Learning About Fascism and Such

I commit to facing history and this present moment.

Here is a mix of quotes, all from articles posted at the bottom in my efforts to learn about fascism and Nixon era as relates to now.

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Few Americans under the age of 50 have a grasp of fascism or the history of fascist movements in modern history. Hitler and the holocaust mesmerize the culture with horror, yet a fundamental understanding of fascist ideology is absent. The spread of fascism in the 1920s was significantly aided by the fact that liberals and mainstream conservatives failed to take it seriously. Instead, they accommodated and normalised it. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. Comfortable happiness is readily available in a fascist state.

This nation was founded as an opposite to an authoritarian monarch. We set up institutions like a free press and an independent court system to protect our fragile rights. We have survived through bloody spasms of a Civil War and a Civil Rights Movement to extend more of these rights to more of our citizens.

From the Nixon years, we know that a law-and-order president who lacks respect for the Constitution poses a critical threat to dissent. In 1969, Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, warned that TV stations broadcasting unfavorable stories could see their licenses revoked by their Federal Communications Commission or their corporate structures dismantled by the Justice Department. Now we are facing limitations on the freedom of our expression, freedom to protest, and even freedom of movement…

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information. Nixon did great damage (including the invasion of Cambodia, the killings at Jackson State and Kent State, the government infiltration and surveillance of dissenters), but the country survived. We must resist because the consequences of twenty-first century fascism are unimaginably horrific. Unlike Germany’s fascism of the 1930s, we possess today nuclear weapons, biological weapons, massive surveillance infrastructures, a gargantuan military industrial complex controlled by Dark Money, and a servile media. We have never had fascism on Earth in this context.

I believe there is a vast majority who wants to see this nation continue in tolerance and freedom. But it will require speaking. Engage in your civic government. Flood newsrooms or TV networks with your calls if you feel they are slipping into the normalization of extremism. Donate your time and money to causes that will fight to protect our liberties.

There was a flipside to the Nixon age: It produced some of the most enduring progressive organizing in the nation’s history. The Stonewall Rebellion in New York City erupted in June 1969, launching the modern-day LGBTQ movement. Less than a year later came the first Earth Day. Second-wave feminism gained traction throughout that period and produced victories like Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

We are a great nation. We have survived deep challenges in our past. We can and will do so again. But we cannot be afraid to speak and act to ensure the future we want for our children and grandchildren. In order to become whole, as opposed to further divided, we must, and I mean must, create safe circles of connection and community with each other. Anyone who attempts to navigate the crisis on his/her own or just with “me and mine,” will not and cannot. If there is ever to be a majority national movement for social and economic justice, it needs to include whites who have suffered from deindustrialization, offshoring, the decline of unions, and the shrinking farm economy. At the same time, there is a lot of policy turf to defend—human rights, public education, the social safety net, the planet’s health—and those are areas where we need to redouble our grassroots efforts. We must squelch the impulse to pretend that things will be fine… moving too fast to normalize the news. And we must protect from harm those in our communities who are most vulnerable both to the Trump administration’s policies and to the violence and intimidation we’ve already seen.

Business as usual is completely over.

All of above is quotes from these articles:

Learning About Fascism and Such

I commit to facing history and this present moment.

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