Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, July 12, 2010

Republicans As Existential Threat

What BooMan Said:
The Republican Party that impeached Clinton was dangerously insane. They took it up several notches after 9/11. But what we're witnessing now is of a totally different scale…. I don't dismiss these people at all. I think they rank with climate change and nuclear proliferation as threats to humanity. And we have no time to be dicking around arguing over the soul of Barack Obama.

2 comments:

jimf said...

Dale quoted:

> But what we're witnessing now is of a totally different scale…

It's not just Fox News -- the avalanche of books seems to be tipping
the scale too.

I stopped in to my local Barnes & Noble yesterday and there was
a new "Current Events" table near the door that was covered with
what seemed to me to be almost entirely right-wing stuff. A couple of
representative titles:

_The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists,
Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists_ by
Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott

_The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the
Liberal Elite_ by Lee Harris

Ah, well. So I took home a couple of Noam Chomsky DVDs.

;->

jimf said...

Speaking of whom:

"Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America"
By Matthew Rothschild, April 12, 2010
http://www.progressive.org/wx041210.html

"'I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s
speeches on the radio, [Chomsky] said, “and I have a memory
of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I
have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering'
here at home. . .

'The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare
in my lifetime,' he said.

He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the
unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer
to them than anyone else.

'Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,'
Chomsky said. . .

'People want some answers. . . They are hearing answers
from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.'

Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and
drew a parallel between it and the United States.
'The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization
and was regarded as a model of democracy,' he said.

And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.

He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about
'the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats,
and carrying out the will of eternal providence.'

When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations
joined forces with the Nazis, 'the center very quickly collapsed,'
Chomsky said.

No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are
'reverberating' today, he said."