[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
I think totalitarian fascism has been defined down if all that it takes to implement it is a string of speeches from a President who can’t be re-elected in 2008 that are critical of those who disagree with him…
Nailed it.
[/quote]
I was reading James Lileks today, and he nailed it:
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/06/0906/092006.html
EXCERPT:
We arrive an hour early for choir, because Tuesday’s pizza night in the tertiary adjunct church basement annex. (It’s a big place.) The kids all watched TV and ate horrible pizza; the moms chatted, the toddlers waddled. Sometimes I chat with the moms, but there wasn’t a seat at the table, and I didn’t want to make everyone move six hundred pounds of coats and purses, so I went up to the library and got the Klemperer diary. (I hadn’t finished it, and when I’m at church with time to spare I pick it up.) I’ve mentioned this before ? it’s a meticulous account of life in Dresden during the Nazi regime, written by a Jewish academic whose “Aryan” wife kept him from the chimney. The diaries start in the early years of Hitler’s rule, and it’s unutterably depressing; in 1937 the diarist is insisting that the government cannot last, and all the decent people believe it will fall soon. (He survived the war, incidentally; the diaries go to the end.)
I was reading the 1941 passages today. Klemperer had his house confiscated by the state, although he was still obliged to pay for a new roof. He was put in a Jewish Home with his wife. Every month, the noose tightens, and not just for him; shortages are rife, and the planes begin to drone overhead. His descriptions of the media give you an idea of where Orwell got the tone and flavor of “1984” ? the state’s incessant pronouncements are heroic and brash and uncomplicated by nuance. Every battle is the greatest ever; every tactic the most brilliant in history. What interested me was his description of the dreaded Sunday announcements: The week would begin with stock phrases, such as “the plan is unfolding as expected;” the middle of the week would offer a glimpse of the news to come, and Sundays were always the same: blare of trumpets, drum roll, Deutschland Uber Alles and the Horst Wessel song, followed by an announcement of a victory on the whichever front the government chose to spotlight. The diarist found Sundays depressing; every victory meant the attenuation of the regime, a continuation of his torments. But surely it would fall soon; surely people would turn. Why, he’d noted that fewer people said “Heil Hitler” instead of “Good Morning” ? this must mean something. It must. Perhaps it did, but it didn’t matter.
By “torments” I don’t mean he was hauled down to the station and beaten. No. He was just denied something different every week. Once the Jews had become accustomed to being banned from public libraries, they were banned from private lending libraries. Once they had gotten used to the special taxes, the taxes were raised. Once they had settled into the special apartment buildings after their homes were taken, they were denied common areas after dark and confined to their apartments. And so on. That was 1941. He had four years to go. Imagine yourself standing on a street at 7:30, watching the taxis pour past, knowing you must be in your room by eight, or it’s the train and the barracks.
Imagine telling that detail to a friend, and noting his shock: he had no idea. He was appalled. (As Klemperer relates it, his German friend, an eminently liberal humanist, nevertheless hoped for the defeat of England; he had managed to separate his dislike of Hitler from his abiding hatred of Great Britain. You infer that the latter blinded him to the former, and that allowed him to reconcile his humanism with the deprivations he knew his Jewish friends faced. In the end we must all make sacrifices, no?)
That was fascism.
Yesterday my paper’s editorial section ran a cartoon from one of the staff artists, a feature that illustrates a quote chosen for its stinging pertinence. The illustration shows two typically stupid Americans with toothy grins and military hats emblazoned with dollar signs. They’re clutching books that say “HOLY WRIT.” The quote:
“I have often thought that if a rational, fascist dictatorship were to exist, the it would choose the American system.” Noam Chomsky
And I used to think that if Elle McPherson really existed, she would parachute naked through my apartment window. She never did but it doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Any day now. Any day.
An angry man on the radio yesterday insisted that talk radio was part of the “fascist control” of the media. He was, of course, a barking lunatic, as nuts as the people who were certain Clinton would use Y2K to appoint himself Bubba the First and suspend the Constitution. But if you dial down the rhetoric a little, you find the same overheated sentiments in more mainstream quarters. It reminded me of Keith Olbermann, who, by his own words, is the first person to criticize the current Administration, all other voices of dissent having willingly stifled themselves in accordance with Archie Bunker Act of 2002. The other day he birthed this rich observation:
" . . .That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think. Thus the lightning flash reveals not merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a monopoly on current truth. It now shows us a President who has decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever, he alone has had the knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights."
Yes, indeed. Well, having just read what actual altering and reshaping rights looks like, I am disinclined to panic over the thing made out in the distant horizon via lightning, even if it reveals “a world” ? presumably Manhattan, below 150th street ? in which “authority” ? presumably Drinky W. Flyboy, the Resident-in-Chief ? actually suggests that thinking is unacceptable, and we must hereby rely on our autonomous nervous system.
Hear ye: if ever I announce that the lightning is sending me messages about how the government seeks to control what I think, please have me commited for paranoid schizophrenia.
Then again, it’s no ordinary lightning flash. It simultaneously “reveals not merely a President we have already seen,” but one who is preparing to revoke Keith Olbermann’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of a job on a network a lot of people actually watch. Fine; it’s good red meat, and there’s always a market for that. (Insert obligatory Ann Coulter denunciation!) Mr. O has his furrow, and he will spend the next two years shoving the blade in the dirt. He will have fans and nice write-ups and profiles and the rest of the perks that follow when you stake out a particular niche. Just like Art Bell. And just like Art Bell, he will instantly become a footnote the moment something horrible and significant happens, and his nonsense is swamped by things that actually happen, instead of things he believes are actually suggested.
One of the constant rhetorical ticks in my email concerns my incontinence when it comes to “terrorism.” Apparently people of my ilk are constantly pissing or piddling ourselves when the government plays the ol’ booga-booga card. We drop our Big Gulps and shout “oh, protect me from the scary Mooselmen, Great Father!” I think it was Woocott who first dribbled this particular riposte, and it’s caught on. A day doesn’t go by in which someone doesn’t point out a direct connection between ginned-up scare-news and the retentive abilities of my urethra.
Perhaps it’s so; perhaps there’s a reason I sit in the dark at night making cold calls to Pakistan, hoping the government taps my phone and maybe, just maybe, finds a terrorist on the other end.
But there’s a certain dark jot of damp trouser-front to Olbermann’s rhetoric as well, no?
