[NEohioPAL] PLEASE read this regarding an existential threat...

[Fred Sternfeld]

Hello Everybody,

As you know, we normally try to keep the Neohiopal list to items that are
more obviously performing arts related and away from politics. I would
argue that the possible election of certain politicians are an existential
threat to free speech and therefore an existential threat to the arts.

So I pass this article from Heather Cox Richardson to you.

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Fred

-------------------------
>From Heather Cox Richardson
<https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/about>...

October 21, 2024 (Monday)
On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living
in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his
political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives,
donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a
fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he
thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign
adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical
left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about
“the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and
former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad
people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that
broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that
led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that
former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has
called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that
his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in
virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The
Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really)
Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933,
oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the
constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first
prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents.
By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition
political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and
students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of
Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for
those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot
deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To
enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil
service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the
Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once
those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes
against immigrants, for example, and others.
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at
her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret
police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed
receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in
store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous
anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that
expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to
become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924
she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York
Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported
on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry
novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.
When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel
Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing
strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents
to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country
in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and
elsewhere.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the
future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of
“startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the
constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power
legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution
and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest
instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above,
discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed:
“Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to
vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the
Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to
leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off
at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had
gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when
she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship
and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train
pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those
officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them
are émigrés and some of them are dead.”
Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were
simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She
lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio
program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write
a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she
became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in
Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she
wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in
advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the
Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always
think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots
and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator
turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will
stand for everything traditionally American.”
In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach
between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is
read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their
political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political
commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the
U.S.”
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square
Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20,
1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed
loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating
that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she
returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a
reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in
Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf
Hitler.”
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised
when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking
her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes
Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to
play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a
showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone
through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I
have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy
itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know
those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between
democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or
nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,”
she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new
ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy
that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too
easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated
intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor
tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of
success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t
anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it
is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or
however modern, go Nazi.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for
the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same
reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a
man, he is a religion,” she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler,
in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think
that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the
reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to
save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous
that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an
American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”
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