Tag: 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.

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.

What We Hath Wrought

RIP Amara Renas and all the other unknown women and men and children. May you haunt our collective memory forever.

The Beeb is reporting that « Turkey and its allies are (“allegedly”) committing war crimes, especially against Kurdish women » in Syria:

“Turkish-backed forces fighting Kurdish militias in north-east Syria have been accused of committing war crimes, with acts of brutality surfacing on mobile phone footage.

“The UN has warned that Turkey could be held responsible for the actions of its allies, while Turkey has promised to investigate.

“Bearded men shout ‘Allahu Akbar [God is the Greatest]’. One captures the scene on his smartphone and says: ‘We are mujahedeen [holy warriors] from Faylaq Al-Majd [Glory Corps] battalion.’ In the background are the corpses of Kurdish fighters.

“Further away, a group of men plant their feet on a woman’s bloodied body. One says she is a ‘whore’.

‘The gruesome footage is much like that produced by the ultra-violent Islamic State (IS) group.

“Yet the men in this video are not IS militants, but rather fighters for a rebel alliance known as the Syrian National Army, trained, equipped and paid for by a Nato member, Turkey. They are under the command of the Turkish army.

‘The video was filmed on 21 October in northern Syria. The woman beneath the fighters’ feet is Amara Renas, a member of an all-woman unit of Kurdish fighters, the YPJ, a force that played a significant role in defeating IS in Syria.

BBC

Notice how the BBC calls the video “brutal” and “gruesome,” words which are not in quotes or alleged. The video is not allegedly brutal and gruesome, it IS brutal and gruesome, says the BBC. Yet they get nervous about calling Turkish jihadist allies war criminals, even though the crimes are very much graphically shown in the brutal, gruesome video.

More importantly than all this, these war crimes are being committed against Kurdish women fighters specifically, and against our Kurdish allies generally. After the mobster-in-chief in the White House unleashed all this.

Not only should he and his administration be impeached and removed for high crimes and misdemeanors, he should also be held personally responsible for these war crimes. Impeachment is certain, but removal is unlikely, and seeing him tried for war crimes is a fantasy.

After all, the last time we had a chief executive who unleashed war crimes (remember Abu Graib anyone?), nothing happened. That president is just sitting around painting pictures of hot dogs while lolling in his bathtub.

Still, there is value in keeping a chronicle of crimes and never forgetting them. This current stain on a house that is never free of stains in some form needs to be remembered and prevented. And we should all start using quotes when referring to executive mansion: The “White” House has been various shades of blood red from its inception.

RIP Amara Renas and all the other unknown women and men and children who fought on our behalf as well as their own. May you haunt our collective memory forever.

Normandy 2019

Tragically brilliant.

«One of the most brilliant things I’ve seen in a long time». Steve Bell and The Guardian continue to hit these out of the park. Go there and read, donate, support. They cover the U.S. as, if not more, effectively than the Times and Post or any other American news organization. Not that those exist anymore, but still.

Far more importantly, RIP Kurds. From you stretching back all the way to Columbus is a long, unbroken trail of genocide. Perhaps things will be just a tiny, marginally bit better in 2021. Knowing other Americans as I do, I’m not holding my breath. I am sincerely sorry that you will not have breath to hold until 2021. What a treasonous betrayal.

Impeach. Remove.

No Slope, No False Equivalency. Just the Same. Damn. Thing.

Immoral, indecent, inhumane. … We are running concentration camps and human beings are dying.

Immoral, indecent, inhumane. There is no slippery slope; this country is on a well-trodden path dating back at least to 1492. There is also no false equivalency. We are running concentration camps and human beings are dying. [Full Stop]

Details are in the OIG report to DHS. Full report is here.

Sieg …

“DEEPLY OFFENDED that a child refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance bc freedom is all about mandatory loyalty oaths.”

John Fugelsang on Twitter

Amen to John Fugelsang’s tweet. Also, it could have been written: “DEEPLY OFFENDED that black football players refuse to stand for the National Anthem bc freedom is all about mandatory loyalty posturing.”

This has been a problem for decades in this country, Jeebus knows.

Plus … this response is fabulous:

As an aside, here’s a great photo of the way students were forced to salute the American flag back in the days when America was great:

[Wikipedia Commons]

It’s worth noting some text from the decision written by Justice Robert H. Jackson (who would go on to prosecute Nazis at the Nuremberg trials—irony!) in West Virginia v. Barnette, the 1943 decision in which the Supreme Court said, quelle surprise, we cannot be forced to “pledge” “allegiance” to the U.S. flag:

“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. …

“The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

Justice Robert H. Jackson

I would never presume to improve on anything Justice Jackson wrote, so …

—30—

[ Photo at top by Alex Martinez on Unsplash ]