Ventura on Rightwing bullying, CBS cowardice & how Nazism thrived

(a great piece prefaced by a great James Baldwin quote...)


You won't believe what happens next

Letters @ 3AM
BY MICHAEL VENTURA



James Baldwin said that Nazism thrived not because most Germans were evil but because most were spineless. One cowardly compromise after another, succumbing to the bluster of bullies, quickly created a climate in which the rare act of courage, however splendid, became futile. Cowardice proved infectious, contagious.

Taking a stand against the dark storm, individuals might have redeemed themselves, but their nobility disappeared with barely a trace; the Nazi anti-culture created a kind of collective immunity to anything redemptive. Only rampant destruction and total collapse would finally cleanse that corrosive atmosphere, so that new beginnings could be made and genuine values could again take root.

Is that what is happening to us? Perhaps.

Or let's just say my fillings itch when a television network takes orders from a political party: a TV miniseries, probably as second-rate as most, canceled out of fear. Fear of what? Of nothing specific. Yet of something pervasive. That's the nature of the disease.

<snip>


http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2003-11-14/cols_ventura.html

EDITED BY ADMIN FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS

Absolutely spot-on and frightening. I had three classmates whose mothers grew up in Nazi Germany and it is not hyperbolic to compare what's happening in 2003 America with that shameful era.

nhgazette.com

It CAN and IS happening here.

The Nazis did not lose WWII. They just dropped their logo (the swastika) and moved to Texas.

and thought it was JESSE Ventura.

Which, as the freepers would say, would be "hugh"

eileen from OH

I'm sending this article far and wide.

Like your handle, too, Treasonous Bastard!

they beat up people with signs, they attacked 4 elderly nuns.. one was 78 and had the sign taped to her wrist because she had arthritis and couldn't hold it. the goons dragged her down the sidewalk thinking she was holding on. they beat up, kicked and wrote on a 19 year old candidate with kato pens right in front of the Swartz' and wife during a speech... they said nothing. truly the Reich Wing.