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

Tue Oct 22 13:18:45 PDT 2024

Wouldn't it be grand to create art without the stain of politics. I know I
try, but politics is upon all of the citizenry in every walk of life. We
have a choice to use our creative processes to keep the gateways of free
thought and expression open or to have them slammed in our faces to only
exist as propaganda. History has taught us this and we must learn from it.
What is happening now is not by happenstance. Fascism has patience. It
waited for the veterans of WWII to fade away, let history become dulled.
The Thousand year Riech is approaching the first hundred years. Hitler
boasted  a thousand years, perhaps we can end that boast and honor those
that gave so much to defeat it 80 years ago.

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 2:24 PM Jim Volkert via NEohioPAL <
neohiopal at lists.neohiopal.org> wrote:

> 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
> _____________________________________
>
> Please consider a voluntary contribution to support Neohiopal -
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