The red, white and black
Robert Harrington | 3:00 pm EST November 30, 2024
Consider this. A democratic nation promoted a man to that nation’s high office, a man who once planned and encouraged a violent overthrow of that nation. With lies and racism and a series of jingoistic rallies he exploited hatred for an unfairly despised minority by blaming them for all that nation’s woes, including inflation caused by a recent worldwide pandemic. He did this in order to enlist the people against that nation’s elderly president.
Instead of putting him in prison for life, the corrupt judiciary gave him a platform to further publicise his insane and hateful ideas and ultimately let him off the hook. The nation’s press, knowing full well that he was a clown, a joke, a lunatic, a danger, gave him free publicity anyway. They did so because he was good for business and they, some secretly, some openly, hoped for his ultimate success.
I’ll bet you thought I was referring to Donald Trump. I’m referring to Adolf Hitler. Hitler tried to overthrow the lawfully constituted Weimar Republic in a half-assed insurrection that came to be known to history as “The Beer Hall Putsch.” He used virulent anti-semitic rhetoric to gain a foothold in the cabinet of the octogenarian president Paul Hindenburg. He was helped along the way by much of a mainstream media that “sanewashed” him into ultimate power.
Hitler, the same man of whom virtually every person on earth for the last 80 years claimed that, if he ever returned in another form, next time we would be ready for him. Next time we would never, ever be fooled again. We would never, ever give power to such a person again. And yet here we are, and an alarming percentage of America and the world’s population looks on and cheers. They have been fooled again. Only this time, they knew exactly what to look for.
To be sure, those of us who were never fooled, those of us who saw Trump for exactly what he was, spoke up and voted against him. Three times. But we underestimated the number of people who were either fooled by him or simply didn’t care. We underestimated that, far from being a brackish and hateful political disease, fascism is an ideology that many people today embrace. They refuse to call it that, but that’s what it is. Fascism. And we need to acknowledge that fascism is back and it’s more dangerous than ever. Last time fascism had the weapons of conventional warfare. This time it will have nuclear weapons and a very real capacity for world domination.
America has, in effect, handed control of the only true superpower on earth to a madman, a jealous, petty, stupid, toxic madman, full of rabies and hate. This is a deadly dangerous situation and we would be fools to underestimate this danger — again.
Those of us who weren’t fooled, who saw clearly the threat that this madman poses to the world, must never give up. For now, it really is up to us. You may consider yourself a passive though disgruntled observer, but I assure you that you are now an activist. History has made you so. The current situation has made you so. Consider yourselves drafted. Drafted by circumstances.
Soon the three branches of government, the Congress, the judiciary and executive, will belong to Trump. Fortunately for us, the power to shift a democratic republic to fascism is a slow one. It took time even for Hitler. It took him fully eight years to become the undisputed master of Germany through a series of deeds and decrees, the Enabling Act, the Night of the Long Knives, the Nuremberg Laws, “Kristallnacht,” and so on, together with an endless barrage of propaganda manufactured by Josef Goebbels’ hate machine and a people too weak and too frightened to resist.
We have seen America make the same mistakes that Germany of the early 1930s made. Let’s resist and fight with everything in our power the tide that drags us toward fascism’s ultimate conclusion. You would be hard pressed to find very many Hitler partisans in the hulking ruin of 1945 that used to be the magnificent city of Berlin. We shouldn’t need to wait for that to happen again.
The new fascism is really the old fascism, dressed up in the same colours of red, white and black. We should be ready to fight this new fascism with every fiber of our beings and every gram of our strength. Along the way, whatever happens, brothers and sisters, take care of yourselves, and if you can, take care of someone else too.
