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Read other letters about this article
Look, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have an authoritarian proto-fascist movement which in the name of God and Country will subvert, dismantle, and destroy our democratic liberties and freedoms in order to establish some form of one-party (possibly totalitarian) rule. (this snark, with deference to the memory of the late Douglas Adams)
Why does Kurtz keep doing this? I don't know. Maybe Alex de Toqueville knows
No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country, and however powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires
- Democracy In America
Incidentally, I just got that quote out of Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Its the opening to a book about how decades of antiSemitic rhetoric set the stage for the Holocaust.
Heck, let's see if I can make a whole point out of nothing but quotes from books on fascism
In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carryiing out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherance of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized
- Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt went on to say what was significant about the Protocols of Zion was not that they were fake, but that they were believed. How many people believe all kind of insane bullshit if its said about "liberals"? My roomate back in 98-99 was convinced Clinton had murdered 16 people.
Extremists never begin as extremists. They become extremists gradually. They move gingerly foward in an open society. They advance only so far as they fail to meet resistance. And no society is immune from this moral catastrophe
- Chris Hedges, American Fascists
Glenn has a post two down from this one about neoconservatives speaking in code.
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself ... The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda - before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's distrubing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world - lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the world
- Arendt
That lying world is being conjured up. Its being conjured up on the AM dial. When I turned Limbaugh off this afternoon he was saying global warming is a hoax because horses cause more pollution than cars. No, really. Its being conjured up by Regnery - the Politically Incorrect Guide... series is some creepy, Orwellian, Hofstadter type paranoid authoritarian parallel version of The Complete Idiot's Guide. Yep. The Complete's Idiot Guide is "liberally biased." Just like Wikipedia, hence Conservapedia. Its conjured up on the House floor when James Inhofe, formerly chair of an environment committee, says that global warming is the second greatest hoax in US history; #1 is church state separation, according to he. Its conjured up when the RNC hires David Barton to tour the country and teach that church/state separation is a myth. Its conjured up when the President and his team say that Iraq has WMDs and ties to al Qaeda.
