DEFEAT FASCISM

 A synopsis of the 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis:

"In 1936, American Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip enters the presidential election campaign on a populist platform, promising to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, and promising each citizen US$5,000 per year (equivalent to $113,000 in 2024). Portraying himself as a champion of "the forgotten man" and "traditional" American values, Windrip defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, and then beats his Republican opponent, Senator Walt Trowbridge, in the November election.

 Having previously foreshadowed some authoritarian measures to reorganize the government, Windrip outlaws dissent, incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force called the "Minute Men" (named after the Revolutionary War militias of the same name), who terrorize citizens and enforce the policies of a corporatist regime. One of Windrip's first acts as president is to eliminate the influence of Congress, which draws the ire of many citizens as well as the legislators themselves. The Minute Men respond to protests harshly, attacking demonstrators with bayonets. In addition to these actions, Windrip's administration, known as the Corpo government, curtails women's and minority rights, and eliminates individual states by subdividing the country into administrative sectors. The government of these sectors is managed by Corpo authorities, usually prominent businessmen or Minute Men officers. Those accused of crimes against the government appear before kangaroo courts presided over by military judges. A majority of Americans approve of these dictatorial measures, seeing them as painful but necessary steps to restore American power." - Wikipedia

DEFEAT FASCISM

 Reading “Murder Among Friends” by Candace Fleming. It’s the latest recounting of the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. All lived in Chicago near one another and the murder shocked the world, created new standards in criminal law, and caused generations of concern about mental capabilities.

The two murderers were from wealthy families and well educated. They lived under the Nietzschean idea that some individuals were superhuman and marched to a different moral drum than mere mortals. They chose their victim because he was walking home from school. They simply wanted to experience the thrill of murder.

Disclaimer. I’m no psychiatrist. Nor am I a psychologist. I’m not overly educated. Both degrees originated from state-supported public universities. I do claim the right, however, to be fascinated. I am.
Some analysts suggest that two people acting together will participate in horrific actions that neither would consider when acting alone.

Some increasingly accepted scholarship suggests that interactions with peer groups largely determine our adult proclivities and that parental upbringing contributes little. See “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do” by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris. (Don’t yell at me.)

What fascinates me is this: In a younger life, I joined thousands of youth, some as young as 17 years, who learned from respected authority figures that it was perfectly acceptable to do what Loeb and Leopold did, i.e. murder a randomly selected youth from another tribe. The burden posited that it was not only okay, but our duty, to murder on demand, whether by hand, pistol, rifle, knife, artillery, or (for the more timid at heart) with bombs dropped from thousands of feet in the air. Almost all of my peer group would have complied if ordered to.

Now we ask ourselves why millions of Americans blindly follow a command to murder the American dream.

Further reading: The Milgram Experiment On Obedience to Authority.

Oh, clicking on an ad helps me fund these efforts.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 So often when a particularly odious law drifts down upon our cities, it contains the admonition that, when trying to adjust to it, a city must employ the "least restrictive option." This occurs even when lives are not threatened but protected. These laws generally originate in far-right think tanks. That's where most of our proposed land use laws originate these days.

I guess the Protocall for ICE didn't emerge from one of those. Their actions call not for "strict scrutiny" but for no scrutiny, thought the lives of individuals and their families are greatly affected.

I think the first thing the panspermian aliens will do when they start putting it all back together is to resurrect the concept of hypocrisy.

DEFEAT FASCISM

It's hard not to think that this time is the most troubling our country has, or will, experience. It probably is, since it portends total destruction, but America has had her ups and downs.

There was 1861 when the split could have become permanent. There was 1929 when the economic system could have collapsed indefinitely. There was 1941 when the forces of fascism could have prevailed.

Then there was 1968.

 I've been watching the Netflix series on the Vietnam War in segments. As a friend remarked, it was a long time ago, but it seems like yesterday. I wasn't in America that year. She had sent me somewhere else. Of course, to paraphrase the poet Rupert Brooke, for the soldier (or sailor in my case), there will always be some corner of a foreign field that is forever home. But I wasn't here.

At any rate, I remember that my comrades and I had this sinking feeling, on hearing the reports, that our country had gone batshit crazy.

It appeared never more so for me than the night, during a lonely midwatch at a bunker atop a mountain by the South China Sea, when I picked up a day-old copy of Stars and Stripes someone had discarded and learned that that the Paris Peace Talks had ended in failure. The reason? The then president of the then Republic of South Vietnam had withdrawn from the talks.

At the time, I discarded the paper and watched a helicopter spewing rounds at a distant mountain. Every fifth round or so was a tracer, so the effect was as if someone were pouring hot rivets from a bucket in the sky. Who knows the impact of those rounds?

Years later I learned why the talks stalled. Richard Nixon, then a presidential candidate did it. He maintained a secret channel to the South Vietnamese through Anna Chennault, widow of Claire Lee Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers in China during World War II. Mrs. Chennault had become a prominent Republican fund-raiser and Washington hostess. Through her, he convinced the South Vietnamese ambassador to withdraw from the talks until after the 1968 election for his—Nixon's—advantage.

I think back about the men, from various countries, who died within my sight that night and it becomes clear.

Donald Trump is not the first one. 

DEFEAT FASCISM

 It becomes more apparent each day that traditional political efforts won’t work against the MAGA dictatorship. It owns the congress, the courts, the presidency, and is working on the military and the media. There is no way that those in power will permit another election in a form consistent with Democracy. The January 6 thugs have formed a fledgling “brownshirt squad” and are actively recruiting members.

What is left? Perhaps what Karl von Clausewitz called “friction.” In Clausewitz's "On War", friction is defined as “the obstacles and difficulties that arise in war, making it more complex and challenging than a simple plan on paper. It's the force that makes "the apparently easy so difficult".

In other words, slow them down, make each step more difficult than the last, and wear them out.

How?

Let us put our heads together. What has worked so far? The efforts of brave lawyers for one thing. Even though they face a 6-3 negative majority in SCOTUS in significant cases, the efforts of getting cases there must be taking a toll. Also, there is the possibility that one or more of the MAGA judges will have what I call a “Thomas Beckett Moment” and shift to the side of righteousness. Our contributions will help.

Let us think more on this strategy. Comments?

DEFEAT FASCISM

Sometimes fiction is more realistic than reality. Take the current dictatorship in America. Compare it to a fictional work, the 1971 Woody Allen film Bananas. In this spoof of the Cuban revolution, the rebel leader of the fictional country of San Marcos, Esposito, seems admirable when compared with the dictator Vargas.

Then the rebels win and Exposito becomes the new dictator. In a surprise development, power has driven the leader mad. He announces that he is the ruler of San Marcos, and orders that the country's official language will be Swedish and that citizens must now change their underwear every half hour, wearing it outside their clothing so that it can easily be checked.

This wasn’t foreseen and leads to many plot escapades.

Let’s look now at two actual dictatorships during the last century. They announced their plans early, openly, and proudly, the first in Mein Kampf and the second in Project 2025. Each laid out clear plans for the resulting victory to their adherents.

Whereas the change in the film’s protagonist was a complete surprise. The results of the two real cases simply appeared as fulfillment of plans and prophecy. Their actions surprise no discerning citizen.

Can we note differences? Yes. Even the brilliant imagination of Woody Allen couldn’t have utilized the plot line of America’s dictatorship. The actions of our dictator reside far outside the boundaries of what one would imagine the inhabitants of a modern democracy would accept, even an imaginary one.

In other words, the idiocies currently flowing from our current seat of power defy logic to the point that they wouldn’t lend themselves to believable fiction such as the plot of a Woody Allen film.

Also, they just aren’t very funny. Maybe if the president grew a beard.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 The closest analogy I can think of for America's current predicament is my experience in military survival training. In a training exercise in a California desert, we were starved for four days and then sent to a mock prison camp. Enemy forces had "captured" us and held complete power. They owned the prison, the guards, the weapons, and all communication. What could we do?

"Resist," our trainers had told us. Resist and cause them effort in every movement. Wear them out and wait for any opportunity. Tell them nothing. Offer them nothing. Resist every command. Make nothing easy or simple for them.

My first encounter came when a burly guard approached me as I was standing almost naked by a large pile of tree limbs and brush gathered by former prisoners. He barked. I resisted. He knocked me over into the pile of limbs.

Resistance was a bit harder after that, but I tried.

Let us all try now. They own everything: the presidency, the legislature, and the supreme court. They will soon own the military if unchecked. Times will get harder. Things will get worse. It will not end well unless we check them with scarce resources. It will be difficult. They flaunt their power as if they have won. "Look what we can do," they jeer.

Yes. They own everything.

They think so. But they don't own our souls.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 This will not end well. Consider the great fall of fascism in 1945. As the allied armies devasted Germany from the east and the west, Nazi commanders refused to cease fighting, help stop the devastation, and save thousands of German lives because, “I took an oath to The Fuehrer to never surrender.”

Though Himmler himself had ordered some concentration camp guards to flee and save themselves, they instead gathered the remaining prisoners and forced them into death marches.

As resistant collapsed, Army commanders still tried to follow Hitler’s orders to counter-attack with divisions that no longer existed from bases in cities that had been leveled.

As the remnants of the Third Reich huddled in Hitler’s bunder, the Gestapo was still applying the death penalty to Germans caught listening to foreign radio stations.

The fruits of moral collapse became evident as thousands of Germans killed themselves and their families rather than live in a world without Hitler. The Russian Army found the bodies of the six Goebbels children poisoned by their parents prior to their own suicides.

How the power of one man is able to poison the minds of so many may be a question never answered by our books or science, only prevented by “the better angels of our nature.”

DEFEAT FASCISM

 So far, the MAGA cult has followed the path of the most destructive fascist government of the last 100 years. It has demonized opposing political parties, spread fear and hatred of selected racial groups, suspended the rule of law, and effectively disabled congress, putting the future of America into the hands of one figure. Whether that figure is a sole leader or charismatic figurehead controlled by selected oligarchs is open for discussion, but it really doesn't matter. What matters is what is happening and what will happen.

If the model is followed, we should be on the alert for a couple of moves.

First, there a manufactured emergency will occur in resemblance to the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. The cult will use this as justification for martial law.

Next, the cult will cleanse itself of dangerous internal segments that would create friction to slow the progress toward final goals. Read about the June 30, 1934 "Night of the Long Knives" here. Purity is important to fascism and any friction must cease. A group that views its own goals as more important than cult objectives is expendable. It should surprise no one if this happens to be the religious fanatically followers largely responsible for the current darkness in our country. Having served their purpose, their power is no longer essential.

In the meantime, notice how mainstream media outlets are beginning to drift more in line with party dogma in order to preserve their existence. Or, notice how major institutions of higher learning are succumbing to the demands of the book burners.

Let us just hope that when it all ends, we will not be in the line of those forced to walk by and view the corpses and carnage march.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 How do we know when we are rich? Does it occur when we purchase that home we’ve always dreamed of, or that automobile? Does it occur when we find we have the largest bank account in the neighborhood or that our children dress the best?

Is it when we realize that we have enough? Is it when we have plenty?

Apparently not: the richest man in the world, and his billionaire sidekicks have it all but still want more.

Perhaps the more proper question is: What does it mean to be rich?

My Sainted Mother once told me that the day she felt she might not be poor all her life was the day her family acquired an electric butter churn. Don’t ask.

A dear friend, born in El Paso, Texas to an Hispanic family told me of his memories as a young child when his family shared, with three other families, a fourth of the covered bed of a farm truck as they followed the harvest across America. He gestured to a modest home smiled and said, “And look what we have now.”

Is that being rich?

A man grew up in our county with barely just enough mental capacity to hold a job, marry, and raise a family. He was quiet and friendly and folks didn’t think about him much until they needed help with a minor task, assistance in mending malfunctioning equipment, or a hand in treating livestock. they might ask him for a ride to church or to pick up groceries for them. He was just a face in the community and easy to forget until he died of cancer.

That’s when those headed to his funeral found that, although they arrived early, the church had already filled to overflowing and the nearest parking spot was a quarter of a mile away. That’s when folks remembered him and a kindness he had once done them.

Ya’ll think whatever you want, but for me that man died a richer person than Elon Musk will ever be.

DEFEAT FASCISM: READ REBUKE RESIST

 Useful idiots abound these days, unfortunately on both sides of the political spectrum. It is a term that originated with Russians Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, mega-madmen who raised mass genocide in the pursuit of power to a level not to be matched until Pot Pol arrived on the scene in Cambodia. It refers to those who help maintain power but aren’t part of the inner circle of actors.

A more apt descriptor might be “useful idiot” for we cannot assume these folks are stupid. Rather, they are sometimes quite intelligent enablers who do not consider the harmful effects of a given cause, political or otherwise. They attribute to a given cause its positive effects. They ignore the harmful, even disastrous effects.

The tragic aspect is that they exist on both extremities of rational behavior and can join hands to place pure evil into power.

On the far right, useful fools pursue the eradication of a women’s choice for abortion to the extent of supporting laws that subject a 12-year-old to the bearing of a rapist’s child.

On the far left, they respond to the actions of a renegade police officer by supporting the demolition of entire commercial areas of a city by mobs screaming, “Defund the police.”

Sadly, we have reached a point in our approach to universal problems such as inadequate health care, lack of housing, crime, and poverty that we now cling to the far margins of rational thought.

Imagine the process of addressing of cognitive thought to solving a problem.  Our workspace is a long spectrum of analysis allowing for major complexities. Take the issue of immigration, for example.

On one far end the useful idiots scream “open borders.”

On the other far end the useful idiots scream “concentration camps, walls, and machine gun nests.”

Any person advocating an approach lying somewhere in between based on logical thinking and compromises encounters vicious, sometimes career-ending attacks on their personal and professional stature. Moving even beyond the strictures of Mafia doctrine, even family members and friends lie within the field of fire.

Fascists love the strife and opportunity caused by this dialectic.

It has placed America in her current condition of impending doom and will get worse as we end progressive education and replace it with indoctrination based on loyalty to the forces in power (FOP).

DEFEAT FACISM

READ RESIST REBUKE

My mind is flittering today. One little messenger said, "They won't come for you."

Another said, "They will come for you, but it will take time. Think of all the teachers and librarians they'll have to get first."

Then one popped up with, "The German veteran of WWI, Jewish, but with an Iron Cross hanging on his wall, probably felt safe in 1936."

They won't be satisfied until the only people allowed to exist outside the ruling oligarchy are the equivalent of what Orwell labelled "proles."

Clausewitz wrote that friction can detract from and army's effectiveness. One person resisting the Trusk administration may encourage another who may encourage another until a fast web of resistance stands in the way of fascism. I'll not be a prole today.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 The Three Rs to defeat fascism: READ REBUKE RESIST

Today: Read. Delve into the facts of modern times, how 77,303,573 Americans renounce the life of a man, himself an honored and distinguished veteran, because he once offered forgiveness to those who made a heart-wrenching decision to avoid service in a questionable war now laud the man who called those who served and died in the effort “suckers and losers.” Only by understanding the depth of America’s descent into fascism can we fight it.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 The Three Rs to defeat fascism: READ REBUKE RESIST

Rebuke a political movement that doesn’t respect a shipmate like Lt. Commander John McCain, USN, who spent six years of torture and imprisonment on behalf of our country: Donald Trump said this of Senator John McCain's reputation as a war hero: "He's not a war hero, He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured." Recently, 77,303,573 Americans agreed. We have our work before us.

 Today: Resist. Some experts say that, when captured, resist in every way possible. It can wear down the captors and limit their ability to undertake their worst intents. Right now, we should assist those in the best position to resist. Depending on one’s sentiments, there are organizations, from the ACLU to the Southern Poverty Law Center, to Planned Parenthood and beyond that have the resources to lead the resistance movement. Agree with them fully or not, we need them now.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 The Three Rs to defeat fascism: READ REBUKE RESIST

Today: Read. Last time we read the Sermon on the Mount. Next suggestion. Stay in the Gospel of Matthew. This time go to the 25^th Chapter, verses 32 through 46. This spells out exactly what the Galilean thought about righteousness and it is pretty much the opposite of the new rulers of America preach. Stay on the path. You will block the fascists and annoy the hell out of MAGA evangelicals.

DEFEAT FASCISM

The Three Rs to defeat fascism: READ REBUKE RESIST

Today: Resist the influence of the weak. Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the two men who seek to rule America, have little physical strength or power, actually less that many of their sex and age.

Yet they stand on the quarterdeck of a ship called America, one that is heading into the dark waters of fascism. How did two fat and flaccid men accomplish this?

 As Leo Tolstoy once said, “Power is the collective will of the people transferred, by expressed or tacit consent to their chosen rulers.”

Obsession with evil, obliviousness to evil, and obedience to evil, all transfer power. Millions of individual actions fuel the coming catastrophe.

Today I will not feed fascism. Thereby, I will reduce its power by a force of one. Join me?

Americans

 Forcing myself to be optimistic on what may be one of the most important days in American history. If things turn out right, we will continue to have enlightened leadership based on adherence to the law and human kindness. Will there be decisions with which I don’t agree?

Certainly. I’m an American.

If things don’t turn out right, I fear this will be the last election America enjoys. Oh, there will be things called “elections” like in Russia. But we will no longer have the opportunity to vote out fascists who don’t do the things their supporters thought they would. Will I resist?

Certainly. I’m an American.

It isn’t easy trying to imagine an America ruled under a government that mocks the disabled, sets a mob loose on police officers guarding our nation’s capitol, demeans our military and its veterans, denounces science, places women in subservient positions with no control over their own health, and rises to power on bigotry. Will the people grow weary of their rule?

Certainly, they’re Americans.

But I stand by my feeling that this will not come to happen. We have a choice today. Will we stand our ground and speak out with our votes against tyranny and oppression?

Certainly. We’re Americans.