My own family left our country of origin because to be a member of our ethnic group, our religion, had become a death sentence. I remember my great-uncle showing me the scars of bullets. Riders galloped through his village shooting as many of my people as they saw, simply because we were the “wrong” race.
Another quote:
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to Internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: Our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war,” a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president — without U.S. citizens realizing it yet — the power over U.S. citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
I see this in the lack of over sight of DSS – the discretion is so total.
I see this in Washington where accused are held without charges, in secret, and taken to black holes to be tortured in other countries.
Another quote:
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as W.H. Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere — while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing. “Dogs go on with their doggy life ? How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”
Maybe the most radical act of all would be to demand civics in the schools, 100% televised coverage of all sessions and hearings on Beacon Hill, and to support reining in the Imperial Presidency in Washington.
… and heck, a little warning hysteria is not all bad. As she says, it’s a process of erosion, and our freedoms are surely eroding.
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The interesting thing about Wolf’s various steps to fascism is that none of these occur as an exercise of absolute power; each one occurs with the consent of the other branches of power, or that of the press, or of the populace. Bush didn’t have to win in 2004, eg. — the people put him back there.
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That’s what we have some power over, and that’s where we’ve got to start: Stop putting up with it, and encourage our press and neighbors to do the same.
I agree. I pretty much ignored everything beyond work and family between 1983 and 2003 – except for a couple issues in child welfare law. It was actually Romney’s “style” and actions that caused me to wake up again in 2003. The reasons I became so apolitical for those prior years are personal, but I am glad to be awake, alive, and involved once again.