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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPsychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton: Trump's attempts to falsify reality follows "pattern of the Nazis"
From Salon this morning:
https://www.salon.com/2020/09/21/psychiatrist-robert-jay-lifton-trumps-attempts-to-falsify-reality-follows-pattern-of-the-nazis/
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, distinguished professor emeritus at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a leading psychohistorian who has written extensively about doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, has long called for mental health experts to defy warnings from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and speak out about Trump's mental health. Lifton recently published a book entitled "Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry" and was one of the 27 mental health experts featured in "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," the bestseller edited by Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee in which mental health professionals assessed the president.
-snip-
Lifton said that Trump's supporters and enablers exhibit the same "cult-like behavior" that he has studied, adding that the current administration has "Trumpified" every part of the federal government, in much the same way that the German government was "Nazified" under Adolf Hitler.
-snipping to get to a quote directly from Lifton in the interview in which he explains what he means by "malignant normality"-
Well, I can tell you where I got that idea. It came from my work with Nazi doctors. I studied Nazi doctors and I spoke to a number of them. And in that situation, if a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, at the ramp, was sending Jews to the gas chamber, that was considered his job. That was what he was supposed to do. He may have had problems with it, but that was what was expected of him. That was a form of the malignant normality of that regime. Now, Trump isn't a Nazi, but still there's an American malignant normality that Trump and his followers impose on us, and that malignant normality has to do with lying. It's particularly extreme in relation to the virus, but it has to do with a more general pattern of lying, a kind of paranoid grandiosity.
It has also to do with attacking and seeking to destroy anyone who questions his version of reality. All that is part of the malignant normality imposed on this country by Trumpites, which I think it's our responsibility to expose and combat with the full knowledge and experience of our professions brought into play. So that is how witnessing professionals, again, confront and combat malignant normality.
-snip-
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)dalton99a
(81,374 posts)KS Toronado
(17,136 posts)Keep wondering if they are proud or shocked at what they have created.
dchill
(38,429 posts)uponit7771
(90,301 posts)ck4829
(35,033 posts)Lonestarblue
(9,958 posts)There arent many undecided voters left, so I think the better tactic is to show what Biden will do FOR the country. People need a vision to vote for rather than just a bogeyman to vote against.
droidamus2
(1,699 posts)I am currently reading a book that was written in 1949 abou WW II and the parallels between the Nazi propaganda and what can only be called thought control are obvious. The demonizing of the other, the claims of victimhood, the outright lies are all straight from Hitler's playbook.
cayugafalls
(5,639 posts)Exactly. We have been battling Nazi's since WW2 and we still are. Smedley Butler exposed an attempted coup in 1935 and sionce then the persons involved have been trying to overthrow the government. They have been playing the long game. BFEE, JP Morgan, etc...
In November 1934, Butler told the committee that one Gerald P. MacGuire told him that a group of businessmen, supposedly backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and others, intended to establish a fascist dictatorship. Butler had been asked to lead it, he said, by MacGuire, who was a bond salesman with Grayson MP Murphy & Co. The New York Times reported that Butler had told friends that General Hugh S. Johnson, former head of the National Recovery Administration, was to be installed as dictator, and that the J.P. Morgan banking firm was behind the plot. Butler told Congress that MacGuire had told him the attempted coup was backed by three million dollars, and that the 500,000 men were probably to be assembled in Washington, D.C. the following year. All the parties alleged to be involved publicly said there was no truth in the story, calling it a joke and a fantasy.[67]
In its report to the House, the committee stated that, while "no evidence was presented... to show a connection... with any fascist activity of any European country... [t]here was no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution..." and that "your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement about the creation of the organisation. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark...."[68]
No prosecutions or further investigations followed, and historians have questioned whether or not a coup was actually contemplated. Historians have not reported any independent evidence apart from Butler's report on what MacGuire told him. One of these, Hans Schmidt, says MacGuire was an "inconsequential trickster".[69][70][71][72] The news media dismissed the plot, with a New York Times editorial characterizing it as a "gigantic hoax".[73] When the committee's final report was released, the Times said the committee "purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true" and "... also alleged that definite proof had been found that the much publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at a hearing, was actually contemplated".[74] The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot, despite evidence to the contrary. Though the media ridiculed the allegations, a final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler's statements.[75][n 1]
The McCormackDickstein Committee said of Butler's testimony in its final report, "In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country... There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
crickets
(25,949 posts)The parallels with how the Mueller report was handled and received are striking.
cayugafalls
(5,639 posts)behind this grab for power and yet they are complicit.
George Bush Sr. Father played a part in the original coup attempt and did not suffer any backlash and decades later his son ran the CIA and eventually became President - The Long Game was complete, installed at the highest levers of power, the Nazi's within no longer were relegated to the sidelines.
These Wall Street millionaires literally plotted to overthrow the president
...Shortly before the committee hearings, in September of 1934, the newly formed American Liberty Leaguemade up of leaders and captains of industry opposed to the president fomenting class hatred and his handling of the Depressionreleased a statement. Among its members were the DuPonts, S.B. Colgate, Sewell Avery, John Raskob, Alfred P. Sloan, and former secretary of State Elihu Root. Butler noticed Robert Sterling Clarks name on the list, as well as Grayson M. P. Murphy, Gerald MacGuires boss.
Also implicated in the plot was Al Smith, former New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as Prescott Bush, a banker, future Connecticut senator, and father to George H. W. Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush...
https://timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a
They are even using some of the same tactics this time as well. Except now, it seems that perhaps some Generals may actually be on board.
I should probably work on an op...lol.
llashram
(6,265 posts)Hitler's playbook from the beginning. Earlier on he had those nazi types like Alec Jones...et al 'advising" him. And I just know he has nazi sympathizers sprinkled all through our government and departments now. If this orange menace to humanity wins again I can hear the jackboots marching. And just like his BFF Putin and other RW dictators like that n. Korean guy, we will have huge military parades honouring the new AmeriKKKan dictator.
bucolic_frolic
(43,023 posts)If it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck ... it's a duck.
What's on those tax returns?
DBoon
(22,336 posts)Banality of evil is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
Explaining this phenomenon, Edward S. Herman has emphasized the importance of "normalizing the unthinkable." According to him, "doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.'"
from Wikipedia
tanyev
(42,511 posts)I picked out a few passages. Remind you of anyone?
Hitler couldnt bear failure or weakness: anyone who looked ill, slack, or even uninspired was quickly out the picture. He had often explained the dismissal of a prominent figure as being on grounds simply of ill health.
The supreme commander of the navy came for the Fuhrers fifty-fifth birthday Grand Admiral Karl Donitz asked his commander in chief to do everything to keep the Baltic ports open in return. Hitler, as mad for boats as a child for toys, blindly promised Donitz that he would.
At the midday briefing, in spite of the looming military disaster, to everyones astonishment he revealed a beaming face, and at the lunch that followed he fell into one of his endless, distracted monologues. This time it was about elephants, which were the strongest animals in existence, and which, like him, abhorred meat.
Without intoxication the last briefing sessions in March and April 1945 were so depressing as to be terrible. The generals seemed to be trying to hoodwink him all the time he constantly thought he was being sabotaged. Hitler started shouting, waving his arms around, raging, raving, his face so distorted that it was barely recognizable. It was only through aggression that he could defend himself against the traitors he sensed everywhere.