Top Stories Monday Nov 18
The Sideshow on the dangers of complacency:
When I was a kid, my many Jewish elders had a short-hand phrase they’d use to explain their objections whenever some suggested legislation (censorship, for example) or discrimination against blacks or gays left them gasping in horror: “The Nazis did that.” (Or sometimes just: “The Nazis….”) These were people who remembered how it took place, with not too much disruption of everyday life, at first, and most people going unmolested and therefore not making much of it. Nothing to see here, just a few commies and Jews and a couple of queers, not any of us Normal people…. These were, you understand, people who would have been crushed if their son turned out to be gay or their daughter married “a Negro”, but by god they knew better than to give an inch on these things. They didn’t have to like pornography to know it shouldn’t be illegal – they knew what censorship was about. They understood, with crystal clarity, that there are no good excuses for dismissing people’s civil liberties.
With the carefully stage-managed “public” appearances of Bush to crowds from which all potential Bush detractors (i.e., the ordinary American public) have been removed to “First Amendment zones”, a “free press” that is bought-and-paid for by the administration (doesn’t have to be government-controlled, since they own it anyway), not to mention so many enormous lies that it’s hard to pick which is the Big Lie, comparisons to Nazi Germany seem impossible to avoid. Bear a few things in mind: Hitler had to start somewhere; it wasn’t Kristallnacht on the very first day. It creeps up on you, and then it’s too late. If you wait until they really are putting people in gas chambers and making lampshades out of human skin, then eventually they will probably get around to that as well. Don’t think, “It can’t happen here”; the German people thought so, too. Even the Jewish ones. And Americans spoke with horror of “the camps” even as we were rounding up Japanese Americans and depriving them of both their property and their liberty. Do check out that letter at Talk Left to see what Ashcroft has really been up to.