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

Wed Oct 23 02:28:56 PDT 2024

Hello.

If we had no other channels to discuss politics, the utilization of a
performing arts list might be important. However, at this point in time,
information can be shared and discussed in myriad ways. This particular
channel of communication serves a purpose, and I do not want that purpose
to be lost.

In the 2016 election, I saw a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)
Facebook community destroyed by politics. That group had previously been a
wonderful place to discuss writing with other writers. It was a large and
diverse group, so we were able to ask for content advice, drawing on the
experiences of people around the world and across different demographics.
We were able to have a respectful conversation even when a fantasy writer
asked what might be found in a witch's cottage and someone responded along
the lines of, "Well I *am* a witch, so here's some things I have in my
house."

Politics, religion, and love were discussed from many perspectives, but it
was always in the context of writing. That is, until the 2016 election.
That wonderful group of writers discussing writing turned into a place to
talk about Trump and Clinton - even people who were not American were
arguing. It became heated and disrespectful. It ceased to be a safe place
to discuss writing. Criticism was no longer constructive. Utilizing the
platform to bluntly argue politics prevented the platform from being used
effectively by those who wanted to discuss writing. Writers left the group,
because they were already hearing about politics everywhere else and that
platform became no different from any other at the time. That group was
never the same again, even long after the election was over. Trust had been
destroyed. The world lost a beautiful thing to hate.

If this performing arts list is used for direct political messaging, will
artists leave? Will the people who want to connect with other artists lose
an opportunity to make a connection? Once a connection is made, it can be
maintained even if this platform is shut down. If the connection is never
made, we may be more easily scattered and divided.

Sharing a message with a large group of distant people is different from
sharing a message with faces you can see. Art can sometimes overcome this
by forming a different kind of connection, but there is a reason why
political art bothers to create connection with the audience.

When you ask me to read something political, why are you asking me to read
it? Am I the target audience for this message? Do you think I am ignorant?
Were I a person who chooses to be ignorant of politics, why would I choose
to read this? Do you think I am your enemy? Were I your enemy, would this
persuade me to change my mind? Do you think I am your ally? Were I your
ally, would this tell me anything I don't already believe?

I believe that building and preserving a network of connections and support
is more valuable than broadcasting a message of doom to people you haven't
first connected with.

I could use this platform to tell you about the existential threat of AI,
or the existential threat of environmental change, or the existential
threat of overdependence on infrastructure. I could tell you why I think
the Hohokam civilization disappeared, and how I see history repeating
itself today. But I do not believe this is the channel I should use for
that type of communication.

Regards,

Carolyn

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 7:56 PM rev rachel hollander via NEohioPAL <
neohiopal at lists.neohiopal.org> wrote:

> Agreed.
>
> Thank you, Fred☮️
>
> reverend rachel hollander, minister
> revrachelhollander.com <http://www.revrachelhollander.com>
> It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our
> preaching.
> ~ brother francesco of assisi
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 5:37 PM Peter Anthony Fields via NEohioPAL <
> neohiopal at lists.neohiopal.org> wrote:
>
>> 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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