Main points of lecture about polarizing political speech, part 2

[nancylebov]

Kathryn Ruud Lecture, Part two

June 2010 issue of Talkers Magazine, an industry publication-- an article compares political talk radio to pro wrestling

It's the job of the talk show host to crank up fear at the other side because that gets attention and advertising revenue:

Fear the enemy: the government
Fear the Other: political opponents
Rachett up fear through polarization
A sales technique with serious consequences

2:39 Glen Beck clip: He's selling gold because Marxism will wreck the country and people will need soemthing to start over with. [Anyone who's pretty sure they'll be able to protect their gold in a totalitarian dictorship probably deserves to give their money to Glen Beck.] Followed by malice about illegal immigrants.

Cicero: "He who knows only his own generation remains always a child."

There are good reasons to fear communism and fascism. Both were very pro-violence.

In Germany, there were political street battles between the wars.

In totalitarian countries, there was control which extended into people's homes.

Things went differently in the US-- while there were believers in far left and right ideas, but mostly, there was a rotation around a pragmatic middle. In Germany, the middle was weak and small.

Totalitarianism starts with ideologies which do not describe themselves as totalitarian.

Glen Beck and others put libertarianism exactly in the middle between totalitarianism and anarchy. This leaves out a lot of context about the range of non-totalitarian possibilites which are not libertarian, Republican, or constitutionalist.

Beck places Nazism on the left rather than acknowledging that totalitarianism can come from the right. Nazism and Communism get lumped together rather than being described as having quite different ideological roots. You can't recognize a problem if you have a mental framework which excludes it.

Comments

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

"... it's well known, for example, that the old officer caste in Germany largely detested the Nazis, and Nazi hatred of the Jews was almost entirely detached from old religious bigotries"? What history of Nazism are you reading? Because the standard text, Evans' The Rise of the Third Reich, makes pretty much exactly the opposite of your points: before the Reichstag fire, the Nazis were the junior coalition partner in a 3-party right-wing coalition: pro-corporate Christian Democrats, pro-monarchist Catholic Nationalists, and themselves. The losing alliance in that election was the pro-labor Social Democrats, the Socialists, and a handful of Communists.

Shortly thereafter, in the Spanish Civil War, you see the exact same alignment: Christian Democrats, Catholic nationalists, and the fascist Falange rising up to overthrow the winning coalition of social democrats, socialists, and anarcho-communists, and guess who Hitler and Mussolini armed and provided air cover for? (See Beevor, The Battle for Spain.)

And, by the way, guess which side American Republican campaign donors and Republican politicians were supporting up until 1941?

A lot of smokescreen has been thrown up since 1941 to find some way to blame Hitler on the left, but it's just that, a historically dishonest smokescreen. Nazism is, and always was, a right-wing phenomenon.

And, I have to say, this whole argument is an irrelevant side issue, a distraction, to the point that Nancy is making: we are seeing right-wing American talk radio drag back out of obscurity a lot of the same linguistic techniques that Nazi propagandists used, not because they're Nazis, but because (at times like this) they work.

[madfilkentist]

And, by the way, guess which side American Republican campaign donors and Republican politicians were supporting up until 1941?

I don't care to guess. Could you provide some specifics of whatever you have in mind, keeping in mind that anti-war is not the same as pro-enemy?

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

All the way through the Spanish Civil War, when US law made it illegal to ship arms or other materials to the belligerents on either side, US companies kept extending credit to, and shipping weapons to, the Nazi side. They did the same thing for Hitler up until (and in some cases after) 1941.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Any argument that's based on alliances in a two-sided power struggle is not going to be informative about the actual beliefs of the allies. By that sort of reasoning, you could prove that not only Roosevelt but Churchill was a Communist—given who they allied with in WWII. Or you could argue, as a conservative former friend did to me, that since I am opposed to making Christianity the American state religion I must be a support of Muslim conquest of the United States and replacement of the Constitution with sharia.

In-group/out-group thinking, of which left/right thinking is one of the currently popular forms, does not support any sort of rational analysis. And it tempts people into forming precisely the sort of fatal alliances you describe in Spain.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

/signed