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

Tue Oct 22 11:06:32 PDT 2024

Stay out of politics!

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 11:17 AM Fred Sternfeld via NEohioPAL <
neohiopal at lists.neohiopal.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 

Jim Volkert

330-603-8334
*"In Wilderness is the preservation of the World"*  Thoreau
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