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Friday, February 24, 2017

One more step towards fascism



Wow! Donald Trump is getting scarier and scarier, isn't he? As I said before, we are lurching towards fascism.

Is this jailing and killing reporters? No, of course not. Not yet, at least. But this is how fascism comes to a country, one small step at a time.

If we don't object - loudly, vociferously, determinedly - there will be another step. And then another. And another.

***
Note: I just finished reading The Fugitive by Robert L. Fish, an old (1962) mystery about Nazis trying to reestablish the Reich in Brazil. (It's a good read.)

The first part of the book is set in 1939, when a Nazi party official visits Brazil. He complains about how everyone is against them, he claims that it's all a conspiracy, and he brags that they're going to make Germany great again.

I'm paraphrasing, but that's still what he was saying. It was all anger and resentment and boasting.

I had to put the book down for awhile, because it was almost identical to what we've been hearing from the Trump administration. All you'd have to do is replace "Germany" with "America," and it could have been Donald Trump, word for word. I'm not kidding. I'm not even exaggerating. It was eerie. And frightening.

Later in the book, after World War II, the Nazis want to prohibit Jewish immigration to Brazil. But they know they can't get Brazil to do that directly, so they just try to prohibit immigration from those specific countries where they'd expect Jews to be emigrating.

In effect, their plan is exactly the same as Trump's plan to keep Muslims from immigrating to America. If you just changed "Jew" to "Muslim," it would be identical.

This wasn't a big part of the book - it was just mentioned in passing - but again, it was bizarre. It was like reading Donald Trump's playbook, only coming from a Nazi character in a work of fiction more than a half-century ago.

I know about Godwin's Law and all, but sometimes, it really seems appropriate.


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