Normalizing fascism

[Tanuki]

http://theconversation.com/normalizing-fascists-69613

How to report on a fascist?
How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone
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The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.


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Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid ‘20’s to early ‘30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

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[mountain grammy]

1. This is such a good article

I've read it before, don't remember where, maybe here.

Even then, the New Yorker stood for truth. Why I'm a subscriber today. And Harper's still on the mark.

[cheyanne]

2. Demagogues don't govern, they create chaos and fear.

Trump is not worried about governing; he likes and needs chaos and fear. We should be focusing on his action to destabilize the governement by purging the beaucracy, employing loyalists (who have no career other than his favor, like is family) and ignoring usual safeguards and features.

In essence his "policies" and all talk of programs is just cover. He needs to keep the appearance of legitamacy while he consolidates his power. He lets the republicans think that they are implementing policies but he doesn't really care what they are. He will use his power to create fear and incite his base against "enemies" and will say whatever is necessary at the moment to do that.

An aside, The "respectable" businessmen who have agreed to join his entourage will soon find that he will treat them as he did Christie: do my dirty work but if you get caught I throw you to the wolves.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Suggested reading: They Thought They Were Free

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928


First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”--from Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”

[cockamamie]

4. "Fascism" is another one of those terms that doesn't carry as much weight as it used to

Nobody can even agree on what it actually means.

[mountain grammy]

6. Thank you. Good bye.

[BSdetect]

5. Creeping cretinism creeping fascism

Its the gradual deterioration of decency with sudden spurts of horror.

It will be too late unless there are people prepared to say enough.

[Cha]

7. Yeah, Mussilini didn't have a good end.. do they ever?

Thanks Tanuki