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Writer's pictureMike Weisser

Someone Should Tell Trump That Fascism's Out of Style.



              I happen to be reading the second volume of William Shirer’s memoir, which covers the first years after he returned to the United States from Europe in 1945. Shirer had been the CBS correspondent first from Berlin until 1941 and then following the Allied retaking of France and the final assault on Berlin.

              He became famous when his history of the Nazi years, Rise, and Fall of the Third Reich, became an international best seller after 1960 when the book first appeared.

              Shirer was born and raised in Iowa and was a typical, Presbyterian kid from the Midwest. He was politically a liberal within the old time, Republican liberal mold.

              When he came back to New York in 1945 he got a job with CBS as a political commentator on their radio network which Edward R. Murrow was beginning to expand with the advent of TV.

              Shirer left CBS in 1947 and never returned to broadcast journalism. In fact, he was booted out of CBS because he was considered to be ‘soft’ on Communism and was one of the early media victims of what would be known as McCarthyism which cost hundreds of individuals their reputations and their jobs.

              My father was briefly investigated for alleged, Left-wing sympathies but what saved him from any serious difficulties was the fact that he worked for a company which he also happened to own. But he and my mother lost many personal relationships during the ‘Red scare’ of the 1950’s, particularly after the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an event which drove many people with liberal and Leftist beliefs to abandon any public associations with like-minded friends.

              That was then, this is now. And now we have a guy running for President (again) who claims that when he gets back into the White House, the first thing he’s going to do is throw all those Communists and Fascists out of the government and maybe out of the country altogether.

              I have to give Trump credit. He’s trying his best to keep a lexicon current in everyday speech containing words which haven’t really meant anything, or certainly haven’t meant what they used to mean for at least thirty years, if not sixty or more years.

              Let’s see, we defeated Fascism in 1945. And even though there are some tin-horn government leaders in various shithole countries which like to think of themselves as Fascists, nobody’s taking them very seriously in terms of whether they represent any kind of a threat.

              I mean, do we really need to worry about whether Lieut. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the Fascist who runs Burkina Faso since he led a coup in 2022, is going to bring his army up the Delaware River to Philadelphia and invade the United States? Where the Hell is Burkina Faso anyway, by the way?

              I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. You’re not a Fascist just because someone calls you a Fascist. Ditto for being called a Communist. And even if you stand up and shout to high heaven about believing in Fascism or Communism, or anything else you want to believe in, such beliefs won’t get you put in jail.

              Remember all those schmucks who paraded down the main street of Charlottesville waving their Nazi flags in 2017? Trump not only didn’t order them to be arrested, but he also even thought that they had some ‘good people’ on their side.

              If you walked down the Champs-Élysées today waving a banner with a swastika, you’d find yourself in a French prison before the day was out. That’s right. It’s illegal to display any kind of Nazi memorabilia anywhere within France, but we wouldn’t even consider preventing anyone from saying whatever they wanted to say as long as they didn’t stand up and yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater or concoct some crazy story about how two election workers in Georgia stole all those votes.

              So, Trump can call George Soros a Communist, he can call Judge Engeron a Fascist. So what? Trump’s got the same one vote that I have and on November 5th I’m going to show up at my polling station, put a mark next to Joe’s name and cancel Trump out.

             

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