An unlettered demagogue consolidating his power, a careless press dedicated to “bothsiderism” and a timid squishy middle scared of it’s own shadow are a recipe for authoritarianism.
Thom Hartmann, at Salon, gives us a peek, by looking into the past, at the right wing’s plan to scapegoat the left and seize the levers of power.
“Some of us have seen this movie before. In my generation, when I was a teenage member of MSU’s SDS in the late 1960s, I remember the guy who was always yelling, “Kill the pigs,” and encouraging us to burn down the ROTC building on campus. In later years, I heard from old SDS colleagues that when they sued the police, they learned that the outspoken guy was a police officer and his friends were informants.
For my dad’s generation, the right-wing takeover of a protest movement happened in Germany generations ago, so most Americans don’t even recognize Marinus van der Lubbe’s name…
It started when the government, struggling with questions of its own legitimacy and the instability of its leader, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. Historians are still debating whether the “terrorist” was a mentally incompetent young man maneuvered into place to take the fall for the crime, or was an actual communist ideologue (of limited intellectual means and probably schizophrenic; that seems to be one thing most agree on).
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the people claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.
He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.”
I have to get to work and don’t have time to devote to analyzing Hartmann’s piece as thoroughly as I should.
But I urge anyone who opens this to follow the link and read it.
The willingness of many here to go along with the right wing framing of Antifa, who do so much good work in exposing and combating the neo fascists many would like to pooh pooh and ignore, should be a cautionary tale for how democracies die.