This is so deeply frightening. I spent @ 20 of my younger years living in a California cult led by an older, charismatic narcissistic man with many similarities to the now ex-president. I know how exciting and compelling it was to feel like I belonged to a special in-the-know, superior group, and how willing I was for many years to deny …
This is so deeply frightening. I spent @ 20 of my younger years living in a California cult led by an older, charismatic narcissistic man with many similarities to the now ex-president. I know how exciting and compelling it was to feel like I belonged to a special in-the-know, superior group, and how willing I was for many years to deny obvious facts in order to be in the good graces of the leader and the group — and how hard it was to break from that. There are parts of all of us that want someone else to figure out the hard stuff and shift all responsibility and blame off ourselves or our in-group. What we are witnessing is the growth of a massive cult, but much more along the lines of the burgeoning Hitler/Nazi movement in Germany between the wars than my small group of oddballs in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s. The naked white Christian supremacy that it stands on, and the moves to permanently entrench the unilateral rule of that minority, are terrifying. We have eked out a reprieve, but the clock is still running. What do we do?
Your comment and perspective is important and reflects my own deep concerns. I have been trying to learn about how people get swayed, taken in, even radicalized. I can see this happening to a few people I know and nothing I say makes any difference. I am now trying to keep any comments I make in response to their outrageous delusions and falsehoods to a focus on the importance of media literacy, encouraging them to check the factual basis of their information sources, at a minimum, but I feel as if I am whistling into the wind. It is exhausting and terrifying.
If you study how Germany was mesmerized by Hitler, early on, and witnessed any of his rallies, you would not be able to have missed that Tr**p used the exact same tactics as Hitler in his own campaign, and continued to hold his disinformational brainwashing rallies, as continual booster shots, throughout his so-called "presidency." Hitler used the microphone and rallies, the TT**p Regime used rallies, Twitter, Faux News and cyber warfare propaganda. His cult followers were able to have 24-hour "programming" in their own homes.
It was so fetchingly obvious the first time I heard our grandest of narcissists speak at an early rally and observe how he very cleverly controlled his followers with lies and repetition (repetitive messaging, at least three times per issue). A master cult leader, he then tested his neurolinguistic programming of his sheep by stating he could shoot someone on 5th Ave. and they would still vote for him. And they cheered. Take note: THEY CHEERED. No one spoke against that horrific statement...and obvious test. The press loved him because their rates went up. They ignorantly, in my mind, assisted him in constant headlines and talking heads. I guess not everyone is trained to understand what feeds a narcissist. You must starve their egos. America did exactly the opposite.
With that 5th Ave Moment, he (and many of us who study how masses are controlled) knew his brainwashing strategy was firmly rooted. Mass consciousness control, negative chanting, cruelty of words, behaviors, threats against the press and opposing party (another tactic installing division, fear and paranoia) was so clearly evident, whilst Reason and Logic were buried deeply. He absolutely petrified me and people like Katie Tur way before the November 2016 election. But Teflon Don was allowed to get away with it all with a lot of support by conspiratorial, global oligarchs bent on destroying our democracy.
This is not a movie. This is our reality show under the trumplican regime. Very early on Rachel Maddow did segments on the wicked web of those such as the Mercers, Kochs, Murdoch, Putin and others and their internecine web and their funding of Breitbart, Bannon, Conway, Manafort, (Flynn?) Cambridge Analytica, money laundering and Deutsche Bank. It has taken the radical crazies of the Right ("Reich" is more apt) decades to set this up and place their masked "evangelicals" in significant positions throughout our government systems. I read about their infiltrative intentions 30+ years ago and thought people would be alerted to this and it would never happen.And look at us today.
What is heartening, somewhere in this forum or a link from it, was an observation that
once a country that has fallen siege to a radical dictator, and he is successfully removed from his pulpit and public, many of the cult simmer way down, some fading completely away. This is why it is absolutely critical to remove all the "heads" (metaphorically) of this seditious beast clawing at us. Taking them down and out of sight of the public forum is the only way we can begin to undo their power over their mind-numbed followers.
I am grateful to have discovered this oasis of thoughtful sanity. The comments express a wide range of sentiment, expressing and provoking an enormous amount of nuanced thinking. It gives me optimism to read so many people who are wrestling seriously with these issues.
People have been suggesting books to read to help us understand the landscape.
I would add a podcast. Gaslit Nation has been amazingly prescient for the past four years in predicting the worst excesses of the Trump regime. Sarah Kendzior, author of Hiding in Plain Sight and Andrea Chalupa are magnificent and pull no punches. They are regularly accused of being Cassandras by some who listen to them, but Cassandra’s prophecies were true despite being ignored. I find this to be the case with Gaslit Nation. Sarah and Andrea are sometimes repetitive, occasionally undisciplined in their conversation, but a magnificent listen nonetheless. I strongly recommend Gaslit Nation. Their action guide is very helpful.
I do believe that this beast can be contained. I did think it was “one and done” as a previous commenter noted in regard to January 6. But that was naive. A titanic struggle is shaping up and people must be ready for it. I don’t know if the Democratic Party has the will to act ruthlessly - they have lacked this in the past. I do believe that the Department of Justice must attack this beast head on. The legal system has to be used to send a clear message that if you are going to try to unseat democracy, you will be brought to justice.
This will be a hard struggle. The other side has true believers in spades as well as nauseating opportunists (Cruz, Hawley and McCarthy spring to mind).
*I think one simple thought will be clarifying if doubts arise during this struggle. Marjorie Taylor Greene sits as an elected Republican representative. And she has been appointed to the Education Committee by McCarthy.*
I am reading Kendzior’s book right now. It is horrifying how many people are involved in this regime! And yes, the Russians have been grooming Fake45 for decades. Putin programmed Fake45 and his pals by using psychological warfare. The targets were the uneducated and the radicals such as the Proud Boys, KKKers, Oath Keepers, Hell’s Angels, etc. Democrats have to learn this lesson by not bringing plungers to the fight but swords! I want them to poke their eyes out with their resolutions and whatever tool they can and must employ.
I am also a fan of Gaslit Nation podcast. Sarah Kendzior was a guest with Ruth Ben Ghiat on Strange Days podcast Jan 11 episode and had a very powerful conversation about the implications of the near coup attempt of Jan 6 and what needs to be done to stop this slide to autocracy. I recommend it highly!
Yes, the parallel between hitler’s rise to power and trump is all there. The alarm has been sounding for years. That our congress has been infiltrated by people who actually believe it is their job to be loyal to a narcissistic dictator-wanna-be and take down the government is going to make it a really difficult task to neutralize these terrorists. They need to be removed and the oxygen that feeds them (constant media attention) cut off. Simultaneously, their actions (open or clandestine) cannot be ignored. We also need to recognize and come to terms that some people are just plain evil and when they are put in places of power, really bad things happen to the masses.
There is no stronger or more sickening visual than the fact in January 2021 we have RAZOR wire fencing around the Capitol to protect our government from the enemy within. The blame lies completely at the feet of trump, a deranged person who republicans refuse to convict. How far we have fallen.
Maybe instead of studying why people get duped by Hitlers and Trumps, we need to focus on why people (like us) do NOT get duped. Prevention will need to be more than education, economic opportunity and The Fairness Doctrine.
An interesting, and eminently sane, proposition. But I wonder if a certain amount of resistance to or submission to duping is innate. Several of us on this forum have revealed that we are the only ones in our natal families who turned out resistant to the H's and T's.
Trying to understand the minds of the delusional is fascinating, but crazy-making. The less brain time I waste understanding how/why, the better. I am not a trained neuropsychologist, and after reading some Lakoff recently, I don't want to be. Other people's minds can be very frightening.
Very good analysis. Trump's path to power is extremely troubling. We are at a frightening juncture right now, because if his tactics and goals aren't widely exposed, and rejected, and decisively defeated by the public at large it will show our susceptibility to future horrors of dictatorship and fascism.
Thank you Penelope. An apt description of Trumps tactics. His former wife Ivana said he kept a copy of Hitlers book on his bedside table and it looks like he made good use of it to come to power in the Republican Party.
I think we can all agree on this! The question is, how does this happen? So far, it would seem, these malicious forces are growing angrier since 1/6 and are rallying to whip up even more hatred and opposition, causing us to have this country’s first domestic terrorism threat alert. It is, as you say. a Medusa-headed problem that may take years to counteract. In the meantime, what are our options?
Hey, Ellie. Just read the first of your links about QAnon. A very informative piece.
There is a well-known horse trainer who has said for years to "cause your idea to become their idea" as a way to get horses to succumb to what we humans want them to do. So it came as no surprise when I read this: "Guiding people to arrive at YOUR conclusions is a perfect way to get people to accept a new and conflicting ideology."
Thank you for these links, Ellie. Wow. I think we would all need to be trained by a professional in order to maintain the constructive conversation that is recommended in the last link. That might be a very good idea, with role-playing practice. We all have friends and family that instantly trigger us and learning, and practicing, how to interact with them, while having group support in this, would be VERY helpful on every level.
Just read your first link Ellie. My head nearly exploded with recognition. Apophenia is a new word to me and an apt explanation for the QAnon phenomenon. Thank you.
"Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The term was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". So QAnon's goal is to subtly drive all its followers crazy?
Q is a mystery to all, including its/his/her followers. But, if you want to undermine democracy what better weapons than confusion, distrust & anarchy? Why do I sense Putin in all this?
Crazyness is a relative concept and is judged in relation to the norms of society. Different norms=different definition of crazyness. In the USSR and elsewhere they locked up people in Psychiatric Institutions because they didn't think, speak and function in a desired way....they opposed the norms being imposed upon society!
Add to these Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, chapter titled Cascades of Falsehood. Did you know Spain’s Vox party used a slogan similar to Trump’s? Hacer Espana Grande Otra Vez? Make Spain Great Again
I was getting ready to recommend The Twilight of Democracy by Pulitzer prize winner, Anne Applebaum. It's a world view of what is taking place today, and shows that Democracies are indeed fragile. Her book is eye opening, not a fun read, but well worth it. She will be a virtual guest on March 7th at the Tucson Festival of Books. Go online for details.
When you think in historical time, Democracy is a very "young" concept....it hasn't actually been around or postulated for very long for other than the city state of ancient Greece. Between 500BC and 1800AD the idea didn't get very far.
Ellie, I'm quite unable to find the place where you asked me this, but I received a message about who censored a comment on DT that mentioned Hitler, and when:
NYT thread in 2016. This drew attention to the extraordinary success gained by Hitler in using barrack-room and beer-hall language in a land where political speaking was modeled on the funeral oration… Info gained from my Dad who had it in 1943 from a retired British foreign correspondent who’d covered both the Russian revolution and civil war and Hitler’s coming to power in 1933… I didn’t regard drawing attention to the dangers of such language as being contentious, but thought it might be useful… Stupid me. Yet, among my friends, I was derided for regarding a Trump victory as probable.
I’d be happier if my pessimism was more often mistaken. At the same time, we must remember that light illumines darkness but darkness cannot negate the light.
Yesterday, I was driving home with the radio on and heard a brief piece about the Capitol insurrectionists and QAnon (don't remember what program or other specifics), and I said to myself, "These people play too many ARGs!" Then I read the game designer's analysis of QAnon and, bingo!
I do not bring up these references to the Hitler Administration and the NSDAP in order to shock people. I bring them up because they are part of history, and many Americans are not familiar with the history. They only know Hitler and Nazi as evil words, taboo words, to be shunned and turned away from.
(National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, the National Socialist German Worker's Party, the "Nazi" Party.
Deutsche = German (that's where the word "Dutch" originated, btw, in the Germany of my grandparents era the Netherlands were sometimes referred to as "low-lying German provinces.")
Arbeiter = Workers
Partei = Party
Nazi = 1st 2 syllables of "National" pronounced in German, the Socialists (Sozialisten) were called "Sozis" for short.
Even the Germans didn't want to say that incredibly long name of the party, so it was "Nazis" and "Sozis."
My attention span after a day of teaching is rather exhausted. I just fall asleep trying to read anything. But Rick Steve’s Fascism in Europe on PBS is really enlightening! He full on calls out what is happening in America is
what happened in Europe pre Nazi. I knew bits and pieces from my school days. But I had not ever been given the full scope and breadth of it all.
Texas just mandated all schools acknowledge Holocaust Remembrance. Everyone seemed shocked that elementary students should be required to learn about this. My art students are doing projects for peace like Picasso’s Dove for Peace and Flowers for Peace. I emphasize this was for a peace conference after WWII. So far, no complaints from parents. When it something remotely controversial, everyone seems to forget knowledge is power.
Rick is an (inter)national treasure: gifted tour guide, humane employer, deep thinker on public affairs. I've watched the Fascism show twice now. Regular episodes inform, entertain and sparkle for 1/2 hr each. The concluding bloopers segment is always a hoot.
I find that heartening. I can't even bring up Hitler's Germany with one of my own sisters, who was raised for part of her childhood in Germany just as I was. She doesn't want to go there. Can't blame her, of course, but it's our family heritage. We have a grandmother who was totally into Hitler, thinking of Hitler of course as Germany's FDR. The Holocaust was not exactly being broadcast in the news, it was the U.S. Army arriving in Germany that publicized the Holocaust.
I believe they are actually labeled as 'entertainment'...except for the actual news shows they have. Someone tried to sue Tucker Carlson for defamation and the judge threw the case out citing that 'no one who watches Tucker Carlson seriously..it's entertainment, not news...!'
Fox's legal designation is an entertainment network because it doesn't meet basic norms of journalism like fact-checking. But freedom of speech allows it to call itself whatever it pleases.
I was talking to my daughter anout what you said. Before I could say a word she said oh yeah the tattoo numbers were an IBM organizing system. But she’s way smarter than me! So there are people who know.
Yes we do need to find better (any?) ways for some kind of dialogue & communication to happen, but it is so hard to make any headway when beliefs are held so dear and are mostly emotionally based. Some folks will likely come out of the fog in their own time, but many die-hards will not. I don't know where to start... but good you are trying!
My dad is completely unmovable. Completely. I have spent 20 years speaking with him weekly, on every social and political subject, since my parents retired here to my town. It's like talking to a brick wall.
It is no consolation to discover, as I was googling to find Hitler's propaganda chief, so see that Heinrich Himmler is from Munich like my dad is. The architect of the Holocaust, no less.
Roland, I am truly sorry to hear about this, which is the painful personal loss which so many people here speak of. I sense you to be a kind, thoughtful person who might have the best shot at reaching a closed mind. This is discouraging to hear. Ugh!
I can't speak for Roland but i can say that I have exactly the same experience with my own dad, and it is on every issue. He is intelligent and highly educated and completely unmovable. People believe what they want to believe, I guess.
Dad is a diehard conservative. Loyal to the Republican party until the day he dies, Fox News in his retirement home most of the time he’s awake. Unmovable and unshakable on subjects of tradition and the old social order, versus the new social order. In other words, there’s no way to scrub the stain of whites come first, males come first, straights come first. Anyone who isn’t white male and straight is inferior, second-class. It will never change.
Thanks, Maggie. Yes, the KGB has been grooming Fake45 for decades. They knew he was the perfect stool pigeon for the job. If you haven’t read Hiding In Plain Sight by Sarah Kendzior, do! She is an expert on Russian affairs as she lived there off and on for years. She delves into how Russians would lure him into thinking he would get a hotel built there. He never has.
Thanks Marlene - I think you mentioned this book before - will ask for it at my library - I dont buy books anymore - have far too many already! But I can ask for what I want at the library.
Thank you Eve. I've been describing Trump's U.S. Capitol riot as America's version of Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass" when Hitler's brown shirt "storm trooper" (S.A. = Sturm Abteilung, "Storm Division") lackeys trashed looted and burned the German Congress, the Reichstag.
The German people, my grandparents and ancestors, were enthralled by a cult leader, and so are the Trumpsters. Deprogramming and un-brainwashing is needed, sorely needed. Cult extraction and intervention.
That’s how The Arnold described it as well. Our version of the crystal night. My Republican coworkers have suddenly gotten very quiet about all of this. But man they are so anxious to have me give them the link to sign up for the vaccine. Even a friend I thought I’d lost to the Dark Side is now following Heather on Facebook. So maybe the non-cult Republicans are starting to realize voting one issue and supporting dumpty was not the right thing to do. They think I’m extremist radical liberal. I guess cause I helped at the polls? I have always said I would have made a terrible nazi. So sorry for your father! That is hard to stomach!
Denise, in Germany or U.K. you might be right down the center. Believe it or not, you might be just right of center. Bernie is center left. In the U.S., we are called extreme radical liberals by none other than, you guessed it, white supremacists and believers in the suppression of women and libertarian gun arsenal owners who don't even know that they are off. They can't admit it to themselves. And I mean OFF, off balance, off in lots of ways.
Europe is more intellectual, more educated, more informed and, dare I say it, smarter than the U.S. Way smarter. This forum might even be considered conservative in Germany. The U.S. has such a strong conservative minority, and so many extreme conservatives, it makes the rest of us look like wild anarchists in comparison. Think RBG 20 years ago compared to now, when the Supreme Court has migrated so far to the right.
Don't kid yourself, your co-workers are incapable of viewing you clearly or stereotyping you properly, if stereotyping you politically is even a palatable subject on this forum. Simpler words: they have no freaking idea what they're talking about, too ignorant to know reality.
You’re preaching to the choir! These women will flat out tell you they are voting Republican because 1. Abortion, one issue voter. 2. Their minister told them too. Christain submissiveness. 3. Their husband/boyfriend/father told them to. Again submissive to be a good god fearing Christain. It’s mind boggling! They say they are not political! Um you just stated why you vote Republucan and you teach in public schools! Can’t get much more political than that!
Ick. As much as I like your writing on this forum, that was a very unsavory image. My first thought was Ted Cruz in the acceptance position; my eyes! They're burning! My eyes!
Glad I read this before lunch. The images I get in my mind (Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, McCarthy, et al) makes me wanna hurl my cookies. I guess we really are big, naked apes after all...
My sister is one of those women who will walk on hot coals if her husband tells her to.. She quotes all the passages of the bible that speak of women's submission. She's gotten worse since Trump, if that's possible. She's not speaking to me right now because she thinks that I'm naive to think that Biden won fair and square. She also thinks the pandemic is a hoax, and living in Florida, she has not changed her life at all. She still travels, does not wear a mask, etc. She used to be smart - I'm not sure what happened.
Some Friday morning ramblings...to my mind, this type of giving oneself totally over to one's religion stems from a desire, a laziness really, of turning over all responsibility of having to make any decisions to some sort of ideology. It really isn't at all unlike cult behaviour. It is submitting totally to, in the case of evangelical Christianity, a spiritual dictatorship. It then absolves one of having to be responsible for--gadzooks!--individual, independent thought. Thinking freely (observe the root word for "free" is "libera", the basis for "liberal") is anathema to these people because they, and others (the ones wanting to control them), believe their group has all the answers. They don't need to think. It's done for them. It's terrifying, really, because these people are then simply malleable into whatever their "leaders" want them to be. It's one of those features of the human animal I have never understood, the seeming desire to follow some sort of illogical ideology, to the death even.
People wonder then how I, someone who calls himself a Christian, can still even remotely follow something like Christianity. Aren't I somewhat guilty of doing this as well? Umm...no. I don't see what I believe, do, and follow as a cult, mainly because I joined it freely, after having been atheist, agnostic, and I know I could walk away from it tomorrow. My faith, or what my version of Christianity follows, does not rule by fear. We don't bang on about "Now, if you do this, this, and this, you will burn eternally in the fiery pits of hell, etc. etc. etc." No faith should have to scare it adherents into believing, and this is what almost all of these sects eventually end up doing. It's part of what drives them to feel superior to the rest of us "heathens". They're going on to heavenly glory (they think), and the rest of us won't. They feel they have to evangelize and convert everyone they encounter over to their way of thinking. This not only gives them better cred with God (the more souls they "bring to the Lord" the greater their "reward" in heaven), but it gives them a certain sense of satisfaction. A cult is like an organism. The first thing it has to do is replicate/reproduce i.e. find adherents in order to survive. Notice anything familiar? Well, my faith does NOT preach this.
As I've pointed out before, these loud-mouthed zealots have done a pretty shitty PR job for Christianity and have given us ALL a bad name. It is a huge disservice to what can be, in its bare essence, a very beautiful faith and spiritual path to follow. Now, when you take these zealots and combine their zealotry with a political force and a host of other human frailties, it is all a very dangerous mix indeed, as we've seen.
That sort of unheading and unlistening political unilogue that you describe is just as common in Europe.....only we have moved the goalposts over the years......just like the hours we keep. We start the day later than you, eat later and sleep later. We give different labels to political points of view because of where they sit on the "acceptable spectrum".....which is in a different spectrum to the US but ideological conflict is still too often reduced to a 2 bulls crashing heads to see who is strongest and can thus commandeer the herd. It used to be essential for survival of the species but now instead endangers it.
My wife and I read this column out loud daily. Part of the way through the comments I asked her, what do we do if the bastards win? Do we shut up and live or do we stand up and possibly self sacrifice? This is really really scary.
We must fight and fight hard. We must do it intelligently and quite frankly, Joe and Kamala are doing just that. Smarter people than us have tools they can use even without having the GOP’s permission. Joe will bypass them if they refuse to comply on this budget. That makes me feel good.
Exactly Roland. I have to just laugh (when I am not curled up in a ball hiding) at people who call President Biden a Socialist and Communist. What??? People no longer understand these terms, and are so extremely to the right they cannot fathom what actual liberals are talking about.
Yes we do = I keep remembering how it galled Fox & others that Obama wouldnt call Islam RADICAL Islam - remember that? Guess its time for the title of radical right to get put where it belongs.
You know, I am not a huge fan of Arnold. I didn't even watch his video, maybe because I'm one of the few people in American who probably wouldn't have learned anything new from it. But that video wasn't for me. It was for everyone with no Hitler-era German heritage, or in denial (or ignorance) of their Hitler-era German heritage. I heard he mentioned domestic abuse from his dad, etc. All of that is part of my family heritage, my mother and her siblings. Arnold is in my Dad's generation. He is from Austria, the country where Hitler was born. My dad is from Munich, the place Hitler came to power. So Arnold and I have plenty in common re: heritage.
I don't read or listen to everything I see about the subject, it ain't pretty, and I've spent a lifetime having to accept it as my heritage. This from the kid who grew up watching Hogan's Heroes and all that.
Werner Klemperer (Colonel Klink) of HH was vehemently anti-Nazi and insisted that every episode end with the Germans, especially Klink, defeated and humiliated. He was a far more serious person than one imagines from his bumbling character; some of that comes through in Judgment at Nuremburg. The whole Klemperer family has a fascinating history in that period, documented in several memoirs and biographies.
Werner Klemperer IS Hogan's Heroes. All the uniforms and military artifacts in that series are part of his personal collection, I understand. Thank you so much for mentioning his biographies and memoirs, I imagine he and I have much in common. Going to look into that.
Interesting that you bring up Hogan’s Heros. My father was a Private 1st Class Infantryman in WWII, liberating one of the Nazi work camps. He despised that TV show. He told us it minimized the horrors of the war and the death and destruction it caused. As I write this, I hold him in my heart...my Dad, who witnessed the evidence of Hitler’s control, power, and hatred of all who were not pure and loyal.
I read the letters he sent to my mother, his then Dearest Darling, during the time of his deployment in Europe and I weep. We cannot let this happen, ever again!
I highly recommend the memoir "I Will Bear Witness" by Viktor Klemperer. A detailed account of living under the Nazis as a Jew married to a Gentile, then surviving the bombing of Dresden.
Paradoxically, the actor playing a German camp commandant was a more admirable person than Bob Crane (Hogan), whose ties to organized crime led to his still-unsolved gangland slaying. Col. Klink was German but not a Nazi; he frequently clashed with them, e.g. Gestapo Major Hochstetter.
Leon Askin, the actor portraying Gen. Burkhalter, was an Austrian refugee whose family suffered greatly during the Holocaust. His politics are not as well-known as the Klemperer family's, but a glance at Wikipedia shows that he too fought the good fight in his own way.
Roland, you clearly managed to distance yourself from your heritage. Obviously, you made a decision to reject the stain of your father's experiences and deeds. Congratulations. You are not him, and that's what counts.
In an nation of immigrants, what else? I seem to recollect a study some years ago about the economic contribution of different "waves" of immigration...looking specifically at California...and the impact of growth was appreciable and high, coming with a time lag of 4 years. I think they looked particularly at the influx of Vietnamese after the war.
Here in Central Florida ,through Catholic Charities, each parish sponsored a Vietnamese family. Within an amazingly short period of time these families (with the initial church support (atonement????) and, more critically, by the way they pulled together to help one another) became industrious social and economic contributors and remain so today.
May I draw attention to Caste, by Wilkerson? working my way through her discussion of how we came to be where we are in terms of 'racial' identity. Using the single quotes because so many of us are blends - collateral member of my family was identified only as "he came up the Mississippi on a river boat". Never could figure out exactly where he fit in - family apocrypha.
The name Fairness Doctrine is somewhat misleading, implying that balance is its essence. The requirement to produce verifiable, fact-based reporting is at least as important.
Hello Ronald, it's astute to compare the Trump Insurrection to the rise of Nazism. However, it probably conflates different events in German history. Kristallnacht occurred in 1938; the Reichstag fire was in 1933, and blamed on a lone individual. Though he may have been framed, it was arson at night, not an open mass assault on the German legislature while in session.
Still, any comparison along these lines is deeply disturbing and should be a call to action against the worst angels of our nature.
You are correct, I am conflating events. However, Hitler is personally responsible for both events. In the case of the 1933 Reichstag fire, he managed to pull a disinformation stunt so that he could blame the Communist Party for his own political ends. His attacks on the German Congress are several, and each is comparable to Trump's attack on our Capitol, our Congress.
So I wanted to add to your list of companies and people who supported Hitler. Porsche, Ford, and Volkswagen. Henry Ford was in love with Adolf. His vans as well as the ones from Volkswagen were used to gas Jews and non-Jews. That’s how my grandparents died.
"During the Second World War, Ford Werke employed slave laborers although not required by the Nazi regime.[10] The deployment of slave labor began before the Ford-Werke was separated from the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, while America had not yet entered the War.
Robert Hans Schmidt presided over Ford-Werke during the Second World War, and engaged slave labor and the illegal manufacture of munitions, including such manufacturing during the period before the U.S. entry into the War. Once the War was over, "notwithstanding all his carefully publicized efforts to erase the stain of the company's past, no evidence emerged that either Henry Ford II or any other top-level Ford Motor Company executive ever raised any moral objects to rehiring [Schmidt], who had presided over one of the company's darkest chapters.[11]
In 1942, German soldiers swept into the city of Rostov in the Soviet Union, moving among the homes of Rostov families, forcing them to register at a labor registration center. Elsa Iwanowa, who was 16 years old at the time, and many other Russians were transported in cattle cars to Wuppertal in the western part of Germany, where they were exhibited to visiting businessmen. From there Elsa Iwanowa and others were forced to become slave laborers for Ford-Werke. "On March 4, 1998, fifty-three years after she was liberated from the German Ford plant, Elsa Iwanowa demanded justice, filing a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Ford Motor Company."[12] In court, Ford acknowledged that Elsa Iwanowa and many others like her were "forced to endure a sad and terrible experience" at Ford-Werke; Ford, however, maintained that cases like that of Elsa Iwanowa are best redressed on "a nation-to-nation, government-to-government" basis.[9] In 1999, the court dismissed Elsa Iwanowa's suit; however, a number of German companies, including GM subsidiary Opel, agreed to contribute $5.1 billion to a fund that would compensate the surviving slave laborers.[9] After being the subject of much adverse publicity, Ford, in March 2000, reversed direction, and agreed to contribute $13 million to the compensation fund.[citation needed"
Many Americans and British supported Hitler. I believe Lindbergh was also a big supporter. Social Darwinism swept the world in the early 20th C. It's so important to read history and the consequences of movements.
Thanks for this! Please remember that JFKs father, Joe Sr. was against the US entering the war and acceptance of the immigrants trying to escape persecution by the Nazis.
I was shocked to learn that at Lindbergh. This is terrible to say, but I feel for certain things, supporters of influence should be permanently and prominently branded as such so it is never forgotten.
Yech. I knew about using engine exhaust fumes, but not which vehicles. Disturbing. Didn't know about Ford, either, but I can't say I am surprised. A lot of industrialists were racist and sexist as hell.
Oh my! I’m so sorry Marlene! This brings tears to my eyes. I have to wonder if living in these times feels even more frightening to someone such as yourself, given your family’s history. Never in a million years would I have thought America would be at such a similarly dark precipice.
Neither did I... it’s so frightening. And such cognitive dissonance! But is the confusion based in some horrible change that seems to have evolved under our noses without our awareness...or, is it that things were always this way, and likely always will be, and we just weren’t aware? Ignoring the man behind the curtain?!
Marlene, I’m so sad and sorry for the loss of you grandparents.
So many atrocities can be blamed on the rise of Hitler and all of his enablers. As he rose to power, I’m wondering if his loyalists and those who “went along to get along” became numb to his despicable acts and no longer reacted with shock and awe at his actions.
Makes me wonder, what if Trumps army of insurgents stormed the Capitol in early 2017? Do you think that all Americans, including those in the Republican Party, would be as accommodating as they are today...after being numbed to his behavior?
I really cannot say. I do believe that people are very attracted to Fake45’s overall “I don’t give a shit” demeanor and rhetoric. He bucked the system for 4 years and he mucked things up big time! These followers are like Mary’s little lambs except, they are dangerous. Fake45 appeals to these people because he speaks their lingo. If things are said repetitively, people listening become programmed to believing in what they hear.
Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. Your comment illustrates succinctly and vividly the immediacy of your connection to the Holocaust. I cannot even imagine.
Let's stay with the facts. Volkswagen only produced the beetle and German jeep during the war. The VW transporter/van/bus was created by a Dutch businessman named Ben Pon after the war in 1947. Please leave the revisionist history with the wacknut Republican fascists.
Easy there, Big Guy, we're all learning from each other here. You're bringing good information into the discussion, thank you very much. No one is engaging in revisionist history here, not that I've seen. Personally I do not know what types of engines and/or engine-driven vehicles were used during the Holocaust, so I appreciate very much Marlene and you, Craig, informing me. Take a look at Marlene's final line. "That's how my grandparents died." We are delving into painful subjects, personally very painful subjects, this is not history from afar, this is history up close and personal, way too personal. Both my parents grew up in that period in Germany. All of us are trying to learn about that period of history, we are students trying to heal painful family heritage, no one is engaging in revisionism or misinformation, from what I have seen there are no attempts here to engage in altering facts. We are just trying to get to the bottom of events that are disturbing to look at.
Unfortunately, VW was founded by the Nazi Party Government's German labour Front and was heavily implicated in the use of slave labour and concentration camp victims to produce the "jeep" based on the beetle chassis.
There are no nicknames for Hitler. We use his name to identify him in an attempt to never diminish or forget who and what he was and what he symbolizes today.
Using a nickname for Trump may be personally satisfying, even humorous, but it takes the edge off of his criminality and fails to accurately reflect who he is and what he stands for.
I mean no disrespect but if we are going to be successful in making Trump accountable for his crimes, now and in the years to come, we must identify and call him by his name in the same way we call Hitler by his name.
Sorry, Ronald. I endorse your point about deprogramming and un-brainwashing (i.e. denazification) -- one hell of a challenge for America and the world after nearly 30 years of getting steeped to the point of drowning in "virtual reality"... But I didn't notice the confusion that came before it.
I tried to draw attention to the Nazi precedents before Trump was elected, but all such references, however factual, were censored.
I'll add that, however horrified they were by candidate DT, most of the supporters of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party whom I know couldn't take the threat seriously enough and didn't want to be seen making comparisons with prewar dictators. Likewise, too many people in Germany just couldn't take Hitler seriously before 1933.
Read Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair...
Two ❤️❤️, 3 ❤️❤️❤️, 4 ❤️s. Not a soul in this country, certainly not any established media source, would touch the subject of comparing trump to Hitler. My how that has changed. Because the subject of Hitler’s tactics is so relevant to understanding 🍊 greaseball, *especially* since he studied Hitler, and *especially* in January 2021.
I don't have time for a detailed reply to your message, but I do want to point out that the affinities between these two run far deeper than tactics, and the danger DT still poses is consequently far greater than if he was just a streetwise mobster with mastery of diversion and confusion.
Try reading C.G. Jung on the German dictator and his Voice. Jung said of Hitler “There is nobody there”...
It's not the man himself, it's the combination between him and a voiceless mass whose hidden thoughts and feelings he voices.
Roland--I appreciate your repeatedly bringing attention to lessons to be learned from German (and other European) history and development. As you have indicated, there isn't direct repetition of the patterns of authoritarian takeover, but there are lots of things that stand as warning signs. Historical analogies are flexible, and are at times stretched too far. No, Trump ≠ Hitler, and the current GOP ≠ fascism. But the old saying that history does give us rhymes remains a useful guide. I'll take advantage of your admirably expressed willingness to look further ("working, working")--which we should all emulate--to suggest another reference. On the issues involved in corporate support for Naziism I have found Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction" to be enlightening. It's long and detailed, something of a slog if read straight through. But with the help of chapter titles and the index you can pursue the shifts and dodges undertaken by leaders of large corporations--both in and outside of Germany--to keep their companies and profits healthy while adapting to Hitler's economically unsustainable demands. A few were either enthusiastic supporters or opponents from early on; lots hedged their bets as long as possible. All compromised to varying degrees good sense--both business and human. Many readers of these letters have commented on the links between Hitler and Trump's authoritarian appeals angry, alienated or dispossessed [see Tooze on Hitler's needs to focus on the German peasantry]. But I found myself hearing rhymes of how plutocrats, pursuing their own interests, potentiated political and human disaster.
Thank you Tom for this thoughtful and exceedingly well written piece. I’m on the job tonight with only my iPhone, so that precludes the thorough response your excellent treatment deserves. I am pleased at what you’ve written, because it indicates clearly that I am being well heard. Also thank you for the word plutocrat, I had to look it up even though I’ve seen it before of course, and now I finally have a word for a concept I’ve been trying to express but doing so poorly. America is a plutocracy. Bernie talks about the billionaires, and I guess if even I didn’t know the word plutocracy, clearer and simpler languaging is necy to amplify visibility of that odious reality here in our beloved nation. Among other pleasing statements you observe that Hitler does not equal Trump. That there are rhymes, resonances, echoes. That is the message I’ve been trying to express, that there are parallels, and that Trump actually studied Hitler. People have been listening because I have found my words being echoed throughout this entire day’s discussion. Your insightful and beautiful contribution is that the American plutocracy, which Heather called the business side of the Republican party, is not to be trusted and actually wants to tear the democratic system down. And of course that is in keeping with the amorality of business and corporations. I use IBM Holocaust tattoos, + now we know Ford was complicit in the Holocaust, indirectly if not directly, you bring up that detailed study, and similarly the big businesses of today like perhaps Facebook and Twitter are complicit in the attacks on the US Capitol, which is our Congress, which is *US*, We the People.
Roland, thanks for your kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed my comment. Your thoughts about the appropriateness of "plutocracy" to describe our current situation are spot on. I would add another possible source to your reading pile if you are so inclined. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written several books about the winner-take-all society. I highly recommend heir latest (2020), "Let Them Eat Tweets." Like Prof. Richardson they analyze the take-over of the country's economy and politics since 1980 (gee, what happened then?).Their term for it is "plutocratic populism": the toxic mix of reactionary economic priorities with right-wing cultural and racial appeals. The book is an easy, if infuriating, read, but if your to-be-read pile is stacked as high as mine, Hacker has written a number of op-ed pieces that should be easily available on line.
I don't recall any mention of studies about the racial attitudes of peasants and small farmers. Tooze, as a political economist, focuses on they're being at the bottom of the economic barrel as the German economy began its slow climb out of the multiple shocks of the '20s-'30s. What does seem to be a rhyme is that they were a substantial minority of the population whose ability to profit off their absolutely necessary support for the industrial drive was strictly curtailed by the government's need to keep food prices low for the urban workers. What the farmers got was lavished propaganda attention, featuring them nationally as the heart of the heartland. All of the pervasive racial suprematist slogans and images prominently featured the hardworking bauer, and bounties were given to the bauerin who produced large numbers of children.
I think the Kristallnacht and Reichstag fire comparison only goes so far and we should be wary of considering Trump times as a leitmotif. It should also be accurately reported.
Kristallnacht was a minor (by comparison to the Holocaust) explosion against the Jews in 1838. It had nothing to do with the Reichstag Fire five years earlier.
For one thing, German democracy was fledgling. It was imposed after World War I and the German people had precious little experience with it. In theory, at least, American democracy should be far more durable.
The Reichstag fire was an attempt to demonize the Communists in Germany who had been engaged in a running battle with Hitler’s Fascists. Hitler, by then in power, used it to consolidate his position and mortally wound the Communists.
In America Trump was on his way out and the acts of January 6 were a wild attempt to prevent this. America’s angry underbelly was prepared to be guided into such an attack. It failed ultimately, partly due to luck, but more because the rioters cannot neatly be packaged into a coherent whole. There are in that group, MAGA onlookers, hate-filled white supremacists, and strands of organized militias who are truly dangerous.
In truth there was only some planning. The enterprise for the most part was as stupid and half-baked as most of Trump’s ideas. That it was somewhat successful was due to the fecklessness of Capitol Police, a general belief that it couldn’t happen here, and the machinations of a few politicians.
Hitler was impossible to stop because he was always a step ahead in his planning, and because the German population was quiescent. Goethe had described them, “so estimable in the individual, so wretched in the mass”. And this latter vice prevailed in the Thirties.
Decisive action now will further fragment Trump’s supporters. He’s out of power and unable to help them. The justice system must shed its pro-white bias and flatten the movement with legal, but brutally efficient resolve.
The comparisons with Nazi Germany will become instructive, rather than convenient and overblown, should the importance of American democracy not be upheld by swift action. If that not be the case, then we will have sown the wind and the whirlwind will be reaped.
"The fecklessness of Capitol Police" was seemingly on display in the first days after Trumpsky's vile insurrection. Now that more details and more video are available, we can see that approval or collusion may have marked the first minutes in storming the Capitol, but most CP quickly regrouped and performed heroically. The number and extent of injuries testifies to their dedication.
Carla's superb, heart-rending comment from yesterday, detailing her connections to the late Officer Howard Liebengood, provides essential insight into the CP. Any failure of theirs should be blamed on the few abettors who welcomed the mob, and still more on superiors who wittingly or unwittingly deprived the Capitol's defenders of critical resources. The latter aspect is especially disturbing and should be a major priority as investigations and prosecutions proceed.
Very nicely expressed. The German monarchy ended around about World War I, so absolutely it was a fledgling democracy, hence Hitler‘s success in damaging it. At that time in history, are the 20s and 30s and 40s, the US democratic experiment was already 140+ years old. Now in 2021 our democracy is close to a quarter millennium. So we have to presume some durability, some strength, and sure enough, damage was done this month but it was not severe. At least I don’t think so.
What can/what should we do? At first I thought of writing to every Republican Senator and Representative who voted against Trump's impeachment and telling them off. LOL - like they would even see that letter! Then I got real. So here's my plan. I realized that I can't vote all Trump legislators out, but I can contribute to their Democratic opponents. I also can and do contribute to the Lincoln Project. Of course, I can't contribute millions, but if we all send what we can afford to the opponents of those folks who are particularly heinous, we could make a difference. And if that's not feasible for some folks, well, letter writing to those companies who pledged not to support any one involved in the Capital riot and pressuring them to honor their word may well be productive.
Your idea has merit. Last year I contributed to Matt Gaetz’s opponent, Phil Ehr, but Phil lost. Next time I will publicize his opponent more broadly, especially here, to get a concerted effort to get Gaetz out.
Thanks for this effort, Annette! We need that madman out! My concern is about the gerrymandering and how much of an obstacle that poses to these efforts in some of these far-right areas. And we could really use a Stacey Abrams here in FL. I would imagine she is working on replicating her efforts in other states, which I will look into.
I too sent money to Phil Ehr (I live down in Tampa so not from his county) and although he didn't win - his numbers were very good and I truly hope he runs against Gaetz again in 2 years because I think he may well win next time -- those retired military may not approve of all of his shennigans).
I'm trying to make the suggestion in as many places as I can. Unfortunately, we can no longer think locally or statewide. We have to work where the crazies are - or they will end up making decisions that affect us all. Thank-you for your reply.
As another long-term action, postcard campaigns are ongoing. I just sent out 50 postcards via Flip the West to voters in California about voting out the complicit Devin Nunes in 2022.
That has been my approach as well. I also contribute to Emily's List when I can. Sometimes my candidate wins and sometimes not, but at least I feel that my little bit might count for something in the bigger scheme of things. I also share HCR with friends on FB and Twitter and in emails. I have been successful in changing a few minds through HER reasoned accounts of the events of the day.
I am hearing people use the words “ personal responsibility “ to mean “do whatever you want to do or you personally think is best for you”. It is so disheartening that we don’t have common agreement on what words mean. This is fascism, correct?
I am committed to not succumbing to cynicism. We have got to pull together and move away from the cliff to which fascism has taken our country. Cynicism and division plays right into the fascism.
Google and read anything you can from Dr Lee. It’s been linked here before. And the book ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’ by the community of respected psychiatrists. Dr Lee lays out cult behavior and exactly what our nation must do. Biden is mirroring a lot of what she suggests.
How exciting it must be to be a QAnon/Trump believer! It must be like living inside a Tom Cruise movie. Dashing heroes, evil villains, amazingly unlikely and convoluted conspiracies; so much more interesting than the boring reality of bills, committee meetings, infrastructure maintenance, and an uncertain future.
There’s the dopamine hit, the brain neurotransmitter, that gives a sense of “aliveness.” It’s a very real thing and children raised in traumatic or neglectful families are predisposed to this due to how the brain is wired in those years. The brain is “plastic” and it can be remodeled at any time in our lives. But there has to be awareness of the problem and a conscious effort to address it.
Terror is one emotion. Was it terror, another emotion or a combination of emotions, that moved you into waking up to the authentic nature of the leader and the cult - and most importantly, yourself? You possess a precious knowledge of the process of liberation and maturation that can teach us what is required in moving from a lonely, dependent fragility into self-responsibility as a woman strengthened by wisdom. If it feels right, please share your insights. Thank you.
Thanks for your response. My transition out of the cult was gradual, aided not by outsiders but by other insiders who also grew out of it over time. A complicated story. There are some parallels to the trump cult but in other ways it was different. I am trying to sort out my own experience to see what if anything can be extracted that might useful now. So far it is helpful mostly in my own ability to understand some of the mindset of cultists... but not on how to penetrate it. Still searching for answers!
What a mystery that experience must be! To have managed to release it thanks to your friends also traveling the path with whom you could sort things through, and find it still an enigma on this side of it emphasizes how complicated emotionally and psychologically indeed it must have been. I've lived outside the US for a time in a place where there's more connection among people, celebrations, strangers invite you to supper, classmates readily befriend you, lots of religious commemorations, lots of art made by regular people. When I come back home, I feel depressed for a month or so. People aren't on the streets, if they are, they don't look at you; people seem more distant, individual, separate,into their own lives, less into community.
I really appreciate this observation and hearing your experience of being in another country and returning here. I have had a similar experience and you have described it so well. It’s as if there is a kind of deadening of the spirit, here. And people feel closed off and even walled off in their homes. I agree.. I don’t feel the sense of community here that I would like to.
That sense of community is a big part of it I think. We were young idealistic hippies at the start of my cult life (I didnʻt think of it as a cult til way later... before, we were supposedly an egalitarian commune!), trying to escape the alienation & social fragmentation of modern american life. But the belong-to-a-tribe impulse can turn into an even more intense us vs. them alienation. That link someone posted in this thread about how people get strung out on QAnon & the likes is pretty interesting, and fits with this.
Now that we have a huge thread, and my note to you might get lost in the avalanche, I just want to say I think your last name is particularly noteworthy considering the subject. Grüss Gott and Fürch Gott are expressions I grew up with in the Germany of my teens.
Yes. My ancestors emigrated to the US in the late 1800s from German-speaking parts of eastern Europe. All Jewish; considering history, I would call my origins Ashkenazi, not German, and this adds an additional shudder when I contemplate our current crazy political/cultural situation.
I realized when filling out the census form last year that nothing in their lists really described my ethnic or national origins. Caucasian, yes, but German? No way! Czech? Polish? Maybe our families were there for many generations but ultimately so many were chased or frightened out of all those places. It was then I thought that for American Jews, the census ought to have Ashkenazi & Sephardic as choices.
Maybe but not all Jews are aware of their origins. And not all Jews are white. The Spanish Insurrection displaced Jews from Spain and they ended up all over Europe and Jerusalem. Others were in Ethiopia and they were black.
Eve, I am sure that you bear scars from the experience you had. Those of us who have also lived in the thrall of narcissists hear you and share your alarm and distress. You're an exceptionally brave person to break free of the syndrome.
I have something concrete you can do. Join a national community of citizen volunteers who are working strategically and ethically to build an inclusive democracy by countering voter suppression in key geographies around the country. We are all volunteer and you and can look up “Walk the Walk 2020.” This is all truly terrifying but much less so when you can connect the historical dots (via Professor Richardson’s summaries and analyses) and the pragmatic dots (via Walk the Walk’s informed research and strategic interventions.
I've been wondering if people with expertise in extracting people from cults might be useful here, but the scope of the problem is daunting. Should there be programs to train family members? Is there anything that can be done on a mass scale? Countering with facts is apparently ineffective.
I think about "re-education" as it's been carried out in other, non-democratic countries. It's anti-American in my view. Technically, public schools exist (or used to exist) to turn out good citizens. Obviously they haven't been doing a good job.
There is some sharing of written works under this comment that have been on my reading list, and prompts me to move them up a notch. Thank you. When speaking of the path towards healing generations of colonialism and oppression, here is a book that should not be missed, from a perspective that has long been dismissed. And that has been to our world’s great disadvantage: https://sacredinstructions.life/
This is so deeply frightening. I spent @ 20 of my younger years living in a California cult led by an older, charismatic narcissistic man with many similarities to the now ex-president. I know how exciting and compelling it was to feel like I belonged to a special in-the-know, superior group, and how willing I was for many years to deny obvious facts in order to be in the good graces of the leader and the group — and how hard it was to break from that. There are parts of all of us that want someone else to figure out the hard stuff and shift all responsibility and blame off ourselves or our in-group. What we are witnessing is the growth of a massive cult, but much more along the lines of the burgeoning Hitler/Nazi movement in Germany between the wars than my small group of oddballs in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s. The naked white Christian supremacy that it stands on, and the moves to permanently entrench the unilateral rule of that minority, are terrifying. We have eked out a reprieve, but the clock is still running. What do we do?
Your comment and perspective is important and reflects my own deep concerns. I have been trying to learn about how people get swayed, taken in, even radicalized. I can see this happening to a few people I know and nothing I say makes any difference. I am now trying to keep any comments I make in response to their outrageous delusions and falsehoods to a focus on the importance of media literacy, encouraging them to check the factual basis of their information sources, at a minimum, but I feel as if I am whistling into the wind. It is exhausting and terrifying.
If you study how Germany was mesmerized by Hitler, early on, and witnessed any of his rallies, you would not be able to have missed that Tr**p used the exact same tactics as Hitler in his own campaign, and continued to hold his disinformational brainwashing rallies, as continual booster shots, throughout his so-called "presidency." Hitler used the microphone and rallies, the TT**p Regime used rallies, Twitter, Faux News and cyber warfare propaganda. His cult followers were able to have 24-hour "programming" in their own homes.
It was so fetchingly obvious the first time I heard our grandest of narcissists speak at an early rally and observe how he very cleverly controlled his followers with lies and repetition (repetitive messaging, at least three times per issue). A master cult leader, he then tested his neurolinguistic programming of his sheep by stating he could shoot someone on 5th Ave. and they would still vote for him. And they cheered. Take note: THEY CHEERED. No one spoke against that horrific statement...and obvious test. The press loved him because their rates went up. They ignorantly, in my mind, assisted him in constant headlines and talking heads. I guess not everyone is trained to understand what feeds a narcissist. You must starve their egos. America did exactly the opposite.
With that 5th Ave Moment, he (and many of us who study how masses are controlled) knew his brainwashing strategy was firmly rooted. Mass consciousness control, negative chanting, cruelty of words, behaviors, threats against the press and opposing party (another tactic installing division, fear and paranoia) was so clearly evident, whilst Reason and Logic were buried deeply. He absolutely petrified me and people like Katie Tur way before the November 2016 election. But Teflon Don was allowed to get away with it all with a lot of support by conspiratorial, global oligarchs bent on destroying our democracy.
This is not a movie. This is our reality show under the trumplican regime. Very early on Rachel Maddow did segments on the wicked web of those such as the Mercers, Kochs, Murdoch, Putin and others and their internecine web and their funding of Breitbart, Bannon, Conway, Manafort, (Flynn?) Cambridge Analytica, money laundering and Deutsche Bank. It has taken the radical crazies of the Right ("Reich" is more apt) decades to set this up and place their masked "evangelicals" in significant positions throughout our government systems. I read about their infiltrative intentions 30+ years ago and thought people would be alerted to this and it would never happen.And look at us today.
What is heartening, somewhere in this forum or a link from it, was an observation that
once a country that has fallen siege to a radical dictator, and he is successfully removed from his pulpit and public, many of the cult simmer way down, some fading completely away. This is why it is absolutely critical to remove all the "heads" (metaphorically) of this seditious beast clawing at us. Taking them down and out of sight of the public forum is the only way we can begin to undo their power over their mind-numbed followers.
I am grateful to have discovered this oasis of thoughtful sanity. The comments express a wide range of sentiment, expressing and provoking an enormous amount of nuanced thinking. It gives me optimism to read so many people who are wrestling seriously with these issues.
People have been suggesting books to read to help us understand the landscape.
I would add a podcast. Gaslit Nation has been amazingly prescient for the past four years in predicting the worst excesses of the Trump regime. Sarah Kendzior, author of Hiding in Plain Sight and Andrea Chalupa are magnificent and pull no punches. They are regularly accused of being Cassandras by some who listen to them, but Cassandra’s prophecies were true despite being ignored. I find this to be the case with Gaslit Nation. Sarah and Andrea are sometimes repetitive, occasionally undisciplined in their conversation, but a magnificent listen nonetheless. I strongly recommend Gaslit Nation. Their action guide is very helpful.
I do believe that this beast can be contained. I did think it was “one and done” as a previous commenter noted in regard to January 6. But that was naive. A titanic struggle is shaping up and people must be ready for it. I don’t know if the Democratic Party has the will to act ruthlessly - they have lacked this in the past. I do believe that the Department of Justice must attack this beast head on. The legal system has to be used to send a clear message that if you are going to try to unseat democracy, you will be brought to justice.
This will be a hard struggle. The other side has true believers in spades as well as nauseating opportunists (Cruz, Hawley and McCarthy spring to mind).
*I think one simple thought will be clarifying if doubts arise during this struggle. Marjorie Taylor Greene sits as an elected Republican representative. And she has been appointed to the Education Committee by McCarthy.*
* for emphasis
As a parent of a child with Special Needs, I am horrified by McCarthy's appointment of MTG! She is a horror.
Horror.
This is why Biden is focusing on approval of his appointees, especially for A.G. - so the Judicial General is in place to attck this beast head on.
We must expand SCOTUS. Also, 50 federal judges have resigned making way for Biden to appoint replacements. That is very good news!
I am reading Kendzior’s book right now. It is horrifying how many people are involved in this regime! And yes, the Russians have been grooming Fake45 for decades. Putin programmed Fake45 and his pals by using psychological warfare. The targets were the uneducated and the radicals such as the Proud Boys, KKKers, Oath Keepers, Hell’s Angels, etc. Democrats have to learn this lesson by not bringing plungers to the fight but swords! I want them to poke their eyes out with their resolutions and whatever tool they can and must employ.
I am also a fan of Gaslit Nation podcast. Sarah Kendzior was a guest with Ruth Ben Ghiat on Strange Days podcast Jan 11 episode and had a very powerful conversation about the implications of the near coup attempt of Jan 6 and what needs to be done to stop this slide to autocracy. I recommend it highly!
Yes, the parallel between hitler’s rise to power and trump is all there. The alarm has been sounding for years. That our congress has been infiltrated by people who actually believe it is their job to be loyal to a narcissistic dictator-wanna-be and take down the government is going to make it a really difficult task to neutralize these terrorists. They need to be removed and the oxygen that feeds them (constant media attention) cut off. Simultaneously, their actions (open or clandestine) cannot be ignored. We also need to recognize and come to terms that some people are just plain evil and when they are put in places of power, really bad things happen to the masses.
There is no stronger or more sickening visual than the fact in January 2021 we have RAZOR wire fencing around the Capitol to protect our government from the enemy within. The blame lies completely at the feet of trump, a deranged person who republicans refuse to convict. How far we have fallen.
Maybe instead of studying why people get duped by Hitlers and Trumps, we need to focus on why people (like us) do NOT get duped. Prevention will need to be more than education, economic opportunity and The Fairness Doctrine.
An interesting, and eminently sane, proposition. But I wonder if a certain amount of resistance to or submission to duping is innate. Several of us on this forum have revealed that we are the only ones in our natal families who turned out resistant to the H's and T's.
Trying to understand the minds of the delusional is fascinating, but crazy-making. The less brain time I waste understanding how/why, the better. I am not a trained neuropsychologist, and after reading some Lakoff recently, I don't want to be. Other people's minds can be very frightening.
I agree . . .
Very good analysis. Trump's path to power is extremely troubling. We are at a frightening juncture right now, because if his tactics and goals aren't widely exposed, and rejected, and decisively defeated by the public at large it will show our susceptibility to future horrors of dictatorship and fascism.
Which is why we need our foreign allies so much more now. They can also help us in exposing Fake45’s dealings as well as his minion.
Biden, at least, is starving his (who-shall-not-be-named) ego now.
It is so calming to not have to read that name so often.
Or, hear and see that hideous voice and face!
Thank you Penelope. An apt description of Trumps tactics. His former wife Ivana said he kept a copy of Hitlers book on his bedside table and it looks like he made good use of it to come to power in the Republican Party.
Vanity Fair article from 1990, an ego piece with you-know-who
Brilliant analysis, Penelope. Thanks.
I think we can all agree on this! The question is, how does this happen? So far, it would seem, these malicious forces are growing angrier since 1/6 and are rallying to whip up even more hatred and opposition, causing us to have this country’s first domestic terrorism threat alert. It is, as you say. a Medusa-headed problem that may take years to counteract. In the meantime, what are our options?
Years ago trumps 1st wlfe warned everyone that he read Hilter's. Mein kampf nightly. That was enough to make me fear him rising to power.
I am ❤️ number 87. We need you to get 88 ❤️s. It’s a symbolic antidote to the former 88 million Twitter followers.
How people get taken into QAnon:
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5
On precarity, a fear that something to which you are entitled will be taken away by Others who do not deserve it:
https://twitter.com/Prof_Kennedy/status/1350937732072300547?s=20
How to talk to MAGA people (which ironically uses a similar stance as QAnon by not confronting head on):
https://youtu.be/jM5uNt7PamQ
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-qanon-followers-are-dangerous-cult-how-save-someone-ncna1239828
Hey, Ellie. Just read the first of your links about QAnon. A very informative piece.
There is a well-known horse trainer who has said for years to "cause your idea to become their idea" as a way to get horses to succumb to what we humans want them to do. So it came as no surprise when I read this: "Guiding people to arrive at YOUR conclusions is a perfect way to get people to accept a new and conflicting ideology."
Thank you for these links, Ellie. Wow. I think we would all need to be trained by a professional in order to maintain the constructive conversation that is recommended in the last link. That might be a very good idea, with role-playing practice. We all have friends and family that instantly trigger us and learning, and practicing, how to interact with them, while having group support in this, would be VERY helpful on every level.
Just read your first link Ellie. My head nearly exploded with recognition. Apophenia is a new word to me and an apt explanation for the QAnon phenomenon. Thank you.
"Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The term was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". So QAnon's goal is to subtly drive all its followers crazy?
Q is a mystery to all, including its/his/her followers. But, if you want to undermine democracy what better weapons than confusion, distrust & anarchy? Why do I sense Putin in all this?
Crazyness is a relative concept and is judged in relation to the norms of society. Different norms=different definition of crazyness. In the USSR and elsewhere they locked up people in Psychiatric Institutions because they didn't think, speak and function in a desired way....they opposed the norms being imposed upon society!
Add to these Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, chapter titled Cascades of Falsehood. Did you know Spain’s Vox party used a slogan similar to Trump’s? Hacer Espana Grande Otra Vez? Make Spain Great Again
I was getting ready to recommend The Twilight of Democracy by Pulitzer prize winner, Anne Applebaum. It's a world view of what is taking place today, and shows that Democracies are indeed fragile. Her book is eye opening, not a fun read, but well worth it. She will be a virtual guest on March 7th at the Tucson Festival of Books. Go online for details.
When you think in historical time, Democracy is a very "young" concept....it hasn't actually been around or postulated for very long for other than the city state of ancient Greece. Between 500BC and 1800AD the idea didn't get very far.
Thanks for the info on the festival. Will definitely check it out!
Holy cow. Just read the first link, and it is terrifying.
This is an amazing revelation, a game-changer for me. Thanks for your contribution, Ellie.
Nice Ellie!!
thank you so informative!!!
Ellie, I'm quite unable to find the place where you asked me this, but I received a message about who censored a comment on DT that mentioned Hitler, and when:
NYT thread in 2016. This drew attention to the extraordinary success gained by Hitler in using barrack-room and beer-hall language in a land where political speaking was modeled on the funeral oration… Info gained from my Dad who had it in 1943 from a retired British foreign correspondent who’d covered both the Russian revolution and civil war and Hitler’s coming to power in 1933… I didn’t regard drawing attention to the dangers of such language as being contentious, but thought it might be useful… Stupid me. Yet, among my friends, I was derided for regarding a Trump victory as probable.
I’d be happier if my pessimism was more often mistaken. At the same time, we must remember that light illumines darkness but darkness cannot negate the light.
Yesterday, I was driving home with the radio on and heard a brief piece about the Capitol insurrectionists and QAnon (don't remember what program or other specifics), and I said to myself, "These people play too many ARGs!" Then I read the game designer's analysis of QAnon and, bingo!
Thank you for these links. The first one was mind blowing for me!
Definately mind-blowing. And terrifying. Required Reading.
Thanks for these useful references.
Mediocre people made to feel that they are special by hating in the right way.
And that they are not thereby alone in their misery.......and above others who are not in "the know";
😔
I also, cannot fathom how one gets so enamored with people like these. It is like they are hypnotized.
Hypnotized. Mesmerized. Deluded. Brainwashed. Blotto.
Welcome to Fox News, the new Russia Today, the new Chinese Communist Party news media.
Rupert and the Murdoch family is our new equivalent of the govt. dept. run by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda.
By the way, I just want to say something here.
I do not bring up these references to the Hitler Administration and the NSDAP in order to shock people. I bring them up because they are part of history, and many Americans are not familiar with the history. They only know Hitler and Nazi as evil words, taboo words, to be shunned and turned away from.
(National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, the National Socialist German Worker's Party, the "Nazi" Party.
Deutsche = German (that's where the word "Dutch" originated, btw, in the Germany of my grandparents era the Netherlands were sometimes referred to as "low-lying German provinces.")
Arbeiter = Workers
Partei = Party
Nazi = 1st 2 syllables of "National" pronounced in German, the Socialists (Sozialisten) were called "Sozis" for short.
Even the Germans didn't want to say that incredibly long name of the party, so it was "Nazis" and "Sozis."
My attention span after a day of teaching is rather exhausted. I just fall asleep trying to read anything. But Rick Steve’s Fascism in Europe on PBS is really enlightening! He full on calls out what is happening in America is
what happened in Europe pre Nazi. I knew bits and pieces from my school days. But I had not ever been given the full scope and breadth of it all.
Texas just mandated all schools acknowledge Holocaust Remembrance. Everyone seemed shocked that elementary students should be required to learn about this. My art students are doing projects for peace like Picasso’s Dove for Peace and Flowers for Peace. I emphasize this was for a peace conference after WWII. So far, no complaints from parents. When it something remotely controversial, everyone seems to forget knowledge is power.
Rick is an (inter)national treasure: gifted tour guide, humane employer, deep thinker on public affairs. I've watched the Fascism show twice now. Regular episodes inform, entertain and sparkle for 1/2 hr each. The concluding bloopers segment is always a hoot.
I find that heartening. I can't even bring up Hitler's Germany with one of my own sisters, who was raised for part of her childhood in Germany just as I was. She doesn't want to go there. Can't blame her, of course, but it's our family heritage. We have a grandmother who was totally into Hitler, thinking of Hitler of course as Germany's FDR. The Holocaust was not exactly being broadcast in the news, it was the U.S. Army arriving in Germany that publicized the Holocaust.
https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/holocaust-remembrance-day
I noticed Rick Steve's program, haven't had a chance to see it yet.
JUST now mandated that? Well a good thing - especially in Texas. Now if all states did that? Hopefully mine does - dont know.
Wow. Thanks for resource.
Why does Fox even get away with calling their shows ‘news’?
The characteristics of news is:
Accuracy
Balance
Objectivity
Concise and Clear
Current
I believe they are actually labeled as 'entertainment'...except for the actual news shows they have. Someone tried to sue Tucker Carlson for defamation and the judge threw the case out citing that 'no one who watches Tucker Carlson seriously..it's entertainment, not news...!'
Fox's legal designation is an entertainment network because it doesn't meet basic norms of journalism like fact-checking. But freedom of speech allows it to call itself whatever it pleases.
Thanks Marlene for probably the only "like" my corporate war crimes posts will get. I always bring up the popular subjects, don't I? *grin*
Roland, you are insightful and that’s good enough for me!
I think you’re getting quite a few “Likes”
Roland, you may be the most popular "unpopular" commenter around. Write on!
I was talking to my daughter anout what you said. Before I could say a word she said oh yeah the tattoo numbers were an IBM organizing system. But she’s way smarter than me! So there are people who know.
I had absolutely no idea that those numbers were from IBM!
Yes we do need to find better (any?) ways for some kind of dialogue & communication to happen, but it is so hard to make any headway when beliefs are held so dear and are mostly emotionally based. Some folks will likely come out of the fog in their own time, but many die-hards will not. I don't know where to start... but good you are trying!
My dad is completely unmovable. Completely. I have spent 20 years speaking with him weekly, on every social and political subject, since my parents retired here to my town. It's like talking to a brick wall.
It is no consolation to discover, as I was googling to find Hitler's propaganda chief, so see that Heinrich Himmler is from Munich like my dad is. The architect of the Holocaust, no less.
Roland, I am truly sorry to hear about this, which is the painful personal loss which so many people here speak of. I sense you to be a kind, thoughtful person who might have the best shot at reaching a closed mind. This is discouraging to hear. Ugh!
When you say your dad is unmovable, on what issue. Your German heritage and familiarity with Germany history are very interesting, btw. Thanks.
I can't speak for Roland but i can say that I have exactly the same experience with my own dad, and it is on every issue. He is intelligent and highly educated and completely unmovable. People believe what they want to believe, I guess.
Dad is a diehard conservative. Loyal to the Republican party until the day he dies, Fox News in his retirement home most of the time he’s awake. Unmovable and unshakable on subjects of tradition and the old social order, versus the new social order. In other words, there’s no way to scrub the stain of whites come first, males come first, straights come first. Anyone who isn’t white male and straight is inferior, second-class. It will never change.
Did anyone here see this article? Certainly would explain a good deal!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-perfect-target-russia-cultivated-trump-as-asset-for-40-years-%E2%80%93-ex-kgb-spy/ar-BB1dcbwf?ocid=BingNews
Thanks, Maggie. Yes, the KGB has been grooming Fake45 for decades. They knew he was the perfect stool pigeon for the job. If you haven’t read Hiding In Plain Sight by Sarah Kendzior, do! She is an expert on Russian affairs as she lived there off and on for years. She delves into how Russians would lure him into thinking he would get a hotel built there. He never has.
Thanks Marlene - I think you mentioned this book before - will ask for it at my library - I dont buy books anymore - have far too many already! But I can ask for what I want at the library.
Thanks for the link to this article, Maggie.
Thank you Eve. I've been describing Trump's U.S. Capitol riot as America's version of Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass" when Hitler's brown shirt "storm trooper" (S.A. = Sturm Abteilung, "Storm Division") lackeys trashed looted and burned the German Congress, the Reichstag.
The German people, my grandparents and ancestors, were enthralled by a cult leader, and so are the Trumpsters. Deprogramming and un-brainwashing is needed, sorely needed. Cult extraction and intervention.
That’s how The Arnold described it as well. Our version of the crystal night. My Republican coworkers have suddenly gotten very quiet about all of this. But man they are so anxious to have me give them the link to sign up for the vaccine. Even a friend I thought I’d lost to the Dark Side is now following Heather on Facebook. So maybe the non-cult Republicans are starting to realize voting one issue and supporting dumpty was not the right thing to do. They think I’m extremist radical liberal. I guess cause I helped at the polls? I have always said I would have made a terrible nazi. So sorry for your father! That is hard to stomach!
Denise, in Germany or U.K. you might be right down the center. Believe it or not, you might be just right of center. Bernie is center left. In the U.S., we are called extreme radical liberals by none other than, you guessed it, white supremacists and believers in the suppression of women and libertarian gun arsenal owners who don't even know that they are off. They can't admit it to themselves. And I mean OFF, off balance, off in lots of ways.
Europe is more intellectual, more educated, more informed and, dare I say it, smarter than the U.S. Way smarter. This forum might even be considered conservative in Germany. The U.S. has such a strong conservative minority, and so many extreme conservatives, it makes the rest of us look like wild anarchists in comparison. Think RBG 20 years ago compared to now, when the Supreme Court has migrated so far to the right.
Don't kid yourself, your co-workers are incapable of viewing you clearly or stereotyping you properly, if stereotyping you politically is even a palatable subject on this forum. Simpler words: they have no freaking idea what they're talking about, too ignorant to know reality.
You’re preaching to the choir! These women will flat out tell you they are voting Republican because 1. Abortion, one issue voter. 2. Their minister told them too. Christain submissiveness. 3. Their husband/boyfriend/father told them to. Again submissive to be a good god fearing Christain. It’s mind boggling! They say they are not political! Um you just stated why you vote Republucan and you teach in public schools! Can’t get much more political than that!
Also the husband is afraid the Dems will take away his guns, whether or not he ever actually uses them.
It's his only link with his idealized "heroic" past. A bit pathetic that they should be reduced to that in this life.
They are part of the herd waiting to see which new male bull will beat the old one before raising their rear ends for the winners attentions.
Ick. As much as I like your writing on this forum, that was a very unsavory image. My first thought was Ted Cruz in the acceptance position; my eyes! They're burning! My eyes!
Glad I read this before lunch. The images I get in my mind (Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, McCarthy, et al) makes me wanna hurl my cookies. I guess we really are big, naked apes after all...
Now there's a disturbing image.
Men & women. They’d choke if they read this.
My sister is one of those women who will walk on hot coals if her husband tells her to.. She quotes all the passages of the bible that speak of women's submission. She's gotten worse since Trump, if that's possible. She's not speaking to me right now because she thinks that I'm naive to think that Biden won fair and square. She also thinks the pandemic is a hoax, and living in Florida, she has not changed her life at all. She still travels, does not wear a mask, etc. She used to be smart - I'm not sure what happened.
Some Friday morning ramblings...to my mind, this type of giving oneself totally over to one's religion stems from a desire, a laziness really, of turning over all responsibility of having to make any decisions to some sort of ideology. It really isn't at all unlike cult behaviour. It is submitting totally to, in the case of evangelical Christianity, a spiritual dictatorship. It then absolves one of having to be responsible for--gadzooks!--individual, independent thought. Thinking freely (observe the root word for "free" is "libera", the basis for "liberal") is anathema to these people because they, and others (the ones wanting to control them), believe their group has all the answers. They don't need to think. It's done for them. It's terrifying, really, because these people are then simply malleable into whatever their "leaders" want them to be. It's one of those features of the human animal I have never understood, the seeming desire to follow some sort of illogical ideology, to the death even.
People wonder then how I, someone who calls himself a Christian, can still even remotely follow something like Christianity. Aren't I somewhat guilty of doing this as well? Umm...no. I don't see what I believe, do, and follow as a cult, mainly because I joined it freely, after having been atheist, agnostic, and I know I could walk away from it tomorrow. My faith, or what my version of Christianity follows, does not rule by fear. We don't bang on about "Now, if you do this, this, and this, you will burn eternally in the fiery pits of hell, etc. etc. etc." No faith should have to scare it adherents into believing, and this is what almost all of these sects eventually end up doing. It's part of what drives them to feel superior to the rest of us "heathens". They're going on to heavenly glory (they think), and the rest of us won't. They feel they have to evangelize and convert everyone they encounter over to their way of thinking. This not only gives them better cred with God (the more souls they "bring to the Lord" the greater their "reward" in heaven), but it gives them a certain sense of satisfaction. A cult is like an organism. The first thing it has to do is replicate/reproduce i.e. find adherents in order to survive. Notice anything familiar? Well, my faith does NOT preach this.
As I've pointed out before, these loud-mouthed zealots have done a pretty shitty PR job for Christianity and have given us ALL a bad name. It is a huge disservice to what can be, in its bare essence, a very beautiful faith and spiritual path to follow. Now, when you take these zealots and combine their zealotry with a political force and a host of other human frailties, it is all a very dangerous mix indeed, as we've seen.
What a shame! She must be quoting the King James Version of the bible. Such a misogynist!
That sort of unheading and unlistening political unilogue that you describe is just as common in Europe.....only we have moved the goalposts over the years......just like the hours we keep. We start the day later than you, eat later and sleep later. We give different labels to political points of view because of where they sit on the "acceptable spectrum".....which is in a different spectrum to the US but ideological conflict is still too often reduced to a 2 bulls crashing heads to see who is strongest and can thus commandeer the herd. It used to be essential for survival of the species but now instead endangers it.
My wife and I read this column out loud daily. Part of the way through the comments I asked her, what do we do if the bastards win? Do we shut up and live or do we stand up and possibly self sacrifice? This is really really scary.
To quote Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that is the question". It all depends what you mean by " be".
We must fight and fight hard. We must do it intelligently and quite frankly, Joe and Kamala are doing just that. Smarter people than us have tools they can use even without having the GOP’s permission. Joe will bypass them if they refuse to comply on this budget. That makes me feel good.
Exactly Roland. I have to just laugh (when I am not curled up in a ball hiding) at people who call President Biden a Socialist and Communist. What??? People no longer understand these terms, and are so extremely to the right they cannot fathom what actual liberals are talking about.
I’m tired of hearing about the “radical left”. We need to start publicizing “the radical right”.
Yes we do = I keep remembering how it galled Fox & others that Obama wouldnt call Islam RADICAL Islam - remember that? Guess its time for the title of radical right to get put where it belongs.
Thanks for this info and I agree with all of it, unfortunately.
Unfortunately.
You know, I am not a huge fan of Arnold. I didn't even watch his video, maybe because I'm one of the few people in American who probably wouldn't have learned anything new from it. But that video wasn't for me. It was for everyone with no Hitler-era German heritage, or in denial (or ignorance) of their Hitler-era German heritage. I heard he mentioned domestic abuse from his dad, etc. All of that is part of my family heritage, my mother and her siblings. Arnold is in my Dad's generation. He is from Austria, the country where Hitler was born. My dad is from Munich, the place Hitler came to power. So Arnold and I have plenty in common re: heritage.
I don't read or listen to everything I see about the subject, it ain't pretty, and I've spent a lifetime having to accept it as my heritage. This from the kid who grew up watching Hogan's Heroes and all that.
Werner Klemperer (Colonel Klink) of HH was vehemently anti-Nazi and insisted that every episode end with the Germans, especially Klink, defeated and humiliated. He was a far more serious person than one imagines from his bumbling character; some of that comes through in Judgment at Nuremburg. The whole Klemperer family has a fascinating history in that period, documented in several memoirs and biographies.
Werner Klemperer IS Hogan's Heroes. All the uniforms and military artifacts in that series are part of his personal collection, I understand. Thank you so much for mentioning his biographies and memoirs, I imagine he and I have much in common. Going to look into that.
Interesting that you bring up Hogan’s Heros. My father was a Private 1st Class Infantryman in WWII, liberating one of the Nazi work camps. He despised that TV show. He told us it minimized the horrors of the war and the death and destruction it caused. As I write this, I hold him in my heart...my Dad, who witnessed the evidence of Hitler’s control, power, and hatred of all who were not pure and loyal.
I read the letters he sent to my mother, his then Dearest Darling, during the time of his deployment in Europe and I weep. We cannot let this happen, ever again!
I highly recommend the memoir "I Will Bear Witness" by Viktor Klemperer. A detailed account of living under the Nazis as a Jew married to a Gentile, then surviving the bombing of Dresden.
The Dresden "fire storm" was a non-atomic Hiroshima.
Paradoxically, the actor playing a German camp commandant was a more admirable person than Bob Crane (Hogan), whose ties to organized crime led to his still-unsolved gangland slaying. Col. Klink was German but not a Nazi; he frequently clashed with them, e.g. Gestapo Major Hochstetter.
Leon Askin, the actor portraying Gen. Burkhalter, was an Austrian refugee whose family suffered greatly during the Holocaust. His politics are not as well-known as the Klemperer family's, but a glance at Wikipedia shows that he too fought the good fight in his own way.
When I hear that name, I must say that the first thought that comes to my mind is Otto and not......
Read Victor Klemperer's "I will bear witness". An excellent first-person eye-witness history of the period
Roland, you clearly managed to distance yourself from your heritage. Obviously, you made a decision to reject the stain of your father's experiences and deeds. Congratulations. You are not him, and that's what counts.
Immigrants get the job done!
In an nation of immigrants, what else? I seem to recollect a study some years ago about the economic contribution of different "waves" of immigration...looking specifically at California...and the impact of growth was appreciable and high, coming with a time lag of 4 years. I think they looked particularly at the influx of Vietnamese after the war.
Here in Central Florida ,through Catholic Charities, each parish sponsored a Vietnamese family. Within an amazingly short period of time these families (with the initial church support (atonement????) and, more critically, by the way they pulled together to help one another) became industrious social and economic contributors and remain so today.
May I draw attention to Caste, by Wilkerson? working my way through her discussion of how we came to be where we are in terms of 'racial' identity. Using the single quotes because so many of us are blends - collateral member of my family was identified only as "he came up the Mississippi on a river boat". Never could figure out exactly where he fit in - family apocrypha.
Thank you. I'll look at it. I have already read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash which covers perhaps similar ground.
Excellent book, as was her ‘Warmth of Other Suns’!
Another cyclical trend running through American history.
Welcome to MAGA.
Renew the media Fairness Doctrine for cable and internet. It’s not freedom to shout lies in the public sphere
The name Fairness Doctrine is somewhat misleading, implying that balance is its essence. The requirement to produce verifiable, fact-based reporting is at least as important.
Exactly... thank you!
Hello Ronald, it's astute to compare the Trump Insurrection to the rise of Nazism. However, it probably conflates different events in German history. Kristallnacht occurred in 1938; the Reichstag fire was in 1933, and blamed on a lone individual. Though he may have been framed, it was arson at night, not an open mass assault on the German legislature while in session.
Still, any comparison along these lines is deeply disturbing and should be a call to action against the worst angels of our nature.
Thanks for pointing that out, let me look into it. *working, working . . . *
Hi TPJ, take a look at this article. I know Hitler ordered that fire, so Wiki is just parroting Hitler's disinformation even 80 years later.
https://time.com/3717003/reichstag-fire-1933/
You are correct, I am conflating events. However, Hitler is personally responsible for both events. In the case of the 1933 Reichstag fire, he managed to pull a disinformation stunt so that he could blame the Communist Party for his own political ends. His attacks on the German Congress are several, and each is comparable to Trump's attack on our Capitol, our Congress.
So I wanted to add to your list of companies and people who supported Hitler. Porsche, Ford, and Volkswagen. Henry Ford was in love with Adolf. His vans as well as the ones from Volkswagen were used to gas Jews and non-Jews. That’s how my grandparents died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#:~:text=Use%20of%20forced%20labor%20during%20World%20War%20II,-Main%20article%3A%20Forced&text=During%20the%20Second%20World%20War,not%20yet%20entered%20the%20War.
"During the Second World War, Ford Werke employed slave laborers although not required by the Nazi regime.[10] The deployment of slave labor began before the Ford-Werke was separated from the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, while America had not yet entered the War.
Robert Hans Schmidt presided over Ford-Werke during the Second World War, and engaged slave labor and the illegal manufacture of munitions, including such manufacturing during the period before the U.S. entry into the War. Once the War was over, "notwithstanding all his carefully publicized efforts to erase the stain of the company's past, no evidence emerged that either Henry Ford II or any other top-level Ford Motor Company executive ever raised any moral objects to rehiring [Schmidt], who had presided over one of the company's darkest chapters.[11]
In 1942, German soldiers swept into the city of Rostov in the Soviet Union, moving among the homes of Rostov families, forcing them to register at a labor registration center. Elsa Iwanowa, who was 16 years old at the time, and many other Russians were transported in cattle cars to Wuppertal in the western part of Germany, where they were exhibited to visiting businessmen. From there Elsa Iwanowa and others were forced to become slave laborers for Ford-Werke. "On March 4, 1998, fifty-three years after she was liberated from the German Ford plant, Elsa Iwanowa demanded justice, filing a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Ford Motor Company."[12] In court, Ford acknowledged that Elsa Iwanowa and many others like her were "forced to endure a sad and terrible experience" at Ford-Werke; Ford, however, maintained that cases like that of Elsa Iwanowa are best redressed on "a nation-to-nation, government-to-government" basis.[9] In 1999, the court dismissed Elsa Iwanowa's suit; however, a number of German companies, including GM subsidiary Opel, agreed to contribute $5.1 billion to a fund that would compensate the surviving slave laborers.[9] After being the subject of much adverse publicity, Ford, in March 2000, reversed direction, and agreed to contribute $13 million to the compensation fund.[citation needed"
Stuart, I always appreciate the knowledge you bring to this site as a result of your extensive reading!
Thank you, Stuart...as always!
Many Americans and British supported Hitler. I believe Lindbergh was also a big supporter. Social Darwinism swept the world in the early 20th C. It's so important to read history and the consequences of movements.
Thanks for this! Please remember that JFKs father, Joe Sr. was against the US entering the war and acceptance of the immigrants trying to escape persecution by the Nazis.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ss-st-louis-jewish-refugees-turned-away-holocaust
I was shocked to learn that at Lindbergh. This is terrible to say, but I feel for certain things, supporters of influence should be permanently and prominently branded as such so it is never forgotten.
Yech. I knew about using engine exhaust fumes, but not which vehicles. Disturbing. Didn't know about Ford, either, but I can't say I am surprised. A lot of industrialists were racist and sexist as hell.
Not "were," "are."
Horrific! I’m so sorry:(
Oh my! I’m so sorry Marlene! This brings tears to my eyes. I have to wonder if living in these times feels even more frightening to someone such as yourself, given your family’s history. Never in a million years would I have thought America would be at such a similarly dark precipice.
Neither did I... it’s so frightening. And such cognitive dissonance! But is the confusion based in some horrible change that seems to have evolved under our noses without our awareness...or, is it that things were always this way, and likely always will be, and we just weren’t aware? Ignoring the man behind the curtain?!
Marlene, I’m so sad and sorry for the loss of you grandparents.
So many atrocities can be blamed on the rise of Hitler and all of his enablers. As he rose to power, I’m wondering if his loyalists and those who “went along to get along” became numb to his despicable acts and no longer reacted with shock and awe at his actions.
Makes me wonder, what if Trumps army of insurgents stormed the Capitol in early 2017? Do you think that all Americans, including those in the Republican Party, would be as accommodating as they are today...after being numbed to his behavior?
Europe has a long history of using Jews as scapegoats.
Good question. We have indeed become numb and terrifyingly accepting of this aberrant behavior.
There's a disturbing article in Slate concerning just how numb we Americans have become to suffering, thanks to the Trump years: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/trump-what-we-learned-suffering-death.html
I really cannot say. I do believe that people are very attracted to Fake45’s overall “I don’t give a shit” demeanor and rhetoric. He bucked the system for 4 years and he mucked things up big time! These followers are like Mary’s little lambs except, they are dangerous. Fake45 appeals to these people because he speaks their lingo. If things are said repetitively, people listening become programmed to believing in what they hear.
Thank you, Kari.
Wow. Thank you for sharing this piece of history, and, family. condolences to you and your family.
Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. Your comment illustrates succinctly and vividly the immediacy of your connection to the Holocaust. I cannot even imagine.
I am so sorry....
😔
Let's stay with the facts. Volkswagen only produced the beetle and German jeep during the war. The VW transporter/van/bus was created by a Dutch businessman named Ben Pon after the war in 1947. Please leave the revisionist history with the wacknut Republican fascists.
Easy there, Big Guy, we're all learning from each other here. You're bringing good information into the discussion, thank you very much. No one is engaging in revisionist history here, not that I've seen. Personally I do not know what types of engines and/or engine-driven vehicles were used during the Holocaust, so I appreciate very much Marlene and you, Craig, informing me. Take a look at Marlene's final line. "That's how my grandparents died." We are delving into painful subjects, personally very painful subjects, this is not history from afar, this is history up close and personal, way too personal. Both my parents grew up in that period in Germany. All of us are trying to learn about that period of history, we are students trying to heal painful family heritage, no one is engaging in revisionism or misinformation, from what I have seen there are no attempts here to engage in altering facts. We are just trying to get to the bottom of events that are disturbing to look at.
Unfortunately, VW was founded by the Nazi Party Government's German labour Front and was heavily implicated in the use of slave labour and concentration camp victims to produce the "jeep" based on the beetle chassis.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/volkswagen-halts-production-during-world-war-ii
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/volkswagen-1
Hah, you are right. There's no limit to the blame to be heaped on Hitler and Trumpsky alike.
Here's a couple of refs, none very recent, that are valuable. If they differ from what I wrote, they're correct.
B Hett, Burning the Reichstag
I Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris & Nemesis
W Shirer, Rise & Fall of the 3rd Reich
" There's no limit to the blame to be heaped on Hitler and Trumpsky alike."
No shit.
Think about this:
There are no nicknames for Hitler. We use his name to identify him in an attempt to never diminish or forget who and what he was and what he symbolizes today.
Using a nickname for Trump may be personally satisfying, even humorous, but it takes the edge off of his criminality and fails to accurately reflect who he is and what he stands for.
I mean no disrespect but if we are going to be successful in making Trump accountable for his crimes, now and in the years to come, we must identify and call him by his name in the same way we call Hitler by his name.
It’s hard for me, Daria, it really is. I call him Fake45 for a reason. I cannot say his name as it sends chills.
I think you may be right about that... what a mess this all is...
If you can get through Shirer, you are a better person than me.
Thank you, TPJ. Adding to my list:
B Hett, Burning the Reichstag
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-reichstag-fire-and-nazis-rise-power-180962240/
https://bookshop.org/books/burning-the-reichstag-an-investigation-into-the-third-reich-s-enduring-mystery/9781522665267
I Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93996.Hitler
I Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64719.Hitler
W Shirer, Rise & Fall of the 3rd Reich
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/767171.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third_Reich
Sorry, Ronald. I endorse your point about deprogramming and un-brainwashing (i.e. denazification) -- one hell of a challenge for America and the world after nearly 30 years of getting steeped to the point of drowning in "virtual reality"... But I didn't notice the confusion that came before it.
I tried to draw attention to the Nazi precedents before Trump was elected, but all such references, however factual, were censored.
You said you tried to draw attention to Nazi precedents before Trump but such references were censored: By whom? When?
Found at last! I've answered you elsewhere...
I'll add that, however horrified they were by candidate DT, most of the supporters of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party whom I know couldn't take the threat seriously enough and didn't want to be seen making comparisons with prewar dictators. Likewise, too many people in Germany just couldn't take Hitler seriously before 1933.
Read Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair...
Two ❤️❤️, 3 ❤️❤️❤️, 4 ❤️s. Not a soul in this country, certainly not any established media source, would touch the subject of comparing trump to Hitler. My how that has changed. Because the subject of Hitler’s tactics is so relevant to understanding 🍊 greaseball, *especially* since he studied Hitler, and *especially* in January 2021.
Thanks, Roland.
I don't have time for a detailed reply to your message, but I do want to point out that the affinities between these two run far deeper than tactics, and the danger DT still poses is consequently far greater than if he was just a streetwise mobster with mastery of diversion and confusion.
Try reading C.G. Jung on the German dictator and his Voice. Jung said of Hitler “There is nobody there”...
It's not the man himself, it's the combination between him and a voiceless mass whose hidden thoughts and feelings he voices.
Roland--I appreciate your repeatedly bringing attention to lessons to be learned from German (and other European) history and development. As you have indicated, there isn't direct repetition of the patterns of authoritarian takeover, but there are lots of things that stand as warning signs. Historical analogies are flexible, and are at times stretched too far. No, Trump ≠ Hitler, and the current GOP ≠ fascism. But the old saying that history does give us rhymes remains a useful guide. I'll take advantage of your admirably expressed willingness to look further ("working, working")--which we should all emulate--to suggest another reference. On the issues involved in corporate support for Naziism I have found Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction" to be enlightening. It's long and detailed, something of a slog if read straight through. But with the help of chapter titles and the index you can pursue the shifts and dodges undertaken by leaders of large corporations--both in and outside of Germany--to keep their companies and profits healthy while adapting to Hitler's economically unsustainable demands. A few were either enthusiastic supporters or opponents from early on; lots hedged their bets as long as possible. All compromised to varying degrees good sense--both business and human. Many readers of these letters have commented on the links between Hitler and Trump's authoritarian appeals angry, alienated or dispossessed [see Tooze on Hitler's needs to focus on the German peasantry]. But I found myself hearing rhymes of how plutocrats, pursuing their own interests, potentiated political and human disaster.
Thank you Tom for this thoughtful and exceedingly well written piece. I’m on the job tonight with only my iPhone, so that precludes the thorough response your excellent treatment deserves. I am pleased at what you’ve written, because it indicates clearly that I am being well heard. Also thank you for the word plutocrat, I had to look it up even though I’ve seen it before of course, and now I finally have a word for a concept I’ve been trying to express but doing so poorly. America is a plutocracy. Bernie talks about the billionaires, and I guess if even I didn’t know the word plutocracy, clearer and simpler languaging is necy to amplify visibility of that odious reality here in our beloved nation. Among other pleasing statements you observe that Hitler does not equal Trump. That there are rhymes, resonances, echoes. That is the message I’ve been trying to express, that there are parallels, and that Trump actually studied Hitler. People have been listening because I have found my words being echoed throughout this entire day’s discussion. Your insightful and beautiful contribution is that the American plutocracy, which Heather called the business side of the Republican party, is not to be trusted and actually wants to tear the democratic system down. And of course that is in keeping with the amorality of business and corporations. I use IBM Holocaust tattoos, + now we know Ford was complicit in the Holocaust, indirectly if not directly, you bring up that detailed study, and similarly the big businesses of today like perhaps Facebook and Twitter are complicit in the attacks on the US Capitol, which is our Congress, which is *US*, We the People.
Roland, thanks for your kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed my comment. Your thoughts about the appropriateness of "plutocracy" to describe our current situation are spot on. I would add another possible source to your reading pile if you are so inclined. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written several books about the winner-take-all society. I highly recommend heir latest (2020), "Let Them Eat Tweets." Like Prof. Richardson they analyze the take-over of the country's economy and politics since 1980 (gee, what happened then?).Their term for it is "plutocratic populism": the toxic mix of reactionary economic priorities with right-wing cultural and racial appeals. The book is an easy, if infuriating, read, but if your to-be-read pile is stacked as high as mine, Hacker has written a number of op-ed pieces that should be easily available on line.
Cheers.
Were there any comparisons regarding those peasants and let's say, white supremacists or POC?
I don't recall any mention of studies about the racial attitudes of peasants and small farmers. Tooze, as a political economist, focuses on they're being at the bottom of the economic barrel as the German economy began its slow climb out of the multiple shocks of the '20s-'30s. What does seem to be a rhyme is that they were a substantial minority of the population whose ability to profit off their absolutely necessary support for the industrial drive was strictly curtailed by the government's need to keep food prices low for the urban workers. What the farmers got was lavished propaganda attention, featuring them nationally as the heart of the heartland. All of the pervasive racial suprematist slogans and images prominently featured the hardworking bauer, and bounties were given to the bauerin who produced large numbers of children.
Btw TPJ my first name is Roland, not Ronald. 😘
I think the Kristallnacht and Reichstag fire comparison only goes so far and we should be wary of considering Trump times as a leitmotif. It should also be accurately reported.
Kristallnacht was a minor (by comparison to the Holocaust) explosion against the Jews in 1838. It had nothing to do with the Reichstag Fire five years earlier.
For one thing, German democracy was fledgling. It was imposed after World War I and the German people had precious little experience with it. In theory, at least, American democracy should be far more durable.
The Reichstag fire was an attempt to demonize the Communists in Germany who had been engaged in a running battle with Hitler’s Fascists. Hitler, by then in power, used it to consolidate his position and mortally wound the Communists.
In America Trump was on his way out and the acts of January 6 were a wild attempt to prevent this. America’s angry underbelly was prepared to be guided into such an attack. It failed ultimately, partly due to luck, but more because the rioters cannot neatly be packaged into a coherent whole. There are in that group, MAGA onlookers, hate-filled white supremacists, and strands of organized militias who are truly dangerous.
In truth there was only some planning. The enterprise for the most part was as stupid and half-baked as most of Trump’s ideas. That it was somewhat successful was due to the fecklessness of Capitol Police, a general belief that it couldn’t happen here, and the machinations of a few politicians.
Hitler was impossible to stop because he was always a step ahead in his planning, and because the German population was quiescent. Goethe had described them, “so estimable in the individual, so wretched in the mass”. And this latter vice prevailed in the Thirties.
Decisive action now will further fragment Trump’s supporters. He’s out of power and unable to help them. The justice system must shed its pro-white bias and flatten the movement with legal, but brutally efficient resolve.
The comparisons with Nazi Germany will become instructive, rather than convenient and overblown, should the importance of American democracy not be upheld by swift action. If that not be the case, then we will have sown the wind and the whirlwind will be reaped.
"The fecklessness of Capitol Police" was seemingly on display in the first days after Trumpsky's vile insurrection. Now that more details and more video are available, we can see that approval or collusion may have marked the first minutes in storming the Capitol, but most CP quickly regrouped and performed heroically. The number and extent of injuries testifies to their dedication.
Carla's superb, heart-rending comment from yesterday, detailing her connections to the late Officer Howard Liebengood, provides essential insight into the CP. Any failure of theirs should be blamed on the few abettors who welcomed the mob, and still more on superiors who wittingly or unwittingly deprived the Capitol's defenders of critical resources. The latter aspect is especially disturbing and should be a major priority as investigations and prosecutions proceed.
This is an excellent point. My comment was ill-considered. It seems that “fecklessness” lies much more with leadership on that day.
Thank you for raising this. 100+ injuries plus two suicides more than compensates for the few who did not serve with distinction on that day.
Well stated ...Thank you!
Very nicely expressed. The German monarchy ended around about World War I, so absolutely it was a fledgling democracy, hence Hitler‘s success in damaging it. At that time in history, are the 20s and 30s and 40s, the US democratic experiment was already 140+ years old. Now in 2021 our democracy is close to a quarter millennium. So we have to presume some durability, some strength, and sure enough, damage was done this month but it was not severe. At least I don’t think so.
And how does this happen? What can we/ should we do ?
What can/what should we do? At first I thought of writing to every Republican Senator and Representative who voted against Trump's impeachment and telling them off. LOL - like they would even see that letter! Then I got real. So here's my plan. I realized that I can't vote all Trump legislators out, but I can contribute to their Democratic opponents. I also can and do contribute to the Lincoln Project. Of course, I can't contribute millions, but if we all send what we can afford to the opponents of those folks who are particularly heinous, we could make a difference. And if that's not feasible for some folks, well, letter writing to those companies who pledged not to support any one involved in the Capital riot and pressuring them to honor their word may well be productive.
Your idea has merit. Last year I contributed to Matt Gaetz’s opponent, Phil Ehr, but Phil lost. Next time I will publicize his opponent more broadly, especially here, to get a concerted effort to get Gaetz out.
Thanks for this effort, Annette! We need that madman out! My concern is about the gerrymandering and how much of an obstacle that poses to these efforts in some of these far-right areas. And we could really use a Stacey Abrams here in FL. I would imagine she is working on replicating her efforts in other states, which I will look into.
Hello fellow Floridians. It’s so good to know you’re out there. We have our work cut out for us. St Pete here.
Hi Diane, good to meet another sane Floridian. We need each other!
I too sent money to Phil Ehr (I live down in Tampa so not from his county) and although he didn't win - his numbers were very good and I truly hope he runs against Gaetz again in 2 years because I think he may well win next time -- those retired military may not approve of all of his shennigans).
I live just north of Tampa, in Pasco County, so we’re close. If you hear of any local efforts in the future please let me know.
I'm trying to make the suggestion in as many places as I can. Unfortunately, we can no longer think locally or statewide. We have to work where the crazies are - or they will end up making decisions that affect us all. Thank-you for your reply.
I think the solution is in your last 3 words: Get Gaetz outed. Will he still have the support of his followers when it is revealed that he is gay?
(in my humble opinion, I hasten to add before I get sued.)
As another long-term action, postcard campaigns are ongoing. I just sent out 50 postcards via Flip the West to voters in California about voting out the complicit Devin Nunes in 2022.
Yay! Thank you.
That has been my approach as well. I also contribute to Emily's List when I can. Sometimes my candidate wins and sometimes not, but at least I feel that my little bit might count for something in the bigger scheme of things. I also share HCR with friends on FB and Twitter and in emails. I have been successful in changing a few minds through HER reasoned accounts of the events of the day.
I did this too, sent contributions to those running against Graham and McConnell. Money talks!
Me too. And contributions to Ossoff and Warnock. But Regrettably I missed Georgia's Van Ausdal. Greene is a disgrace.
Pressure legislation. Freedom requires responsibility and rules
I am hearing people use the words “ personal responsibility “ to mean “do whatever you want to do or you personally think is best for you”. It is so disheartening that we don’t have common agreement on what words mean. This is fascism, correct?
I am committed to not succumbing to cynicism. We have got to pull together and move away from the cliff to which fascism has taken our country. Cynicism and division plays right into the fascism.
Google and read anything you can from Dr Lee. It’s been linked here before. And the book ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’ by the community of respected psychiatrists. Dr Lee lays out cult behavior and exactly what our nation must do. Biden is mirroring a lot of what she suggests.
Yes, I read that the day it came out! Thanks for reminding me!
Ellie Kona posted some good links on this as well.
Who's Dr. Lee. Send me a link.
She did a good interview with Bill Moyers recently. You can google his website.
He’s the author of the book in Tricia’s comment above.
Whoa. I'm reading too fast. Thank you for pointing that out, Cynthia. I ordered it and will start reading on Sunday.
Dr. Bandy Lee is female. This is the website of her organization: https://worldmhc.org/
I ordered her book as a result of the recommendation here. Thanks for this link, Christy.
I have skimmed thru this book. I found it repetitive and short on practical advice. We can generate some practical advice on our own. Have a look at
https://cogitamus.substack.com/p/interviews-with-trump-supporters
https://bandylee.com/
How exciting it must be to be a QAnon/Trump believer! It must be like living inside a Tom Cruise movie. Dashing heroes, evil villains, amazingly unlikely and convoluted conspiracies; so much more interesting than the boring reality of bills, committee meetings, infrastructure maintenance, and an uncertain future.
what a pathetic group they are...
There’s the dopamine hit, the brain neurotransmitter, that gives a sense of “aliveness.” It’s a very real thing and children raised in traumatic or neglectful families are predisposed to this due to how the brain is wired in those years. The brain is “plastic” and it can be remodeled at any time in our lives. But there has to be awareness of the problem and a conscious effort to address it.
Terror is one emotion. Was it terror, another emotion or a combination of emotions, that moved you into waking up to the authentic nature of the leader and the cult - and most importantly, yourself? You possess a precious knowledge of the process of liberation and maturation that can teach us what is required in moving from a lonely, dependent fragility into self-responsibility as a woman strengthened by wisdom. If it feels right, please share your insights. Thank you.
Thanks for your response. My transition out of the cult was gradual, aided not by outsiders but by other insiders who also grew out of it over time. A complicated story. There are some parallels to the trump cult but in other ways it was different. I am trying to sort out my own experience to see what if anything can be extracted that might useful now. So far it is helpful mostly in my own ability to understand some of the mindset of cultists... but not on how to penetrate it. Still searching for answers!
What a mystery that experience must be! To have managed to release it thanks to your friends also traveling the path with whom you could sort things through, and find it still an enigma on this side of it emphasizes how complicated emotionally and psychologically indeed it must have been. I've lived outside the US for a time in a place where there's more connection among people, celebrations, strangers invite you to supper, classmates readily befriend you, lots of religious commemorations, lots of art made by regular people. When I come back home, I feel depressed for a month or so. People aren't on the streets, if they are, they don't look at you; people seem more distant, individual, separate,into their own lives, less into community.
I really appreciate this observation and hearing your experience of being in another country and returning here. I have had a similar experience and you have described it so well. It’s as if there is a kind of deadening of the spirit, here. And people feel closed off and even walled off in their homes. I agree.. I don’t feel the sense of community here that I would like to.
That sense of community is a big part of it I think. We were young idealistic hippies at the start of my cult life (I didnʻt think of it as a cult til way later... before, we were supposedly an egalitarian commune!), trying to escape the alienation & social fragmentation of modern american life. But the belong-to-a-tribe impulse can turn into an even more intense us vs. them alienation. That link someone posted in this thread about how people get strung out on QAnon & the likes is pretty interesting, and fits with this.
Now that we have a huge thread, and my note to you might get lost in the avalanche, I just want to say I think your last name is particularly noteworthy considering the subject. Grüss Gott and Fürch Gott are expressions I grew up with in the Germany of my teens.
Yes. My ancestors emigrated to the US in the late 1800s from German-speaking parts of eastern Europe. All Jewish; considering history, I would call my origins Ashkenazi, not German, and this adds an additional shudder when I contemplate our current crazy political/cultural situation.
I am of Ashkenazi descent too, 100% according to my background. My mother was from Berlin and my dad, Poland.
I realized when filling out the census form last year that nothing in their lists really described my ethnic or national origins. Caucasian, yes, but German? No way! Czech? Polish? Maybe our families were there for many generations but ultimately so many were chased or frightened out of all those places. It was then I thought that for American Jews, the census ought to have Ashkenazi & Sephardic as choices.
Maybe but not all Jews are aware of their origins. And not all Jews are white. The Spanish Insurrection displaced Jews from Spain and they ended up all over Europe and Jerusalem. Others were in Ethiopia and they were black.
Eve, I am sure that you bear scars from the experience you had. Those of us who have also lived in the thrall of narcissists hear you and share your alarm and distress. You're an exceptionally brave person to break free of the syndrome.
I have something concrete you can do. Join a national community of citizen volunteers who are working strategically and ethically to build an inclusive democracy by countering voter suppression in key geographies around the country. We are all volunteer and you and can look up “Walk the Walk 2020.” This is all truly terrifying but much less so when you can connect the historical dots (via Professor Richardson’s summaries and analyses) and the pragmatic dots (via Walk the Walk’s informed research and strategic interventions.
I am Totally Ashamed of these republicans!!! We HAVE TO get them out!!!
Omgosh, they are ACTUALLY visiting that sick sonofa....., Still???
The World is Watching!!!!😮😠😡
I've been wondering if people with expertise in extracting people from cults might be useful here, but the scope of the problem is daunting. Should there be programs to train family members? Is there anything that can be done on a mass scale? Countering with facts is apparently ineffective.
I think about "re-education" as it's been carried out in other, non-democratic countries. It's anti-American in my view. Technically, public schools exist (or used to exist) to turn out good citizens. Obviously they haven't been doing a good job.
Eve, beautifully spoken by someone who has been on the inside and managed get free. Thank you.
There is some sharing of written works under this comment that have been on my reading list, and prompts me to move them up a notch. Thank you. When speaking of the path towards healing generations of colonialism and oppression, here is a book that should not be missed, from a perspective that has long been dismissed. And that has been to our world’s great disadvantage: https://sacredinstructions.life/
Hi Eve, I echo your concerns and experience. I was in NY & FL and the cult leader a woman.