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amspeck

amspeck's Journal
amspeck's Journal
November 21, 2022

Next steps?

I just listened to the final episode and I have to think about next steps.

I mean one is to understand that the right wing, authoritarian-adoring folks she is talking about have a direct through-line to today. David Talbot documents one of these lines in his book "The Devils Chessboard". It is not just that people read about the Nazis in a history book and thought they had some good ideas. It's that people who are in positions of power now were mentored by people who were mentored by people who thought Hitler's Germany had the right idea.

A second is to put the Ukraine war under the lens of this story. Fighting the Nazis is part of the origin story of Putin's Russia, but when he calls the Ukrainians "Nazis" he is justifying his own genocide of Jewish peoples who've lived in that part of the world for centuries. Putin does not mean "anti-Semitic, violence-loving, human experimenting, colonialist war machine" he means "people opposed to Russia's goals."
And Putin is funding a propaganda and political support column for his genocidal policies in the US and a whole bunch of congress critters seem to be drinking from that well.

And then the third -- how do we resist the forces of authoritarianism today?
Of course she talks about funding journalism and research, it's her deal. (And I do; I have listened to her on this and support news locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally).
And there is some hope in the idea that when the truth comes out voters will turn out their elected representatives who were complicit in these acts.

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Member since: Sun Nov 20, 2022, 12:02 PM
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