Category: Fascism

You Get Out

“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”

Yes, “the lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later:

Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.

Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

—The Guardian

It’s great if you can get out, but like in 1933, not many of us can leave. Would Canada take us? Nearing retirement, no money, not famous, not Ivy League professors, not … anything? Just like the United States in 1933, most countries would reject us. Oh, yes. But we would go if we could.

Everything Old is New Again

Williams Shirer on editing his college newspaper. We’re still experiencing the same stuff today.

Williams Shirer on editing his college newspaper. We’re still experiencing the same stuff today. My own mother told me in 2024 that “You can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat.”

Same ol’, same ol’.

This. Is. Us. Part Two

We have ALWAYS been this. One example among countless: The Sand Creek Massacre: “An estimated 70 to 600 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho – about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants – were murdered and mutilated by Col. [John] Chivington [a Methodist minister] and the volunteer troops under his command. Chivington and his men also took scalps and many other human body parts as trophies, including unborn fetuses, as well as male and female genitalia.” [Wikipedia]

Captain Silas Soule refused to attack at Sand Creek, testified against Chivington and “within three months was murdered by a soldier who had been under Chivington’s command at Sand Creek. Some believed Chivington may have been involved.”

Chivington suffered … the end of his political aspirations (oh, the poor, poor man), but nothing else and died of cancer peacefully in bed in Denver in 1894 at the ripe old age of 73, unrepentant to the very end.

Thus has it always been, with more massacres certainly to come.

This.
Is.
US.

This. Is. Us.

The following quote so accurately pegs the U.S. of the 2020s as it did the U.S. of the 1890s. Shirer writes of Upton Sinclair’s famous and seminal work, The Jungle, regarding the Chicago and U.S. in which he was born and raised.

This. Is. Us.

More will follow.

On Courage to Stand Your Ground

Regarding < this interview in the New Yorker>: A response.

As I know from being a reporter (and as opposed to the myth we all had agendas), all I had to do was let someone talk and then print a transcript. They showed their moral bankruptcy or stupidity or cupidity themselves without help. This reporter has done exactly that.

While outside the Irving trial and her bio I don’t know much about her or her path here, but this reveals serious, mealy-mouthed moral bankruptcy. She’s on board with the “both sides are good people” thought school and seems to have been bought off by an American embassy in Jerusalem.

While outside the Irving trial and her bio I don’t know much about her or her path here, but this reveals serious, mealy-mouthed moral bankruptcy. She’s on board with the “both sides are good people” thought school and seems to have been bought off by an American embassy in Jerusalem.

Have to wonder how she rationalizes an administration that celebrates a white Christian nationalist pastor, Joel Webbon. As I said, just print the transcript and they eagerly reveal who they are:

“I do think that there’s some level of not all Jews, but particular Jews in positions of political power in the West, outside of Israel, not their own country, but in our country or in England or this or that, and opening the door to Muslims to come and ravage the nation. …

“So I see Muslims, not as our friends, but doing this, destroying nations. But I see Jews holding open the door.”—Joel Webbon [Right Response Ministries livestream, 21-Apr-25.] “Oh, but that beautiful embassy in Jerusalem!” <ahem>

Back to Lipstadt: Her very weak response to the American GeStaPo snatch-and-grab mass arrests of non-Jews and their “resettlement” in the south makes me wonder: Would she have, voluntarily or not, served on on one of the Judenräten in the German-occupied East?

Sadly, for me at least, she gives her answer in her own words. Makes you wonder what she said off record. She has the serious career and credentials behind her, but ghat’s all the more reason not to falter now.

While her reticence might be down to worry about threats, she HAS way more to fear from the truly antisemitic American right wing, who have for centuries put down any Jew, fellow traveller or not. She now reminds me of the character Aaron Jastrow from “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance.”

Antisemitism is wrong. Full stop. The state of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, & the West Bank, full stop. Fascism & genocide are wrong whether perpetrated by Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Communist, atheist or my Aunt Fanny. Both the above statements are true. No gray.

“If they don’t stand for something, they will fall for anything.” — Gordon A. Eadie, 1945

When you’ve done all you know stand, then stand there, to paraphrase Ephesians, which adds that your stand should be made while wearing the whole armor of your faith—your moral compass.

It’s trite, but never again is now. So as for me and my house, I stand. Wholly and on the record, unafraid.