Fascism or socialism? A false choice to be sure, but one to which committed leftist-liberals are fixated. The fever swamp is buzzing with excitement because Naomi Wolf, onetime advisor to Presidential candidate Al Gore, has looked at the patterns of history and has found that Bush is Hitler! Who would have thunk?
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all ~guardian.co.uk
You see, history always repeats itself. Hitler took over during an election, there’s an election coming up, therefore Bush will take over during the election. See?
Wolf began by diving into the early years leading up to fascist regimes, like the ones led by Hitler and Mussolini. And the patterns that she found in those, and others all over the world, made her hair stand on end. In “The End of America,” she lays out the 10 steps that dictators (or aspiring dictators) take in order to shut down an open society. “Each of those ten steps is now under way in the United States today,” she writes. ~alternet.org
Since it has already been established that Bush = Hitler it makes perfect sense to assume that Bush will declare martial law if he loses the 2008 election. Oh wait, he can’t run in the 2008 election. See! This proves that he will declare martial law because he’s being forced not to stay in power for another term. It’s all makes so much sense.
In addition, I’m concerned about the 2007 Defense Authorization Act, which makes it much easier for the president to declare martial law. ~alternet.org
You see, Bush is an alpha male and Naomi understands alpha males like nobody’s business. This is why she knows what Bush is going to do, (ahem, fascist dictatorship), before he even knows he’s going to do it. By the way, Hitler was an Alpha Male too. Need we say more?
Of course, as we all know, the main tool of fascist dictatorship is capitalism.
But what I don’t understand is why Klein would implicate the Clinton administration as fascists. Yeah.
One current warning sign is the e-mails that the White House is not yielding about the attorney general scandal. The emails are likely to show that there were plans afoot to purge all of the attorneys at once, like overnight. And then to let the country deal with the shock.
Now that’s something that Goebbels did in 1933 in April, overnight. He fired everyone, focusing on lawyers and judges who were not a supporter of the regime. So you can still have elections … in an outcome like that. If that had happened, if the bloggers and others actually hadn’t helped to identify the U.S. attorney scandal, and they had been successful and fired them all, our election situation would be different. ~alternet.org
The Clinton administration didn’t just fire a few (8 out of to be precise) U.S. Attorney’s, they fired them all. Clean slate. Kristal Nacht. Night of the long knives. Paving the way for a fascist state. “…that’s something that Goebbels did in 1933 in April, overnight.”
I know, I know, no one really believes what these ‘progressives’ say. It’s all just exaggeration. And they have ‘good’ intentions. But I’m wondering if there isn’t an obvious irony here. Wolf seems to be working on step one…
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
Like fascists.
I think that if you want to be more persuasive, you might want to start attacking the more substantive parts of these “left wingers” arguments. For example, rather than saying “GODWINS LAW!”, perhaps you could look closely at whether 1) the ten steps seem to be valid, and 2) Bush fits them, and destroy the argument from there. Instead, what you do is you ridicule and you bring in no outside information or statistics. Condescension is fun, but it will rarely do more than make people angry. I hope you are striving for more than that?