| SOCIAL CRITICISM REVIEW | SELECTED READINGS |
SPECIAL: FASCISM IN AMERICA (2017)
"These are the times that try men's souls" - Thomas Paine
This is how fascism comes to America
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." - Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
A totalitarian movement thrives on the denial and destruction of reality, offering alienated and rootless people a coherent and empowering counter-narrative, a false reality actualized through thoughtlessness, lies, disruption, dehumanization, lawlessness, propaganda, violence, terror, domination, and radical evil. Hence the importance of safeguarding democracy with a free press, good education, critical thinking, and participatory self-government. – "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Donald Trump - Schoolyard bully, archetypal psychopath, malignant narcissist, ruthless machiavellian, pathological liar, amoral charlatan, antisocial ratcatcher, racist hatemonger, apocalyptic arsonist, unbridled demagogue, would-be tyrant, attack dog, sexual predator, morally bankrupt, impulsive and reckless, obviously demented. An authoritarian megalomaniac - paranoid and vindictive - with his personality flaws aggravated by power. Mentally unfit for the presidency. – But the real illness is a society that is in denial
Free speech and freedom of the press
George Orwell's 1984
Facts, lies and bullying
The know-nothing flip-flop president
"Make America great again" is used as dog-whistle politics: a big tent salesman trick to trigger nostalgia among the general population, with a built-in coded message for racists of exclusion, dominance, ruthlessness, and undoing civil rights
A pawn in Russia's hybrid warfare – to destabilize NATO, United States, European Union, and United Nations
"Might is right" versus international law, human rights, and constitutional government
After campaigning against the evil bankers, Donald Trump puts Goldman Sachs in control
Impeachment Led astray by the moral void of its president, America faces a moral crisis as a country and as a people
An age of global confrontation
"Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book." - Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny