My parents always thought it'd be Commies who'd conquer us from within

[Philosoraptor]

I remember so clearly in the late fifties and early sixties the commie scare, the bomb scare, and the great folk music scare.

They'd see Peter, Paul and Mary singing Dylan's 'Blowing in the wind' and they'd lament that the nation was falling to the commies at last, like they'd always predicted, and it was our own kids with guitars and beatniks and peaceniks, and demonstrators and malcontent socialists IN OUR VERY MIDST, eating away at our society like a cancer and outright attacking our established government.

They were way, way off. But we have indeed been conquered from within, right under our apathetic noses. The enemy who finally conquered us was not foreign, but domestic. Not Nazis, or Commies, or Socialists, but fascists, with nice, expensive suits.

[Selatius]

1. We live under an oligarchy of corporate special interests now.

Some of those special interests own the very news people need to become informed. It's a slavery of the mind, a prison of ignorance. You don't need barb wire fences here. You just need a TV.

[Swamp Rat]

3. Exactly!

[tecelote]

2. Drink the Kool-Aid

Everything will get better.

[crud76]

4. Krushchev Said

"We'll bury you" to the U. S. in the Fifties, then quickly changed his mind and told us we'd bury ourselves.

[Deja Q]

7. Did he know that we were 'burying ourselves' while propping them up?

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=346356&ssid=54&sid=BUS

[Karenina]

12. Yes, I remember him banging his shoe

on the table at the U.N. We jumped under our desks at school in response. Fast forward to '71, a dark hole-in-the-wall on the Lower East Side where exotically flavored vodka flowed and dissident Soviets who had found their way to NYU congregated. I'll never forget Sergei's comment:

"The United States has little to fear from the Soviet Union. America will be completely destroyed by the Harvard Business School."

[jody]

5. You say your parents were wrong and perhaps your children will say you were wrong.

:hi:

[Philosoraptor]

6. I've rarely been right.

Like a busted clock, I'm right twice a day.

[izzie]

8. I understand it. I must be their age. Plus

look at this or think about this. I have three boys. Two work where military goods are made. My sister has 2 or her 4 children husband that work where military goods are made. Tell me that is not a big part of this. The town I grew up in the largest amount of workers worked on subs. All goods made to kill and blow up people. Locally we can visit an old farm village that base income came from making carts and carnages. Things used to do things and not kill and blow up people. Times do change. :think:

[Ian David]

9. When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
-Sinclair Lewis






September 21, 2004
MAUREEN FARRELL ARCHIVES

When Fascism Comes to America

by Maureen Farrell

I. When Fascism Comes to America, It Will Be Embraced by FOX News

"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. . ."– Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the New York Times, April 9, 1944

"Fox is not objective. Fox is a Republican propaganda machine." – Roger Ebert

In 1944, Henry A. Wallace, one of three Vice Presidents to serve under Franklin D. Roosevelt, assessed the threat of fascism in America and predicted that the time might come when the media was in collusion with the ruling power. "American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information. . . ," he wrote.

Decades later, during the first Gulf War, the media dutifully regurgitated propaganda while those in power did, in fact, "use the news to deceive the public." But the public remained so fully gullible that by the time the Bush Cartel's "Operation Iraqi Freedom" hit TV screens, the "deliberate poisoners of public information" didn't even have to break a sweat to fool us twice.

<snip>

Nearly 70 years ago, Sinclair Lewis warned against the dangers of fascism in America. Nine years later, Vice President Wallace did the same.

Describing American fascists who "are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so," FDR's Vice President added, " but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead." Decades later, G.W. Bush's Vice President would become the poster boy for similar shadiness. While serving as Halliburton's CEO, Dick Cheney conducted $73 million worth of business with "worse-than-Hitler" Saddam Hussein, helping him rebuild the oil fields destroyed during the first Gulf War -- back when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense.

And while Benito Mussolini said that "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power," the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary extended the definition to include the kind of snarling seething "patriotism" we've experienced since Sept. 11, 2001.

Defining fascism as "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism," American Heritage appeared to be forecasting our current political climate. How bad has this belligerence been? In case you've forgotten:

More:
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/09/far04031.html

[cassiepriam]

10. I always thought we would be threatened from the outside.

Never occurred to me that we would be destroyed from within.
From fellow Americans. From US sociopaths driven by greed and self interest.
Who would ruin our country to enrich themselves. And a madman would
act out his insanity and try to destroy the world.

[mwb970]

11. The righties still feel this way.

They'd see Peter, Paul and Mary singing Dylan's 'Blowing in the wind' and they'd lament that the nation was falling to the commies at last...

Remember the Dixie Chicks uproar? Remember the reaction to those protesting Bush's Iraq War?

They think the fascists will protect us from these scurrilous types! Listen to their hate radio shows for a dose of old-fashioned paranoia.