"This Week in Fascism"

[sarahlee]

“Sun Dec 12th, 2004 at 21:06:09 CST

”This is the first installment of a new weekly "Diary Whoring" segment I am entitling "This Week in Fascism" I hope to make this a highly recommended (hint! hint!) diary to highlight overlooked work by other dedicated diarists. I want everyone to understand that America will probably not become another Nazi state, But I do believe we are well on our way to a Corporate Nationalistic Anti-Communistic state that is akin to 1930's Germany and Italy and would have the potential, if left unchecked, to do more damage worldwide then any fascist state beforehand.”

F.Y.I. 1487 Undeleted diaries on DailyKos for week ending 12-11-04
167 Dairies Included in "This week in Fascism"

I am leaning toward the Weekly format to get maximum "Recommends" so we can keep this in the people's eye more often. I also only wish to do 3 days's of Prep and 3 days of responding and maybe take a day off.

It is not my belief to try to analyze the validity or worth of these diaries, just to categorize and assemble them to allow a hopefully well recommended diary as a list for these other diaries that slip past too fast to get the proper hearing and respect.

During my browsing I found 14 signs of a fascist society. It is in an article in Free Inquiry Magazine possibly from march/April 2003 (volume 23 # 2). We seem to have all the 14 principles evident in this society and they were emphasized during this election. I think this country has slowly become fascist over such a long period that no one person can be responsible for this. Our system emphasizes playing to the masses. They only have to persuade and energize 30% of the masses.

I will use these points as an outline and reference Diaries that fall into the categories. I cannot place blame for all the items listed here to any one group. I believe certain individuals and groups support individual items and ignore or are apathetic toward other items. This allows the countries move toward fascism to proceed at an accelerated pace.

Read the rest here . . .
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/12/2269/2862

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I think we should start a section of the new Demopedia to do the same thing as this Kos diary. That way stories could be added as they appear during the week. There could be one Index page that linked to weekly pages that would be created every Monday. Maybe the best collected in a monthly summary.

I would set up the pages, but know I don't have time to post the information. I would miss way too much.

Anyone else think this might be a good idea?
If your answer is "Yes", are you willing to help collect and post appropriate stories to the various categories each week?

[UncleSepp]

1. It could be very interesting

I might be able to help, not sure about the next few weeks as I am covering for people who are on holidays at work so my free time is somewhat limited. After the first of the year, I'll have more free time to write.

I do want to know who Youngblood Kaufmann is. Kaufmann has something quite interesting going on with the Goebbels diaries. There are better sources than just Lochner if Kaufmann wants to keep going with this line of comparison - the Lochner stuff is full of, excuse the pun, holes.

The Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte has published volumes of material from the Moscow archives, and I would be willing to hunt through it for appropriate passages and translate them into English if some enterprising Seattle-area college student with access to interlibrary loan privileges would request it. (Translate the quotes, that is. I am not setting myself up to translate five shelf-yards of material!)

I also have a series of letters I am translating which contain some interesting and relevant passages, one of which makes interesting references to the 1932 election and another of which describes life at the end of the war (February 1945). I find them moving for their ordinariness. Looking back now, we understand how far from normal was the situation on the ground in Germany in the 30s before and immediately after the Seizure of Power, but many now take our own time to be only slightly off. It was the same then. People realized they lived in an unusual time, but many were caught up then as we are now in the daily business of life. Middle class Germans still went to the movies and got married and sent each other baby pictures and complained about their relatives, and so until the bombs were actually falling on one's house or the police came to one's own door, one did not believe it could be so terrible. I cannot say that it is the same now, but I do think that one of the most difficult hurdles for us who are in the boiling pot now to overcome will be the impression that we are normal and the Germans in the 1930s were not. Enough with the comic books and to hell with Goldhagen - any people may be so fooled when the conditions are right!

[sarahlee]

2. The holidays

are part of my problem as well. I am trying to finish up a lot of work to hit the road for 2 weeks of traveling on the 20th. Will have my laptop with me, but won't be on-line all the time every day and risk being "anti-social" with family seen once a year if I insist on plugging in at every stop. This is the time I remind my grandchildren I exist and spend time with parents who might not be here next year. And I try to prove to them all that I have not gone completely cyber.

The work you are doing is extremely valuable and should be included in some way, but it is not so much new writing that will be needed as linking to information coming out weekly in the news that is indicative of this dangerous path we seem to be traveling.

I don't know who Youngblood Kaufmann is, but I believe he/she is trying to allow people to see the parallels between then and now. It seems apparent that the majority of our population - even those here and on Kos are not ready or willing to even entertain the possibility that we may be walking that historic path again.