"It CAN happen here" - must read

[trof]

My deepest thanks to depakote_kid for posting a link to this in another thread.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2344349&mesg_id=2344349

It deserves a thread of its own.

Published on Monday, July 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann


"Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

Please read the entire article here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm

[OneBlueSky]

1. fascism = "merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state"

we're already there, folks . . . we're already there . . .

[Shopaholic]

2. Amen to that---

too true. You control the media, you control the message. That's where we're at now and we're not in control of the media or the message.

[trof]

4. Damned if we aren't.

Now what?

[LWolf]

6. Good question.

I'm open to suggestion.

Anybody?

[ulysses]

8. we can start

by ridding ourselves of the corporatists and their appeasers of all parties.

[LWolf]

9. Yes, and I think that in order to do that,

we are going to have to wrest the media away from them. As long as they own and direct the media, it will be hard to organize well enough to be rid of them. I was struck by this part of the article; the bolding is mine:

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:

" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."

[trof]

10. Precisely.

Murdoch/News Corp/Fox News, Washington Times/Sun Yung Moon, GE/NBC, Disney,Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Savage, and all the rest.

[LWolf]

11. So, how do we do that?

So far, the internet has made a difference for some; but I don't think for a moment that, left unchecked, the media conglomerates will leave it unfettered. Who owns the ISPs?

I quit watching all tv news on principle, and almost never listen to the radio. I recently called my sattelite company and removed the networks from my programming. I've cut them off. But I'm just one person. How many people need to be willing to turn the set off and search out alternative sources before it makes any kind of difference?

Will Kerry work to get the FCC to re-regulate how many stations any one person or corporation can own?

[ulysses]

12. and how do we do that?

To my mind, focusing on taking back the major media is a losing proposition because the major media outlets are owned by corporations that have no allegiance but to themselves. The only force, as far as I know, that could rein them in is the federal government, the control of which we've all but consigned to that same media. Wash, rinse, repeat.

We're living in Joseph Goebbels' wet dream. We have to go *around* them, not through them. The question is how.

[LWolf]

13. There are alternate sources for news

and editorials in place already. So I guess the question is, how do we get people to move their focus away from the tv screens and onto other sources?

[renegade000]

5. from the mouth of good ol' benito

father of fascism himself.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[trof]

7. Sorry bub. Too late to "guard against".

We're there.
Now...how to take our government back?
That's the question.
Welcome to DU.

[donkeyotay]

14. here's a boring, workable idea

The fascist state has resulted from allowing representative democracy to be hijacked. We need our congress to be beholden to the people. They are gutless, but not dumb, so they play the corporate game to stay in Washington. We must give them cover for them to do otherwise.

Liberals are currently expending vast amounts of time and energy fighting on myriad fronts with little result. If we reduce our problems to the lowest common denominator, it's lack of representation. So, instead of splintering up into small issue-groups of protest, instead of exhausting ourselves writing detailed LTTE, I am suggesting that we each write ourselves ONE letter, even a postcard.

Demand the full restoration of representative government for people. Remind them that McCain/Feingold demonstrates that incrementalism will not work.

There are two horseshit objections to this. 1) money is speech and 2)corporations are individuals. These are both debatable even if they have some legal precident.

We all take our letters, make zillions of copies, go buy a roll of stamps, and mail the letter to our representative's local office weekly until they and the local media can no longer ignore the stacks.

You might be sorry you asked, but this is what I tell people who ask for answers. It is a boring solution that could work.

[gumby]

15. "Who cares what you think?"

And if you don't tow the party line, you won't work, eat or find housing. That's just for starters.

What do you think has been going on the last 30+ years? What do you think Rush Limbaugh has been spewing for 15 years? What do you think the "elves" trying to destroy Clinton were doing? What do you think Heritage Foundation, AEI, etc have been working for all these years?

This country is a One Party State NOW. I was fairly certain that if The Monster was installed into the presidency, that it would be the end of our democracy. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything to make me think differently.

<bummed out>
edit: added " " to denote a * quote, not referring to anyone else.