More than 100 years ago, American labor activist Eugene Debs said, “Every robber or oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both.”
In 1940, British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote:
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.
American philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen was worried that fascism was causing the deaths of millions during WW2. She edited the book Freedom, Its Meaning, which was first published in 1942. In the prologue, she wrote:
Human thoughts and knowledge have never before been so abundant, so kaleidoscopic, so vast, and yet at the same time never so diffused, so inchoate, so directionless.
Ms. Anshen’s thought was composed more than eighty years ago, before the Internet and before cell phones were carried by just about every person in the developed world older than 12.
Today, morons and scoundrels encounter few barriers when accessing communication systems. They can outnumber rational voices and provide support for corrupt and dangerous leaders, like those holding or seeking power in North America in 2024.
Professor Benjamin Hett is a legal and history scholar raised in Edmonton. He now works at Hunter College – City University of New York.
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Timothy Snyder is a Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books on tyranny experienced by people in Europe and Northern Asia.
He has also written political and polemical journalism and books, notably “On Tyranny” (2017). Inspired by the numb horror he and so many Americans like him felt at the election of Donald Trump, the book looked back at the way fascism had so widely succeeded in 20th-century Europe, not least by using democratic means to destroy democracy.
NY Times: Can Americans Have Democracy, Freedom and Other Nice Things?
In 2024, Snyder is warning Americans to fear fascism. He says democracy is always in danger and if we think it’s somebody else’s problem, we’re exacerbating the danger.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWatch & share this video of author historian @TimothyDSnyder — a leading expert on how democracies fall to authoritarians.
— democracyFIRST 🇺🇸 (@democracyFIRST) October 26, 2024
"Democracy is always in danger. The moment you think it's someone else's problem or institutions will come to the rescue, you make that danger greater…" pic.twitter.com/oeD1qMHukG
Reuters reports that Trump’s Republican rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday began with a series of vulgar and racist remarks by allies of the former president. The following quote by a PBS commentator ought to frighten us all.
So this place in Madison Square Garden, and it was one of many occasions that the Trump campaign has chosen to allow comparisons to be made to the Nazis. So that was Madison Square Garden, which was the site of a rally by American Nazis in 1939, talking about polluting the blood, speaking of Americans as an enemy within.
This is all straight from fascism. In fact, fascism — the core of fascism in Italy and Germany were combatants who followed their leader to bring the war home and turned their force against their own people. And when Donald Trump was talking about America as an occupied country and he was going to liberate it and also in the past talking about using the military on Americans, this comes out of fascism and also the tradition of military dictatorships like Pinochet in Chile.
So it’s a purely authoritarian spectacle that we saw.
Conservatives in Canada who embrace Trumpism are enemies of democracy., undeserving the support of any Canadian.
EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM
- Powerful and continuing nationalism
- Disdain for human rights
- Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
- Rampant sexism
- Controlled mass media
- Obsession with national security
- Religion and government intertwined
- Corporate power protected
- Labor power suppressed
- Disdain for intellectual and the arts
- Obsession with crime and punishment
- Rampant cronyism and corruption
Categories: Fascism
in-sights.ca 
It is years overdue but thank God some have recognized the danger of Trump’s fascist threat. Meanwhile, cynical cowards in the Republican party cover their ears and hide under their desks. Yes, their dishonor will live on.
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Pierre Pollievre, John Rustad and Smith in Alberta are Canadian fascists. They no longer even bother to hide their fascism. In fact they boast about it. They take the very real apprehensions Canadians feel about heath care, jobs and affordability and use that to their own twisted ends, just like Hitler and Mussolini. The closing scene in The Great Dictator should be required viewing in our schools and elsewhere. Chaplin hit the nail squarely on the head with that.
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