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

Tue Oct 22 11:54:20 PDT 2024

Some of the most acclaimed works of art can be and have also been defined
as political. Can art be complete without politics?  Personally, I don't
think so.  They are somewhat intertwined; one affects the other in some
ways.

Peter Anthony Fields
playwright/novelist
www.peteranthonyfields.com

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 2:23 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
> _____________________________________
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