#1019 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Sunday November 3)
Good morning,
Just a few observations about voting, leadership, and rationality today. Tomorrow, some predictions and Tuesday some contemplations:
THE DANGERS OF IGNORING FACTS
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists.
-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
THE IMPORTANCE OF VOTING
"Voting is a civic sacrament."
- Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C.
"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting."
- Tom Stoppard
"Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be."
- Sydney J. Harris
A LEGITIMATE OBSERVATION
Regarding my concern about the poisoning rhetoric of Trump, Jeremy Rosen notes that Trump is not the only person guilty of over-the-top rhetoric:
“…you couldn't just admit that Biden is part of the problem in the escalation of poisonous rhetoric on both sides that is destroying our country. It's fine to say Trump is worse. It's fine to point out (which you didn't) that Harris even chastised Biden for that comment quite properly. But you can't ignore the rhetoric of the left against Trump and his supporters. It's how we got here. Yes Trump takes it to extremes and is worse. But the left is not blameless in why we are in such a polarized place. If the left had not used overwrought rhetoric calling Bush and Cheney criminals and Romney a far right unacceptable candidate we would not have created the environment where someone like Trump could have even existed. Our country is broken and I hold both parties responsible.”
FASCISM
A little long, but worth the read (come on, it’s Sunday, you can do it!). It is hard to believe this came from an article published 80 years ago…
“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions, or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.…
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.…
It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.…
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.… They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interests.…
Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.…
Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself….
Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
--Henry Wallace, "The Danger of American Fascism," (excerpted), The New York Times Magazine, April 9th, 1944.
Have a good day,
Glenn