The US media and 14 common characteristics of fascist regimes

[RaulVB]

You should read this article to understand your "new" country. I've lived through this before...

"6. Controlled Mass Media — Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common."

http://www.peacecouncil.net/pnl/03/721/721_Fascism.htm

And media manipulation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_manipulation

[lookinforward]

1. Great Site on this topic

I studied this in college and in Europe. He is spot on.


http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

[RaulVB]

2. Thanks for the link

Welcome to the forum.

Your input on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Regards.

[zapped 1]

11. welcome and thank you! nt

[newyawker99]

21. Hi lookinforward!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[KaryninMiami]

3. Where were you when you lived through this before?

Thanks for the great links on media manipulation and fascism, a word I have found myself saying quite often these days. Unfortunately.

[RaulVB]

5. Chile. General Pinochet. (1973-1989) n/t

[KaryninMiami]

7. Ah, ok. Thank you. I couldn't help asking.

A friend's husband who came over recently from Cuba, said this is all too familiar to him as well. It's like living in a nightmare that just keeps unfolding.

If you are in Miami, let me know since there's a group forming there which I think you might be interested in learning about. www.therightiswrong.us. Email me directly and I'll share with you what I know so far.

Anyway, thanks again, Raul. It's late and I am meeting someone at 7:30am on the metro to find our way over to the Counter-Inaugural events tomorrow. Should be quite an adventure...

[RaulVB]

10. I will. Be safe (n/t)

[kaho]

14. ...Cuba...

...and its press/media may point to why Raul's reference could equally apply to totalitarian left wing regimes...

[RaulVB]

15. Correct. Similar behavior. Ideology does not make any difference (n/t)

[glitch]

20. Whether the state owns the corps or the corps own the state - fascist is

fascist, "left" or "right".

[Nothing Without Hope]

8. I'm glad you survived and can share your insights with us

A quote I have been thinking about lately:

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering. -Henri Frederic Amiel, philosopher and writer (1821-1881)

[RaulVB]

12. Thanks

I wish this nation will wake up before is too late...

The suffering is self-inflicted here, unfortunately.

[Nothing Without Hope]

16. I believe internet-based activism is key...and ANOTHER article

The other times in history when fascism corrupted societies, it was easier to silence dissent and stifle the flow of uncensored information because the internet did not yet exist. I believe that when the b* administration fully realizes this, our freedom of communication and information retrieval on the internet will be attacked. Defending this will be crucial.

Re the "waking up" -- yet another article I recommend, though it is written as a dense psychological study rather than a lucid analysis accessible to non-psychologists, is an 11 page piece by Paul Levy (see below). It's clear to all of us here that far too many people in this country are deliberately choosing to blind themselves to reality. As a result, they are easily manipulated and the country is heading for destruction. Why is this, when it is so clearly against their own interests? (I mean the "average" people, not the war-profiteers and the nuts who eagerly await the imminent 2nd coming of Christ.) The Levy article goes some way to explaining this as a psycho-social disease.

Before I give you that link, this has reminded me of another favorite quote, a translation of a Navajo proverb:
You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

And now the Paul Levy article:

http://baltimorechronicle.com/011305PaulLevy.html
ANALYSIS:
The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis
Bush’s sickness is our own.
by Paul Levy

George W. Bush is ill. He has a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times we live in. It’s an illness that has been with us since time immemorial. Because it’s an illness that's in the soul of all of humanity, it pervades the field and is in all of us in potential at any moment, which makes it especially hard to diagnose.

Bush's malady is quite different from schizophrenia, for example, in which all the different parts of the personality are fragmented and not connected to each other, resulting in a state of internal chaos. As compared to the disorder of the schizophrenic, Bush can sound quite coherent and can appear like such a "regular," normal guy, which makes the syndrome he is suffering from very hard to recognize. This is because the healthy parts of his personality have been co-opted by the pathological aspect, which drafts them into its service. Because of the way the personality self-organizes an outer display of coherence around a pathogenic core, I would like to name Bush's illness ‘malignant egophrenic (as compared to schizophrenic) disease,’ or ‘ME disorder,’ for short. If ME disorder goes unrecognized and is not contained, it can be very destructive, particularly if the person is in a position of power.

(snip)

[RaulVB]

17. I'll read that. Thanks

Good article, indeed.

[Nothing Without Hope]

4. Thom Hartmann's article from July is also excellent

Published on Monday, July 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Original posted at http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm

The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann

(snip)

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

(snip)

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:

" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "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."

(snip)

[farmboxer]

6. The Republican right wing Corporate owned Mainstream News

media is so obvious, it became extremely obvious before the Gore/Bush election. I can't watch that propaganda. Many people are waking up about this.

[Nothing Without Hope]

13. yes - you might enjoy reading this thread, which expands on this

In it, a lot of DU people sort of co-discovered that they no longer use the MSM to get their information. They have moved to the internet because they can no longer stomach the lies and drivel of the corporate media.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2970623

The thread has an air of surprised discovery about it. In a sense, it represents what I hope and believe is a turning point, where the corrupted MSM are bypassed and people use internet-based communities to exchange information and organize. We must guard this freedom, because it if is attacked -- and it will be -- there will be much less opportunity to recover democracy in this country.

[gumby]

9. Eric Blumrich made an animation of these 14 points

as read by Mike Malloy (heard on Air America).

http://bushflash.com/14.html

[helderheid]

19. fantastic flash!

[MHalblaub]

18. US beats Cuba by 13.5 : 11

as I counted.