy’ is a gender-specific term! Hopefully you get the point. As though we didn’t always have Annie Oakley & Calamity Jane, & call them cowgirls, knowing they were equal or better to any cowboys. And then there’s Dale Evans, who often participated in saving the day (subservient of course to Roy). And probably lots of other lesser-known Cowgirls.
The point is there is no point: women were as important as men in settling the West; there’s no logic to the PC elimination of culturally-important words other than deep-sixing the words which might foment some kind of interesting discussion on Western-history General-words!
Sometimes it’s illuminating and useful to use Nazi Germany as a point of comparison. The other 99.9% of the time it muddles and confuses. That’s why it’s become a cliché that invocations of the Nazis are failures of argument. The 99.9% figure would be a lot lower if it weren’t so popular to use Nazi comparisons as argument. “Because you know who else thought animals should have rights?…”
Agree FLERP….’Nazi’ has indeed become “a cliche that muddles and confuses”…and history also became muddled, and with indiscriminate name calling of our often muddled current presidential candidates who may be bigots, but that does not equate to their being a Nazi rather than a self aggrandizing megalomaniac I prefer descriptive words, even to excess, than a one word ultimate insult.
Sahila…above you attributed many name callings to me such as “Islamaphobic”….wish you were one of my grad students so we could have a constructive dialogue, rather than a one-sided bashing. But then, as my colleague 2old2teach says, this is what free speech is all about.
The issue I see with Trump, a self styled showman, is how many voters support his distorted thinking. These are our neighbors and the question is how to address them constructively.
Perhaps you have some ideas Sahila, since you are a professional wordsmith who informs us that you are “well versed in using language to manipulate.”
“‘Fascism’ is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man’s character, a structure that is confined neither to certain races or nations nor to certain parties, but is general and international. . . ‘Fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.” ~ Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
i think most people dont want to face the reality that fascism AND nazism is common as mud and exists all around us…
fascist/nazi zionist groups; fascist/nazi islamic groups; fascist/nazi christians; fascist/nazi sikhs; fascist/nazi hindus; fascist/nazi right wingers; fascist/nazi italians; fascist/nazi germans; fascist/nazi brits; fascist/nazi dutch; fascist/nazi french; fascist/nazi americans….
they seem to think that evil is rare…
people seem to forget those experiments where ordinary, apparently decent people are induced very easily to torture other people… and others where ordinary, apparently decent people sit by and watch/let others be abuse/terrorised… and remember abu ghraib anyone?
TRUMP is a nazi, calling for a white america, deporting people of other skin colours, building walls to keep people of other colours out, “making ameriKKKa great again”, invading other nations to take possession of their resources… and he’s in favour of using military force and torture to further the state’s goals…
you might like to read this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/14007-no-actually-this-is-what-a-fascist-looks-like
and this, from Larry Pinkney on america having become a fascist state:
‘America’s’ Fascist Paradigm & the Myth of Democracy
May 28th, 2011
Larry Pinkney
“Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country [America], for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.” -Howard Zinn
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
-Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz]
A woefully uninformed and/or a perniciously misinformed populace will, in the distorted name of ‘patriotism,’ repeatedly commit the most horrendous atrocities. Such people do not recognize the precariousness of their own existence, the fleeting nature of their own humanity, or the preciousness of Mother Earth and the rest of the global human family. Such people provide fertile soil for fascism to take root and grow. This is the stark reality for an enormous amount of the population of the United States of America, who has been psychologically, institutionally, and systemically trained to be ahistorical and to cling to systemic mythology rather than reality, no matter how obvious such reality might be.
Fascism, contrary to popular U.S. mythology, is alive and growing in this corporately dominated body-politic, institutions, and economy of the United States. An indication of just how very effective fascism has become in this country is the invariable knee-jerk reaction on the part of so many persons here who refuse to even consider that such a reality is even possible, much less already here. Everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people inside this nation are in deep, deep trouble.
‘Americans,’ like Pavlov’s laboratory dogs, have been indoctrinated to believe that fascism can only be in the one form of jackboots, swastikas, and/or soldiers, etc. marching through the streets. This however, is absolutely false. Fascism is not static or stagnant, it has many different forms, and it evolves in conjunction with political, economic, and social conditions. To reiterate: depending upon the political, economic, and social conditions and perceived norms – fascism evolves accordingly. As in the case of the corporate plutocracy in the United States, it effectively subverts any genuine democratic process in the body-politic.
This nation’s populace has been adroitly imbued in ‘educational’ institutions and by the U.S. corporate-stream ‘news & analysis’ media to mentally salivate in horror and utter disbelief at the very idea that fascism could, or for that matter, has already taken hold in this nation. Indeed, there is so much intellectual salivation and repugnancy at the very mention of the word fascism, in relation to ‘America,’ that the majority of the populace quite simply misses seeing the forest for the trees, as it were. After all, can’t we choose between buying the corporate McDonald’s Hamburger, or the corporate Wendy’s Hamburger, or the corporate Burger King, or the corporate Subway food chain outlets, etc.? Can’t we choose between watching the corporate multi-millionaire Oprah, or the corporate American Idol, or the corporate Makeover TV programs, etc. on television or the Internet? Can’t we choose between watching the corporate CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, or the largely corporate-sponsored Public Broadcast System (PBS), etc.? Don’t we, after all, have a choice as to which corporate-funded politician to elect? Don’t young people have a choice as to whether or not to enlist in the military, even as multinational U.S. corporations have outsourced millions of jobs elsewhere in which they might have been employed? Doesn’t this nation have an overwhelmingly corporately controlled judicial system that pretends to be equitable and just? With all these wonderful choices and opportunities how, then, can it possibly be said that this nation is fascist?!
As the discerning reader has no doubt readily noted, none of the above mentioned alleged choices and opportunities are choices at all. They are in fact corporately manipulated non-choices – packaged and presented as choices. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that corporations are hierarchal, profit-driven, and fundamentally undemocratic, and the very idea of a corporate-democracy is a contradiction in terms. Human lives, the environment, justice, and democracy, etc. mean substantively nothing to the corporate elite – profit does! This is why the United States is always at war and maintains at least 800 military bases throughout the world. Wars make huge profit for the few (approximately 1%) bloodsuckers at the top, while maiming or killing the many [i.e. everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people]. The corporate elite [i.e. the Wall Street banksters and robber barons, the pharmaceutical corporations, oil corporations, nuclear power corporations, insurance corporations, etc.] dominate and are in de facto control of every major institution in this country including the White House, the Congress, the military, the news media, educational institutions, the Courts, etc. The one thing that corporations, by their very bloodsucking nature will not long tolerate, is genuine democracy at home or abroad. Real democracy has the inconvenient habit of placing lives, dignity, and justice – above corporate profit. There is nothing less than a ruling corporate plutocracy in this nation – which is 21st century fascism.
Financial might, or in other words, organized corporate capital, systematically and systemically stymies the will of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this country. It subverts the will of the everyday people while maintaining a disingenuous veil of ‘democracy.’ When corporations and government become virtually indistinguishable, as presently exists in the United States, what we actually have is a 21st century form of fascism.
Thus, ‘extraordinary rendition’ & torture, perpetual U.S. wars abroad, the suppression of civil liberties at home, the incessant intellectual dumbing-down of the population, and a burgeoning prison population, etc., combined with indisputable corporate hegemony, has become the new norm. Patriotism and the so-called ‘war on terror’ are, in essence, the watch words meant to neutralize and ultimately eliminate internal political dissent. The corporate / military elite [i.e. the actual government], under the auspices of patriotism and of fighting terrorism, in fact ensures the continuance of “terrorism” and perpetual war; which ensures massive profits for that elite. This U.S. ‘democracy’ is, in reality, the best form of 21st century fascism that [corporate] money can buy.
Notwithstanding the abhorrent and utterly despicable role of Barack Obama in serving as the colored head of the corporate / military U.S. Empire, it must be remembered that in order for fascism to evolve in the United States to where it is today, it was imperative that a nominally black ‘Obama brand’ be cultivated, groomed and installed; in order to deflect and distract the attention of the masses of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people from the political repression and economic disaster at home and the perpetual U.S. wars abroad. We must no longer allow our attention to be deflected or distracted.
Whether or not you, the reader, accept or reject the argument that the United States is now a corporate plutocracy of 21st century fascism, one thing is certain: the U.S. corporate / military government’s political and economic war against the people right here in this nation must not and cannot be long ignored. Moreover, the bloody U.S. wars and corporate / military occupations, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, north Africa, and elsewhere must not be supported. These terroristic wars have nothing whatever to do with the spreading of democracy or the diminishing of terror. To the contrary, these terroristic U.S. wars are themselves increasing and ensuring a further cycle of terror; and this nation cannot in any fashion spread a democracy which itself does not possess.
If ever there were a time for political dissent in this nation – it is now! The words of Howard Zinn ring clear, strong, and true today: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” It is in the name of not only this nation, but of all of humanity that people of conscience must dissent! Even as the U.S. corporate / military government engages in constant subterfuge and seeks to discredit and neutralize dissent and dissenters, there is the need to redouble our efforts in this struggle for political, economic, and social justice and human rights at home and abroad. The storm is already upon us if we could but see its clouds. Ah! But after the storm, if we have done what must be done, the sweet liberating rays of sun may yet shine again! It is only ordinary everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people, nationally and globally who, in the final analysis, will determine if we have a future and what that future will be!
Onward then my sisters and brothers! Onward!
-###-
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.
Reich describes appears to describe fascism not as a political ideology or a state of affairs, but as a quite mundane personality disorder. That may be accurate, as far as it goes. But it does seem to take a lot of the sting out of the assertion that someone (or something) is fascist, not to mention beg the rejoinder: “Look who’s talking!”
It reminds me of George Orwell’s statement that, by the mid-1940s, the term “fascist” had already devolved into a synonym for “bully,” which I think actually remains the best concise definition of the word.
“‘Fascism’ is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man’s character, a structure that is confined neither to certain races or nations nor to certain parties, but is general and international. . . ‘Fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.” ~ Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
I would like to add the word “part of” after the word “of” in the first sentence. So there may be a fascist part in the structure of an “average” man’s character — and, for that matter, in mine or yours or others who may or not be “average”, whatever that word might mean in this context.
So evil is not rare, indeed, it is commonplace. It only needs certain conditions to manifest itself more horribly than usual.
But there are other parts to the “average” person’s character, and surely to mine and yours and those we know. We do have the traditional virtues mixed in with the traditional vices. Compassion, courage, patience, honesty and altruism do exist, just as callousness, apathy, impatience, dishonesty and selfishness do.
If it were not so, it would be far worse
If one goes and lives with remote tribes, as some have, one will see all of these things in play.
It may be that our mass economies and social structures are bent more easily towards evil, even if this be the evil of compliance–be this from fear or greed (the common drivers used to enslave populations) or just not caring.
We see this too well in the schools — and not just in the charters.
there is no addressing these people constructively… it’s too late for that, for our generation and that of our parents/grandparents….
the political-economic-social model we have been living under for so many generations has naturally and predictably led to this outcome…
we cant at this point ‘undo’ what everyone has experienced and the world view they’ve constructed; for these people, we cant insert a new, different reality in our collective belief systems and thought processes… there’s no ‘wiggle room’ left… we’ve run out of time and we’ve run out of road…
the fact that you dont recognise you are living in a fascist plutocracy already (and that TRUMP is merely the most vivid, “out”, public personification of that) proves that it’s already too late… TRUMP is no outlier… he’s not an aberration – he’s merely the logical evolutionary end of a path we’ve been treading for a long time…
the fact that you and i aren’t out on the streets, challenging the state, manning the barricades, willing to die to change the course of all of this, proves it’s too late… and the fascist patriarchal plutocratic system is so embedded and so powerful that it would take that and more to change anything…
all of this is compounded by population overshoot and the exponentially increasingly severe effects of climate change… just watch fascism and nazism drop any pretence and come fully into the open when we have millions of desperate starving, thirsty climate change refugees come knocking on the door (and yes, analysts say that the syrian refugees ARE (in part) climate change refugees – the first of many waves of people from many places on the planet)…
this will all have to come tumbling down, with much weeping and wailing and really horrible suffering… then, if any of the young survive, they might be privileged enough/have the resources to have another go at building a truly ‘civilised’ model for living together, with other species, on a vastly altered earth…
and i may be well versed in the use of language to manipulate – that doesnt mean i will stoop to doing so…
God bless you, Diane. Or wait–can I no longer say that?!
Grateful for this post and you.
Annie
Well, you can always use Roger Zelazny’s Agnostic’s Prayer (from his book “Creatures of Light and Darkness,” 1969:
Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
And yes, people were aware of “political correctness” a long time ago, although I don’t recall that we called it that way back then.
I think the concern is that if you reach for the most extreme comparison you minimize one and magnify the other. There’s some validity to that, because it’s always presented as a comparison- “X is like Y because…”
If you’re comparing the two things I think it’s valid to ask if you’re equating them, because that’s what comparison language tends to do.
I also think comparisons can be lazy and they’re (generally) over-used in analysis. Obviously history is a guide but there’s a tendency to jam events into something we’re familiar with and that sometimes involves ignoring ways “this” is NOT like “that other thing that happened”.
Plus you know who else liked to make the most extreme comparisons . . . .
Wall Street Journal is all over the free speech issue in higher education, calling out students as spoiled brats who have nothing better to do than complain about personal feelings of hurt from “micro-aggressions.”
The WSJ blames adults who gave the current crop of students “too many trophies for participation,” also too many faculty who have promulgated political correctness. Read some of the comments. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-campus-dissenters-1448663907
@Laura H. Chapman: the trouble with the WSJ and other right-wing organs on the free speech/political correctness issue on campus is that they are incapable of seeing it with a non-partisan perspective. I trust organizations like F.I.R.E. to give unbiased accounts of the repression of speech and academic freedom in education because they are bipartisan and 100% committed to the 1st amendment. They don’t pick and choose whose or what speech to defend, unlike the Journal, which is only worried about attacks on conservative speech.
My wife tried to buy a cup of coffee at a shop in the local Lincoln district. The area is a growing African-American rejuvenation with an exceptional theater. She was rudely refused by the black waiter even though all the other black patrons were enjoying lunch. My wife is white. What we see now is a backlash ad fear of “revenge” by white America fueling the campaigns of people like Trump and Cruz. Race politics run deep.
@mathvale: seems like a lot to extrapolate from an incident that strikes me as odd. I’ve lived in mixed neighborhoods, worked in Detroit, Harlem, etc., and never been refused service or treated with hostility by any black waitperson. Ever. Not in 65 years. In my experience, such incidents are better explained from an individual perspective: perhaps he’d just been yelled at by his supervisor, for instance. To presume that it has a racial basis absent more direct evidence (e.g., the waiter makes a remark about your wife’s ethnicity) is to fall into the sort of thinking that makes me very uneasy about “hate crimes” as a special category of crime. A rude waiter is a rude waiter: the motivation is irrelevant to me if I’m getting crappy service. If someone makes an anti-Semitic remark and throws something at my car, am I more injured than if someone throws something at my car? I don’t see how. So I prefer that we err on the side of non-mind reading.
& then there’s that other issue w/WSJ, which is you can only read the article if you pony up $ to Rupert Murdoch. I refuse.
Wow, what a wonderful, wonderful post. Can you write an article-length version of “The Language Police” for a major publication?
A few comments:
I fear freedom of speech is being lost among millennials due to this idea that you are not allowed to offend anyone. This is chilling.
I recall an apt essay that I thought was called “Confessions of a Textbook Editor,” but couldn’t find it to post the link.
I don’t think joking will stop reformers or Donald Trump, but we still need as much as we can get! There’s a reason that this ends under dictatorships.
Now I just read your last comment, Diane. Seriously, can you write an essay for whatever your favorite major publication is? No doubt they will publish it if you pen it. We need it! If people can’t speak freely, then we can’t have honest conversations to solve problems. This is a huge problem in education, and teachers are part of it. (Don’t mean to dump on teachers any more, but, yes, teachers need to be reflective about how they play into all of this.)
As defenders of public education, we must be on the side of democracy. That creating a national database of national tests with a de facto national curriculum, and using them to advance privately run institutions with public taxes is the antithesis of democratic rule is a fact, not a conspiracy theory makes this a pivotal issue not to be suppressed. As a Jew whose family escaped the pogroms to come to this country, the birthplace and most powerful defender of democracy against kings, dictators, communism, and fascism, it is my responsibility to keep a constant, weary eye fixed on preventing a repeat of the horrific mistakes of the early 20th century.
It is too important to ignore.
Reformers are not Nazis, but they are leading us in that direction. It is not hyperbole to, not just make the comparison, but remind people of the ideals that make this country the greatest on Earth and of what can and will happen if those ideals continue to be thrown aside. So, Bill Gates, if you don’t like being compared — by grownups, not schoolchildren in class — to the many eugenics loving sociopaths of history, stop following in their footsteps. I am a free American, not a statistic. And Diane, you remain my stalwart hero.
I am with you, LCT. I have thought that Emperor Gates could become our dictator. I believe he could win presidential election. I don’t think he’s near as Hitlerish as Trump, but he certainly seems to believe that he’s smarter than everyone and thus should be able to run things in a non-democratic way (while pretending it’s about service rather than profit).
Dear LCT…the theory of American Exceptionalism can be dangerous. Suggest everyone see the new film, Trumbo, for not only superb acting and true to history plot, but as a reminder of what has happened only in this century in America…and how blind and fearful followers of edicts of legislators can drag us into the pits of fascism.
You’re right about nationalism, Ellen, but I like democratically elected school boards. And I do not like unrestrained, free market ideas in schools. Competing with charter schools for funding is just a little too much Social Darwinism for my tastes. Okay, not fascism per se, but Darwinism. Maybe I’ve gone overboard in the past, posting links to American Nazi Party affiliate websites praising the NCLB and charter schools/vouchers, for example. Maybe I’ve gotten a little too caught up thinking about Gates’ changing views on population control. I simply cannot help but feel persecuted by the reformers, haunted by the vision of Michelle Rhee ready to sweep me into the sea, to the point of crying out, grasping for any vine of reason or logic — or metaphor — that will restore my former ability to do my job without having the oxygen sucked out of the room by test prep.
Agree with you LCT. What does it mean when 7 yr olds are told to watch their language when using the word, “dumb” to describe a thing. The language police will continue to manipulate youth so free speech becomes the equivalent of a punch in the face.
LeftCoastTeacher writes “this country, the birthplace and most powerful defender of democracy against kings, dictators, communism, and fascism, it is my responsibility to keep a constant, weary eye fixed on preventing a repeat of the horrific mistakes of the early 20th century.”
I think you include four questionable ideas in the above proclamation.
1) Are you sure the US is the place where democracy was first invented and practiced?
2) You list communism among dictatorships. Communism is an ideology which is aimed to get rid off the horrors of capitalism. That communism was used as a means of oppression by corrupt politicians is a completely different matter, isn’t it?
3) Do you seriously believe that the US is a powerful defender of democracy all over the world? For some, it appears that as soon as we declare to support democratic change in a country, we soon start bombing that country.
4) Is it really viable to have a single country to play the role of World Democracy Police?
Excellent points. The US becomes the Democracy Police when politically and financially expedient.
Ditto
Double ditto…
& LeftCoastTeacher, let’s keep our eyes on changing the laws which presently allow anyone w/big bucks to direct legislation via lobbying & campaign support. There will ever be Bill Gateses with whatever nutty ideologies looking to impose their ideologies on the public. They will not be swayed by appeals. They need to be stopped in their tracks by legislation that allows voters to self-determine.
@Máté Wierdl:
1. OK, I’ll bite, what was the 1st country where democracy was invented & practiced? Greece? England? & how does the answer negate what LFT is saying?
2. We can all agree that Communism was an ideology aimed to get rid of the horrors of capitalism,& that any positives there were banished by the dictatorship of communism, which eventually led to its downfall.
The horrors of capitalism again afflict our country, primarily because the laws promulgated in the 20thc to place limits on capitalism– to tame it, to establish a middle ground allowing capitalism to flourish while supporting middle class & common good– were mostly eliminated between 1980 & the present. And of course there was the brief period of McCarthyism (to which you refer?) which turned communism’s dictatorship on its head by dictating anti-communism.
3. U.S. foreign policy, like that of all global powers in history, has always been dictated by the need to assure its supply of foreign raw materials, as well as for security of the nation.That we may have disingenuously couched such imperialism as supporting democracy abroad is merely universal diplomatic rhetoric. That does not negate our national democracy. The only thing that negates our democracy is our very own neglect in maintaining laws that ensure leadership by the general citizenry.
4. Is it viable, as a single country, to take on the role of ‘World Democracy Police?’ Of course not, but as you have suggested above, our role over the 20thc tho it may have been couched in such terms, was strictly about securing raw materials & maintaining nat’l security, usually via dictatorships we thought we could manipulate to our advantage. We were never about securing global democracy. It is only recently that U.S. for-policy has evolved to the point where it recognizes that a stable democracy makes for a viable global trade partner. We’ll see where that takes us..
I would never suggest that using certain words be banned, but when you are having a discussion with people on what you hope is an intellectual level, it is permissable to suggest that certain comparisons, such as the comparison of some unethical individuals to Nazis trivializes the suffering and death of millions. Mel Brooks and other humorists who ridiculed Hitler were not using Nazis for metaphors.
Part of me tugs in the direction of being very careful not to diminish more than 6 million lives lost. But a nuanced discussion permits comparisons to the political, social, and economic roots of fascism without direct comparisons to the Holocaust. Fear of even mentioning Adolf Hitler and his successful methods of propaganda is a very dangerous thing.
I think you have hit on something, LCT. Because of the horrors of the Holocaust, Hitler and Naziism are treated as buzz words/synonyms for it. Just using the term fascism might be more accurate, but pairing it with happened in Europe in the thirties and forties still resonates with many people and not just because of the attempted genocide of Jews and other suspect minorities.
To Krazy TA:
My principal is on the reform page, and has driven out many good teachers and other staff members. I realized recently that several current staff members are obsessed with Disneyland.
That having been said, I agree with Smyth. I think Millennials and the left are deserving of some of the criticism of political correctness. Millennials were raised at a time when any kid saying anything to hurt their feelings was not an opportunity to learn how to handle such things positively, but to get adults to judge and punish.
justateacher: not disagreein’ wid ya…
That’s why I have learned to distrust and be cautious with the way people label themselves. And don’t get me started about the pro-rheephorm MSM…
If I may, this is also part of the “civil conversation” discussion. As you know, the “thought leaders” of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement think WE are getting out of hand and need to tone it down.
Here’s one for you: the fundamental problem that “data-driven decision making” (3DM) a la rheephorm is trying to solve with its numerical accountability bludgeons like VAM (resting on standardized tests) is to combat the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” You know, it’s a HUGE & CRITICAL problem that, typically, public school teachers and staff use the “poverty excuse” to be lazy and hard-hearted and incompetent, denying our youth the futures they deserve. That’s why you need teacher-proof tests and curricula and top-down reward [the few] and punish [the many] management practices.
As politely put by Amanda Ripley in her THE SMART KIDS IN THE WORLD (2013, p. 163):
[start]
What did it mean, then, that respected U.S. education leaders and professors in teacher colleges were indoctrinating young teachers with the mindset that poverty trumped everything? What did it mean if teachers were led to believe that they could only be expected to do so much, and that poverty was usually destiny?
[end]
And I politely point out: that’s an immoral and monstrous lie. It inverts reality. The people who excuse themselves from addressing poverty are the rheephormsters—they think that (to use an apt expression by Linda Darling-Hammond) they are fixing problems by measuring them. Or to put it another way: they think they can fatten pigs by weighing them.
Let’s have real, not Rheeal (even when conducted in the most Johnsonally sort of ways), conversations about any and every topic under the education sun. That’s tough, there’s missteps, hurt feelings, conversations going past each other—well, welcome to reality!
The alternative is to follow the rheephorm playbook where, e.g., numbers & stats are not just shamefully massaged and tortured but often distorted so clumsily that it is obvious that one is reading the work of people that are envious and jealous of Soviet-era style Potemkin Village propaganda.
To conclude: I have no problems with what you wrote. Maybe you think I’m missing your point. That’s ok.
Does that mean I’m not opinionated? I’ll let a genuine American hero speak more eloquently on the matter than I could:
“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.”
That’s the way I see it.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
The quote is from William Lloyd Garrison.
My bad. Please escuse.
😎
Krash TA, If I may paraphrase you. The ed-deformers are the most PC of all folks in the discussion of ed-policy, as they maintain that equality of access to quality ed may be had via simple metrics,. Measurement of ‘measurable’ results will tell all: whether teachers and schools are effective, whether schools are effectively teaching as measured against test scores on tests ‘aligned’ with ‘national’ stds, etc– no discussion or even the vaguest reference to social realities necessary
bethree5: very well put!
It’s particularly evident in the public pronouncements of the “thought leaders” of the self-styled “education reform” movement. Question, even tentatively, their fundamental assumptions and their language that is replete with a host of unproven (and unprovable) catch phrases and snappy slogans—
And be prepared for the sneer, jeer and smear they reflexively turn to when their [as they see it] obviously “superior” thoughts are challenged. Just one example: they use “achievement/performance gap” when, strictly and more accurately speaking, they are referring almost exclusively to a “test score gap.” I wouldn’t mind it so much if they simply acknowledged that their POV of view differs from mine and others in support of a “better education for all,” but in order to deflect from and avoid a genuine wide-ranging discussion they light-mindedly start throwing around terms like “evil” and “racist” and “union thugs” and “bigotry” and the like.
Perhaps strangest of all, is that I have come to the conclusion—after reading so many of the more carefully crafted rheephorm arguments and justifications over the past five years—that they impute to others what they instinctively know reflects their own thinking and feelings.
How else to explain their stock mantra that the vast majority of folks working in public school are irremediably infected with the “soft bigotry of low expectations” towards the vast majority of our nation’s students? It not only inverts reality, but they have nothing but a reflexively bigoted attitude, very often expressed with undisguised contempt, towards public schools and their staffs and their students and their associated communities.
That’s how I see it…
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Back at the turn of the new millennium, I gave my classes an article that discussed the biggest events of the just-ended 20th century. World War II was ranked as the most important. And, the Holocaust was the abyss at the very center of that global war.
15 years into this not-so-new century, I can’t find the article. It’s probably in one of my file cabinets at school. The article, like my file cabinets, are relics of the pre-YouTube, iPhone era. (If only we’d worried less about Y2K back then and more about al-Qaeda)
Of course, the lessons of World War II remain central to our lives. So, it’s only natural that people still use -and sometimes misuse- that war as a touchstone today. I miss the members of the “Greatest Generation” that were part of my life and who have passed away. And, I wonder what it will be like when the last survivor, the last eyewitness to the Holocaust breathes his or her final breath?
However we keep the true facts of those millions of stories alive -print, blog, film or even by arguing with one another – thank God those stories are being remembered.
The Nazis, of course, were masters of censorship. They used language to obscure or just plain bury the truth. Diane is to be commended for saying, “let freedom of speech ring.”
To quote the 19th German author Heinrich Heine, who fought censorship: “Where they have burned books. they will end in burning human beings.”
19th century German author
Just to put it down here, for the record. My father-in-law was old enough (born 1920) to have been in the 1st gen drafted into WWII. He wouldn’t have enlisted. He was a practical man, 1st-gen American, he knew about Eur war & its likely outcome for him personally; his dad brought him here to get away from all that. Due to his skills he was in the Radio Signal Corps, which meant he was 1st on the scene of finished battles to confiscate tech devices to ensure they were not converted to enemy use. The repeated scenes he experienced were horrific, & he almost never spoke of them. The takeaway for him was not about ideologies of either side, but simply that war is hell.
My dad was too (1921). He did not speak about the WWII until his “senior” years. My mother said he could not go to a funeral for ten years. He got called back for Korea; the government really did not want to advertise the extent of our involvement and called back reserve troops first ( who were mostly WWII vets). He managed to stay below the radar and train troops for combat stateside. He said he knew he couldn’t run fast enough at 29 anymore. I was born a few weeks before he left. My mother picked up and followed ASAP, so almost my first two years were on army bases.
I viscerally do NOT like making Nazi comparisons because no suffered during WWII like the Jews. Of course, sympathizers and other “undesirables” perished the same way as the Jews.
One can make an excellent and cogent argument that using Nazi metaphors and similes cheapens the meaning and tragedy of the atrocities and camps. I don’t disagree with this.
But language, as long as it is not threatening physical harm or causing libel and slander, deserves to breathe freely and openly. Even those I don’t agree with here are permitted to voice themselves, and that’s the way it should be. Of course, what I very specifically think about those individuals is a private matter and remains between me and me AND me and my wife. That’s usually how it goes. My exact words for corporate reformers would not be appropriate for this or most any other forum. It’s just the way it is, and I am no different than the vast majority of people who feel strongly about politics but also have social skills.
And, in the realm of critical thinking, the propaganda tactics used by Hitler to target a very specific group and make them look bad and become hated by the masses is indeed eerily and too uncomfortably similar to what the federal government, the National Governors’ Association, and corporate America have done to educators in public schools. The only main difference – and it is a big one – is that educators are not thrown into camps to die or be executed. But all other aspects are, when it comes to the media and lies spread to fuel fear and loathing, substantially the same.
Therefore, while I have disdain for the “Nazi” comparison, I understand its judicious use and can see why people would want to pull it out and use it as a tool for critical thinking and activism. Factually, the tactics of the Third Reich and the American overclass are qualitatively similar, and any historian worth their salt would recognize that.
It’s interesting that the German government (notice that I’m not saying the “German people”) wants to dominate Greece and the debt crisis and monetary policy scene in the EU, and hypocritically, took well to the forgiveness of their literal fiscal debts after WWII.
First the Germans came with tanks . . . . Now they’re coming back with banks.
Still, sometimes, it’s good to part with your instincts and gut feelings in order to try to understand what people are saying and why they are feeling a certain way.
That’s how you learn . . . .
“. . . because no suffered during WWII like the Jews.”
Yes, a group suffered more than the Jews, the Soviets. From Wiki:
Civilian losses (doesn’t include military losses/deaths)
In 1995 a paper published by the Russian Academy of Science M. V. Philimoshin put the civilian death toll in the regions occupied by Germany at 13.7 million. Philimoshin cited sources from Soviet era to support his figures, he used the terms “genocide” and “premeditated extermination” when referring to deaths of 7.4 million civilians in the occupied USSR caused by the direct, intentional actions of violence. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major part of the huge toll. The report of Philimoshin lists the deaths of civilian forced laborers in Germany totaling 2,164,313. G. I. Krivosheev in the report on military casualties gives a total of 1,283,000 POW dead. The total of these two figures is 3,447,613, which is in close agreement with estimates by western historians of over 3 million deaths of prisoners in German captivity. In the occupied regions Nazi Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in the famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, 4.1 million persons.
Soviet civilian war dead estimated by Russian Academy of Science:
Deaths caused by the result of direct, intentional actions of violence 7,420,379
Deaths of forced laborers in Germany 2,164,313
Deaths due to famine and disease in the occupied regions 4,100,000
Total 13,684,692 Soviet civilian deaths
“Who made Godwin God?”
Who made Godwin God?
Deciding what is kosher
Who gave him the nod?
Deciding what is closure
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference involving Sir Francis Bacon approaches 1.
There is a difference between the moral objection to Nazi analogies and the rhetorical objection to analogies. The moral objection is that Nazi analogies are offensive. The rhetorical objection is that Nazi analogies are a form of bad-faith argument designed to stifle debate (because no one, except perhaps a Nazi, can dispute that something that resembles the Nazis is bad). This post appears to be a response to the moral objection, not the rhetorical one.
On a more basic level: Did anyone actually make either of these objections to the “1908 German school rules” post? If they did, I missed it.
FLERP, this issue has come up on this blog on many occasions.
But apparently not on this occasion, until this post.
Questioning the aptness of an Nazi analogy is not always the same thing as “saying that any invocation of Nazis and Hitler is strictly forbidden, intolerable, unacceptable, verboten.” People remain free to refer to the Nazis, Hitler, or even Christmas whenever they like. Just as people remain free to complain about it.
I didn’t see your 9:33 p.m. comment last night, FLERP!, because I’d gone to bed -though later on my daughter started practicing trombone just below me downstairs so I probably should have gotten back up anyway. LOL. ( I do want to encourage the arts in our schools if not my living room.)
From what I read in these specific comments, It looks like you “FLERPED!” Diane.
I’ve never known what “FLERP!” means but I love the word. Is it a noun…..is it a verb? I’ll take whatever grammatical way it can be used. Gerunds, anyone?
I really do enjoy the names on here….. “Krazy TA”. Great. And, “Clarity”. I truly need someone in my day-to-day life named “Clarity”. That would help. And, by the way, “2old2Teach”, not true, based on what I’ve seen on this blog.
Diane wrote a thoughtful reply to me last year regarding this issue of “comparison to the Nazis” so I think it’s something that’s she’s been considering for quite a while. I know I have been, especially since her e-mail response back then.
I do think your contrast of the “moral objection” vs. the “rhetorical objection” is an interesting one, FLERP!. Once again, more to think about.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, John. By the way, my husband and I lived through the “mastery” of several different instruments. The oboe was initially the worst, but, oh, the music he eventually learned to make brought tears to my eyes. May you reap the rewards as well. 🙂
I, too, am curious about the origins of the handle FLERP.
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads.
The best recent book I read on the topic is The German War. As my friends used to say: “Ah, the Second World War. The Germans. You can’t blame everyone for what the majority did…” I got my copy of The Language Police during the AFT event that summer, when you spoke, Diane. Things have only gotten worse since then. I taught English for 28 years in CPS before I was fired and blacklisted by 2001. But by today, the new language police would bar me from teaching most of the major works of U.S. literature from Huck Finn and Moby Dick all the way to For Whom the Bell Tolls…
Just a quick correction. Mel Brooks remade To Be or Not to Be in 1983; the 2001 Broadway musical was based on Brooks’ 1968 film The Producers, followed by the movie musical of The Producers in 2005. In your post all of this is a little mixed up.
I’m a high school teacher in my 17th year and I love your blog! Please keep it up.
As a European immigrant I have always been baffled at the informal censorship in this country. People are not trusted to make their own opinions about things so the powers that be demand censorship of specific words.
In recent years I have become more and more interested in the many ways in which voices are excluded if they differ from those of the rulers. In the suburb I live in people are named “lose canons” if they bring up uncomfortable topics or even call out injustice. Even “progressives” jump to the defense of the powers that be if someone dares to express frustration with oppression or fraud. I think it was Arundhati Roy who said there are no voiceless people but voices that get excluded. very true.
I’ve started using Joe McCarthy.
Mathvale…do see the film Trumbo!!!
It is a compelling reminder of quite recent US governmental Nazi-like behaviors which actually did lead to death of some, and devastation and complete ruin of most.
HUAC and the petty wannabe dictators who took it upon themselves to destroy the film industry, (and also the education industry as with claiming many professors were Marxist, which caused many of the finest academics to leave U. of California. and even perhaps suspicious death of Chancellor Dykstra at UCLA…..remember Helen Gahahgan Douglas, the so-called Pink Butterfly, and her destruction at the lies of Richard Nixon) and to bring down the Jewish industrialists who ran it ( many of whom actually joined this purge to save themselves) needs to be a reminder in each generation of how close we can be to fascism.
Forgive this long garbled Faulker-like sentence…I am emotional about it all having lived through it as a kid in California.
So, MV, using ‘Joe McCarthy’ as a descriptive device for the era in American history that could have been scripted by Goebbels and Goring, is to me too, a much harsher, insulting, and revealing epithet than just tossing off the word Nazi. And using it only to describe Trump is not enough when we also hear Cruz, Carson,Santorum, Huckabee, and their ilk who revile so much that so many of us fought a lifetime to achieve…as with Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Bd. of Education.
However, watching some of the American public cheer Trump, and those who used to cheer Palin, I am reminded of Ionesco’s over-arching accurate drama, Rhinoceros….which gives me great worry as to our future. Couple this reactionary mass manipulated by the oligarchs and I wonder where It will all end????
Sadly, this swing to the right, even to the point of violent ethnic cleansing, has been in evidence over much the world over the past several decades. My own home country of India might be at the brink of a repetition of the tragic events of the 1940’s, during the unfortunate partition of the subcontinent.
I hope not, but armed children and adults are marching with swastikas on their armbands in the streets, demanding that Muslims “behave or leave”.. This particular phenomenon never reached this scale even at the time of Partition. We haven’t had anywhere that many deaths and dislocations yet (which amounted, in the ’40’s, to millions and tens of millions, respectively), but one should not be too sanguine about this.
I should hasten to add that the swas-t’ika (auspicious sign) is an ancient Hindu-Arya motif, found carved or painted above the entrance door to almost every Hindu temple in India. The Nazis under Hitler borrowed that symbol (mirror-imaging it in the process, for some reason). But there has always been a racist thread in the Arya traditions, with the caste (varna=color) system being a manifestation of that (paralleling and exceeding the segregation of the old South in the U.S.and the apart-heid of S. Africa. And there are many more recent parallels between the extreme-nationalist ideologies and methods of the fascists in the Europe of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the Hindutva demagogues and theorists of the subcontinent. They were responsible for Mohandas’ Gandhi’s death.
Well said, Ms. Ravitch!
As an aside to this, one should note that the Nationalsozialistischen, horrors that they were, were neither the first or last to commit mass genocides.
This country that we live in was built on twin genocides–the systematic extermination of natives from an entire swath of a continent, and the deaths of countless numbers of African slaves, before, during and after the harsh transatlantic passage. This was accompanied by the systematic destruction of the cultures (and families, in the case of the Africans) of those who survived.
But it wasn’t just in this country that such things happened. In every region, in every corner of the world, if the earth could speak, what tales would it not tell!
There is scarcely a “nation” in the world that does not have the blood of innocents on its hands, if one goes back in time.
And one need not go back far. Three whole continents — the Americas and Australia, were wiped clean of most of their earlier human inhabitants in the course of a few centuries. Tens of millions have died, just in the subcontinent of my birth, in ethnic conflicts, just in my lifetime, which only spans the past six decades and some.
But this is nothing new. If one takes passages in the Torah (or parts of the Quran and the Old Testament) to be historical accounts, there again, we see systematic exterminations of populations, carried out by Jews, Gentiles, Christians, Muslims and others. It is the same, perhaps, if we infer from what we read in some of the Hindu-Arya texts and other sources.
Such things continues to this day, the world over. And I have only been speaking about our own species.
So while one should acknowledge the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, one should not give that set any special status, lest this blind us to all the other atrocities that preceded them, accompanied them and followed them, not just in Europe, but the world over.
The more serious concern is not that we “normalize” and so accept the Holocaust in Europe (which systematically did away first, with the Communists and Socialists, and then the Jews and yet other “undesirables” and “threats”, including the Gypsies and others) or that war in which some 30 million Soviet citizens perished, but that we blind ourselves to the very real possibility that such things can occur again, and not just to those who were affected by this in the 1940’s, and that this can happen here, as it has before.
Great post. Genocide occurred between Native Americans and African tribes. The use of Nazi references should be backed by accurate history lessons. Nazis took many elements found in our own society to the extreme. We are fooling ourselves if we think it could not happen here. Does anyone think some of the current candidates for president would not suspend the Constitution or impose a theocracy given the chance?
nor
You are right, Mathvale.
I love the book The Language Police and agree it needs an update. I also suggest more people read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa. Terrorism and genocide are history repeating itself over and over.
Methods of oppression evolve. The methods of nazi Germany are outdated since killing your own people was proved to be ineffective and risky for the oppressor who are always the minority.
Violence is now almost completely taken out of the main methods and principles of oppression in this country, but the rest—psychology, propaganda and ideology—have become much more sophisticated and powerful.
As for foreign policy, I really fail to see how the US behaves differently from the Germany of WWII or the long historical line of empires that aimed to control the whole world. Perhaps the main difference is that the US is the first to have a realistic chance to succeed.
Still, the recipe for world domination and necessary domestic oppression is ancient and nobody formulated it better than Göring in an interview with an American journalist during the Nürnberg trials
“… after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”
Applying this to our present situation: The 1% needs obedient workers (soldiers) for Saint US Economy—who is the key to power and wealth— and for that, they need to control education. Those who oppose the war on education—the teachers—are denounced as unpatriotic, since they are against producing soldiers for the unlimited fattening of St US Economy, our only chance to beat everybody in The Race To The Top.
Agree O’Weird One….so glad you are in the conversation and making excellent points from an academic’s ‘examined’ point of view. Here is a notice I just received…(and we must remember history and that it was African merchants who often sold their people into slavery)….
Below is a terrifying example of our current American freedom of speech, as of the last few days…and Keith Ellison is a Muslim member of Congress…whose son is caught in the police cross hairs….
———————————————————–
Fund raising notice….
“is shouldering gun. Why?” – Rep. Keith Ellison on Twitter
Show solidarity with Ellison.
Police point gun at Keith Ellison’s sun(sic) during protest.
Ellen,
Progressive Congressman Keith Ellison called it “agonizing” to see police aim a gun at his son during a recent demonstration in Minneapolis.
Local citizens are speaking out against the killing of an unarmed man named Jamar Clark by police. On the same night Chicagoans demanded justice for the shooting of Laquan McDonald, over a thousand Minnesotans demonstrated for justice for Clark.
Keith Ellison successfully asked U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate – calling it “necessary to restore trust.” And local residents, including Ellison’s son Jeremiah, are calling on police to release video of the incident.
Keith is emerging as a national leader as police violence against black Americans happens week after week, city after city.
Can you help keep this bold progressive leader in Congress by donating $3 toward his re-election? It would be a GREAT show of solidarity.
Hours after the police aimed a gun at his son, Ellison flew back to Minneapolis, joined citizens outside a police headquarters, and rallied hundreds of people.
In Minneapolis, Keith continues to stand by demonstrators as they intensify their call for justice. Last week, counter-protestors shot and injured 5 people.
Keith has also been in the news speaking out about the refugee crisis as one of only two Muslim-Americans in Congress. Ellison has debunked myths put out there by Republicans, some Democrats, and xenophobes.
And Keith has been an ongoing leader on “Warren wing” issues such as debt-free college, Wall Street reform, and expanding Social Security benefits instead of cutting them. Keith also authored the Constitutional Amendment to overturn Republican state laws restricting voting rights.”
“As for foreign policy, I really fail to see how the US behaves differently from the Germany of WWII or the long historical line of empires that aimed to control the whole world. Perhaps the main difference is that the US is the first to have a realistic chance to succeed.”
I would defer to John Kerry on this point, but another possible difference is that US foreign policy doesn’t seem to involve annexing large amounts of territory by force for the purpose of establishing a Pan-“American” racial state.
Ellen… seems to me you are quite well versed yourself, in using manipulative language to diminish the power of others’ words and to ridicule their POV…
i could copy and paste from your previous responses, but that would make yet another long post from me, so i will just refer to this from your latest:
“so glad you are in the conversation and making excellent points from an academic’s ‘examined’ point of view. ”
and then you managed to get in a dig at the black lives matter movement with this: “(and we must remember history and that it was African merchants who often sold their people into slavery)”
Congratulations – you get an A+ for strategy and wordsmithing and a F for failing to recognise/own your white supremacist tendencies…
like TRUMP, you’ve let it all hang out, tho he was more direct and honest about it…
“Those who are afraid to speak his name confer power on him.”
An ancient concept and a wise one. That is why God told Moses ‘I am what am/ I will be’, and Yahweh is not spelled fully in ancient Hebrew texts. (The practice not only confers power on “G_d” but also implies that He is being itself).
Those who sidestep potentially controversial issues by not mentioning them– the Politically Correct– seek universal approval [votes] by trivializing this ancient practice, using it in the service of conflict avoidance. In doing so, they inadvertently confer power on the unmentioned controversies, ensuring that they will remain potent, as obvious ideas raised by context yet undiscussed & undigested, thus casting polarized positions in concrete.
For Ellen particularly…. a SLATE article that’s just been posted… please note the references to american nazis in the article – including people who have a commitment to the establishment of a white nation within the bounds of north and south carolina..
Nov. 30 2015 9:58 AM
The Terrorists Among Us
Forget Syria. The most dangerous religious extremists are migrants from North and South Carolina.
By William Saletan
IMAGE: 498965678-hostages-are-escorted-by-police-during-an-active
Hostages are escorted out by police during the active shooter situation outside a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Nov. 27, 2015.
Photo by Justin Edmonds/Getty Images
Another terrorist attack. Another grim tally of the dead and wounded. Another killer full of hate, from a land that breeds such men. Like millions of migrants before him, the perpetrator crossed the border unchallenged. And like others, he struck our country without warning.
Our politicians say they’ll stop these killers. They talk about building walls and vetting refugees. If we were serious, we would do it. We would seal our borders against North Carolina.
North Carolina? It sounds absurd. When we think about immigration and terrorism, we think of Syria. But that’s not where our casualties are coming from. On Friday, a gunman killed three people and wounded nine more at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. The suspect is white American Robert Lewis Dear. When police apprehended Dear, he uttered one telltale phrase: “no more baby parts.” People who have known or met Dear say he wasn’t a regular churchgoer. But they also report that he believed devoutly in the Bible and that he claimed to have read it “cover to cover.” In an online forum, Dear apparently spoke of Jesus and the “end times.” He painted or posted crosses on at least three of his homes.
Dear moved to Colorado last year from North Carolina, where he had been living. For two decades, the Tar Heel State has been a hotbed of religious extremism, fueled by clerics who preach holy war. The result is a stream of interstate terrorism.
It began with Eric Rudolph, a Holocaust denier who grew up in the Christian Identity movement. In 1996, Rudolph traveled from North Carolina to Atlanta, where he detonated a bomb at the Olympics, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others. A year later, Rudolph bombed a lesbian bar in Atlanta, wounding five people. In 1998, he bombed a reproductive health clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killing a security guard and injuring a nurse. The “Army of God,” which hosts Rudolph’s writings, claimed credit for his attacks.
In 2001, Steve Anderson, another Christian Identity follower, was pulled over for a broken tail light on his way home from a white supremacist meeting in North Carolina. He pumped 20 bullets into the officer’s car and fled. Police found weapons, ammunition, and explosives in his truck and home. A year later, he was captured in the western part of the state.
In 2010, Justin Moose, an extremist from Concord, North Carolina, was arrested for plotting to blow up a Planned Parenthood clinic. Moose, who claimed to represent the Army of God, also opposed the construction of a mosque near ground zero in New York. He called himself the “Christian counterpart of Osama Bin Laden.” Eventually, Moose pleaded guilty to disseminating information on how to make and use explosive devices.
In 2014, Frazier Glenn Miller, a career anti-Semite and former grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, killed three people at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home in Kansas. Decades ago, long before ISIS conceived of an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Miller devised a similar plan in the United States: an “all-white nation within the bounds of North and South Carolina.”
Among dozens of avowedly Christian, anti-Semitic, and right-wing terrorists cataloged by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, you’ll find many from these two states: Charles Robert Barefoot Jr., a North Carolina Klan leader who was convicted in 2012 on charges involving firearms, explosives, and violent conspiracy. Kody Brittingham, a Marine at Camp Lejeune who confessed to plotting the assassination of President Obama. Paul Chastain, a South Carolina militiaman who tried to acquire plastic explosives and threatened to kill federal officials. Steve Bixby, a violent activist from an anti-Semitic household, who gunned down two police officers in Abbeville, South Carolina. Daniel Schertz, a Klansman arrested in Greenville, South Carolina, and later convicted, on weapons charges involving racist bomb plots.
And then there’s Dylann Roof. After allegedly murdering nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church this summer, Roof drove more than three hours north, to Shelby, North Carolina. Nobody stopped him at the state border. The boundary between North and South Carolina, like the boundary between Syria and Iraq, is a joke.
Today, Republican presidential candidates are climbing over one another in a race to block the entry of Syrian refugees. They’re doing this even though, among the nearly 800,000 refugees we’ve accepted since 9/11, not one has been convicted of—or has even been arrested for—plotting a terror attack in this country. (A few have been arrested for links to terrorism elsewhere.) Why do refugees have such a clean record? Because they have to go through an elaborate process: screening by U.N. evaluators, “biometric and biographic checks,” consultations with U.S. counterterrorism agencies, and an in-person interview with the Department of Homeland Security. On average, the process takes about a year and a half—or, in the case of Syrian refugees, about two years.
Terrorists from North Carolina encounter no such scrutiny. They just climb into their cars, cross the border, and proceed to Georgia, Kansas, or Colorado. They’re protected by Article IV of the Constitution, which, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, guarantees citizens “the right of free ingress into other States.” That’s why, among the 27 fatal terror attacks inflicted in this country since 9/11, 20 were committed by domestic right-wing extremists. (The other seven attacks were committed by domestic jihadists, not by foreign terrorist organizations.) Of the 77 people killed in these 27 incidents, two-thirds died at the hands of anti-abortion fanatics, “Christian Identity” zealots, white anti-Semites, or other right-wing militants.
This week’s carnage in Colorado brings the death toll from North Carolinian terrorists, including Eric Rudolph, to eight. That’s just one shy of the nine people murdered in Charleston. Throw in the work of a few lesser miscreants, and you’re looking at roughly 20 casualties inflicted by Carolina extremists.
That doesn’t make the Christian states of North and South Carolina anywhere near as dangerous as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But it does make you wonder why, as we close our doors to refugees who have done us no harm, we pay so little attention to our enemies within.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/11/robert_lewis_dear_is_one_of_many_religious_extremists_bred_in_north_carolina.html
Diane’s post has triggered a wide-ranging commentary on several issues, including the question as to the wisdom of accepting syrian refugees…
to that question, i’m going to post the text of, and link to, a new article just posted on CommonDreams, which highlights US foreign policy that spawned ISIS, including the resourcing/support of syrian extremist rebel groups….
This is the chickens coming home to roost; this is the result of american hubris….
Given this history of botched US foreign policy, this country has no moral right to with-hold sanctuary from the people hurt by and fleeing from the consequences of that policy… in fact, the moral thing to do would be to accept ALL the refugees and help them build new lives here, if that’s what they wish…
Published on Monday, November 30, 2015 by Common Dreams
‘Huge Error’: Former US Military Chief Admits Iraq Invasion Spawned ISIS
The U.S. is poised to repeat all the same mistakes in Syria that it made in Iraq after 9/11, says former head of Defense Intelligence Agency
by Nadia Prupis, staff writer
IMAGE: The Islamic State (ISIS) formed in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, said (Ret.) U.S. General Mike Flynn. (Photo: AP)
The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq fueled the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS) today and must serve as a warning against similar rash military intervention in Syria, a former U.S. intelligence chief said in an interview with German media on Sunday.
“When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, ‘Where did those bastards come from? Let’s go kill them. Let’s go get them.’ Instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from,” former U.S. special forces chief Mike Flynn, who also served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), told Der Spiegel. “Then we strategically marched in the wrong direction.”
In recent weeks, ISIS has claimed responsibility for attacks in Lebanon and Paris and the bombing of a Russian airplane over the Sinai peninsula, which together killed hundreds of people. Following the attacks, French President François Hollande vowed a “merciless” response against the group in Syria and Iraq—a statement that prompted comparisons between Hollande and former U.S. President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.
Echoing long-held arguments made by other experts, Flynn said Sunday that increased airstrikes and other offensives could be seen as an attempt to “invade or even own Syria,” and that the fight against militant groups like ISIS will only succeed or make progress through collaborative efforts with both Western and Arab nations. “Our message must be that we want to help and that we will leave once the problems have been solved. The Arab nations must be on our side.”
Otherwise, the U.S. is poised to repeat all its past mistakes, he said.
Der Spiegel’s Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark noted that in February 2004, the U.S. military “already had [ISIS leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in your hands—he was imprisoned in a military camp, but got cleared later as harmless by a U.S. military commission. How could that fatal mistake happen?”
Flynn replied:
We were too dumb. We didn’t understand who we had there at that moment.
[….] First we went to Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was based. Then we went into Iraq. Instead of asking ourselves why the phenomenon of terror occurred, we were looking for locations. This is a major lesson we must learn in order not to make the same mistakes again.
Asked whether he regretted the Iraq War, Flynn responded simply, “Yes, absolutely.”
“It was a huge error,” Flynn said. “As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.”
Flynn’s interview with Der Spiegel echoes comments he made to Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan in August that the U.S. “totally blew it” in preventing the caliphate’s rise “in the very beginning.”
In fact, Flynn said, the U.S. deliberately backed extremist groups within the Syrian rebel movement as far back as 2012, when he was still DIA head. The Obama administration was aware at the time of a recently-declassified DIA memo that predicted the rise of a militant group in eastern Syria. Supporting the insurgency was a “willful decision,” he said.
Watch below:
http://commondreams.org/news/2015/11/30/huge-error-former-us-military-chief-admits-iraq-invasion-spawned-isis
Spike Lee seems certain that TRUMP is a nazi…
article out today: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/01/spike-lee-doesn-t-hold-back-on-chi-raq-laquan-mcdonald-and-how-trump-is-like-hitler.html
Diane wrote:
“Brooks told the German publication Spiegel that comedy robs Hitler of his posthumous power. Those who are afraid to speak his name confer power on him.
To those who say, “You can’t say that,” I say “Yes, you can, and so can I.” If you are afraid to use Hitler and Nazis as metaphors, that is your choice. It is not mine. If Jack Benny could do it in 1942, if Mel Brooks could do it in 1968 (To Be or Not to Be) and again in 1983 (The Producers), well, I say, let freedom of speech ring.”
Didnt JK ROWLING play around with that same theme in Harry Potter? No one would speak Voldemort’s name, people wouldn’t let Harry say it…. and he knew that by not naming the evil, evil’s power would rise….
and by the time people were willing to accept the truth that Voldemort was back, it was almost too late – he had built a powerful following and had undermined the structures of the system and organisation and people who could stop him — and many people had died because of that refusal to accept that reality…
people could do worse than think of that story as a metaphor and apply its teaching to the reality unfolding in front of us now…
Sahila,
I saw the new James Bond movie last night, called “Spectre.” The funny part for me was that the bad guys were collecting data on everyone in the world and creating a massive data base where no one could have a private life. Sounded familiar to some of the discussions on this blog.
yes Diane…. sometime i dont know if art is imitating life, or if life is imitating art… from a shamanic point of view, it makes no difference cos the two are one!