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

[Cathy Lesser Mansfield]

For anyone who thinks art is immune in a regime that designates some people
worthy and some people "the enemy from within" worthy of prosecution and
persecution, please go to the Maltz Museum to see the Degenerate Art exhibit
<https://www.maltzmuseum.org/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/>.  Hitler
labeled certain art, not only art created by Jews, as degenerate.  The Nazi
party burned books by many authors, including non-Jews, for being
unGerman.  Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of
association are fundamental to the creation and presentation of art.

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 5:43 PM Brian Bartels via NEohioPAL <
neohiopal at lists.neohiopal.org> wrote:

> 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
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-- 
Cathy Lesser Mansfield
www.thesparksflyupward.org
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