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| Baraboo, Wisconsin youth offers display of community pride |
Updated: See also Jonah Raskin: A California Jew in a Time of Anti-Semitism, in
CounterPunch.
Madison, Wisconsin — News out of
Baraboo High School that students gave a NAZI salute posing for a Prom picture should surprise noone.
The same racist minds can be found in
DeForest, Wisconsin with a police force stacked with bigots.
Or, in
Fitchburg, Wisconsin with City Hall similarly full of white malignant bureaucrats and too-many corrupt, racist cops.
They vote Republican. They're white and proud of it. And racists are everywhere here. See S. Ani Mukherji in the
Boston Review.
Small-town Wisconsin and rural USA are the vanguard for the White Party, the Republican Party, and
criminal, hateful and violent conduct is given a free pass.
If you are a racist, Christian fundamentalist who works against Jews, Muslims and atheists, Trump and the White Party have a home for you.
You can be attorney general.
Where
America is going is unclear:
Time to speak out.
Notes
ThinkProgress this morning:
In the United States as in other countries, those old demons include Nazis and other variations of white nationalists, modern iterations of whom strongly support nationalist leaders like Trump and whom Trump has praised in return. When white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville last year, for instance — one of them even murdering a counter-protester by driving into a crowd with his car — Trump insisted there were 'very fine people' on both sides of the demonstration.
We know where
Baraboo, Wisconsin stands, where the Republican Party stands.
---
A book to read for the Hitler youth of small-town America:
Milton Mayer's
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press. ©1955).
Mayer, an American Jewish writer who had gone to Germany in the 1930s,
made friends with 10 people, all of whom were members of the NAZI
Party. He found them courteous, funny, genuine human beings whom he
called "friends."
They were also fools and certainly were guilty.
---
From
Milton Mayer:
But Then It Was Too Late
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist,
"was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the
people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in
Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people
close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government,
a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to
vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is
governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by
little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions
deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so
complicated that the government had to act on information which the
people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people
could not understand it, it could not be released because of national
security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in
him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would
otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap,
took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps
not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated
with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the
crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they
did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of
government growing remoter and remoter.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my
life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then,
suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was
drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews,
ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports,
bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the
demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected
to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important
before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s
energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see
how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had
no time." ...
