Look, I don’t want to get all high and mighty. I’m mindful that on August 8th, 1925, thirty thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC to vocalize their opposition to our then-stringent immigration policies. So, what we’re seeing in Warsaw isn’t without precedent here at home:
WARSAW—Tens of thousands of Poles marched across downtown Warsaw on Saturday, in an independence-day procession organized by a nationalist youth movement that seeks an ethnically pure Poland with fewer Jews or Muslims.
The largely young crowd shot off roman candles and many chanted “fatherland,” carrying banners that read “White Europe,” “Europe Will Be White” and “Clean Blood.” Some of the marchers flew in from Hungary, Slovakia and Spain and waved flags and symbols that those countries used during their wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany.
A number of people in the crowd said they didn’t belong to any neo-fascist or racist organization but didn’t see a problem with the overall tone of what has become Poland’s biggest independence day event.
“There are of course nationalists and fascists at this march,” said Mateusz, a 27-year-old wrapped in a Polish flag, “I’m fine with it. I’m just happy to be here.”
The march, organized by a group called the National Radical Camp, underscores the rightward politics of a growing section of Polish youth. The Radical Camp presents itself as the heir to a 1930s fascist movement of the same name, which fought to rid Poland of Jews in the years just before the Holocaust. A second group, All Polish Youth, also named after an anti-Jewish interwar movement, co-organized it.
Europe’s fascist movement had enough support here in the States that even after the war some people were punished for having been “premature” anti-fascists by taking the Second Republic’s side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
A couple of things about this, though. We know what resulted from the fascist takeover of Europe. The Poles certainly did not fare well. We also got our act together and fought against the fascists. And, when we were done, we started a decades-long process of cleaning our own house while rebuilding the conquered lands in both Europe and Asia so that we wouldn’t have to fight again.
So, we may not have purest history, but we can be proud and unashamed of our record. Our leadership put us on the right course.
It’s important to remember that the day after the 1925 Klan parade, a sizable contingent of the protesters went across the river to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath at the grave of William Jennings Bryan, who was the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908. But it was a Democratic administration that led us through our fight against the fascists. Let’s not pretend that their base was united or that it didn’t take some courage to stand up to them.
What’s different today is that our administration is much more sympathetic to the European fascists than it is to their opponents. And leadership really matters in fights like this. And our leadership is moving their supporters in the exactly wrong direction which is why they’re increasingly acting out.
A Democratic president from Missouri integrated our army. A Democratic president from Texas signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. They led their followers away from pseudoscience and racism and hatred and violence.
Today’s Republicans need to take a hard look at that history, because it damn well is possible to do the right thing even when your base will punish you for doing it.
Nonetheless, Allen Dulles smiles.
Of course the fascists are back. The conservative austerity party has given people no hope and told it that that the others are stealing their income.
The Democrats came to power in 1932 in the desperation of voters who had suffered 12 years of agricultural depression and three years of general depression; it acted outside of the comfort zone of the mainstream of the Democratic Party in exerting governmental power.
It was Churchill’s fear of Germany that brought the US against the fascists.
Enough Republicans loved the pro-business actions of Hitler’s regime. Enough who later plotted against FDR.
America’s graciousness in reconstructing Europe after World War II now clearly comes down not to values (as it was propagandized in the 1950s and 1960s but to outright paranoid fear.
So why are not Poland and Russia good buddies now with their similar ideologies? History.
Contemporaneous historical reports fail to support the view you appear to express here that the post-World War II rebuilding of Europe was entirely outside the best American values and purely in the service of “outright paranoid fear.” I don’t know that this is what you intended to express in that declarative sentence, but it comes off that way.
If you were to make the case that the Marshall Plan was formed and executed as expressions of both our best values in supporting the installations of and support for liberal democracies with strong economies and our less worthwhile repressive fear-based instincts, I’d agree with that.
There were plenty of rational reasons for the leaderships of every government around the world to experience and express paranoiac fear in the wake of World War II. That were at their best when they resisted that siren call, but I’m not ready to declare the Marshall Plan a failure to face down that fear.
I just now ran across an article claiming that fascism was never really eliminated from Europe, but I don’t care to find it at the moment.
In any case the austerity regime and immigration policies of the Eurozone have resulted in continued high unemployment and suspicion of the other similar to the states. We know fascism exists all across Europe but especially France, Spain, Greece, Hungary and Poland. And Britain also experienced turmoil and the Brexit. I personally believe income inequality and fiscal austerity is a serious problem of our time and Trump elicits at least some support on that account and hatred for the other. The tax reform bill does not appear at this time to help with that, and in fact, seems to aggravate it.
What I’m addressing in response to TarheelDem’s comment is what appeared to me to be his declaration of America’s motivations behind its “…graciousness in reconstructing Europe after World War II…”.
On a third reading I can see that his use of the word “now” in that sentence might have been where he asked us to consider America’s motivations re. Europe in 2017, not 1947. I may have misunderstood, but it’s a confusingly constructed sentence.
I agree with your conclusion that forced pan-European austerity policies at a time of high immigrant migrations in all European nations seed the soil for right-wing racist national movements.
My point is that all the self-congratulation we gave ourselfves for the actions in the 1940s and 1950s to restore Europe have been betrayed by our heartlessness after the collapse of the Soviet Union (“shock treatment”, which meant theft and oligarchy) and the drift of economic responsibility since, which has allowed the decline of the US and the failure of European Union sacrificed on a false economic position that empowered international billionaires and tax avoiders. It seems the US was not indispensible enough. Now the global architecture that it built in the 1940s is being torn down.
The treatment of Greece has been the signal failure that is the root of Catalonian secesssion and a symptom of Spanish national fascism.
As for the 1940s, in fact the memos at the time show that it was fear, ambition for Luce’s American Century and not our generous values that indeed were responsible for the Marshall Plan.
reporting that Catalonia was the wealthier portion of Spain. If so, this formulation doesn’t really seem to work:
Instead, in the analogy of internal Spanish politics/factions to EU dynamics, Catalonia would be more analogous to Germany, claiming to be drained and held back by and subsidizing the rest of Spain, no?
While within EU dynamics, Spain’s in the same forced-austerity boat with Greece, just not so far down in its lowest holds.
Or in the old SAT analogies format . . .
Castilian Spain:Catalonia [within Spain]::Greece/Spain:Germany [within Eu]
“Treatment of Greece” = “a symptom of Spanish national fascism” seems an especially problematic assertion in need of factual support and/or explanation.
Both Catalonia’s actions and Spain’s responses are influenced by austerity that they can now blame the other party for.
And while Catalonia is richer, Spain is more powerful. Greece isn’t splitting of regions, but the government was seriously worried that there would be a right wing coup if they didn’t accept the ECB “bailout” plan.
No perfect analogies here, just societies coming apart across different seams as austerity grinds them down.
One set of memos cannot contain everything the United States did in the execution of the Marshall Plan and the reasons we did them. In the rebuilding, did we place the fingers on the scales for liberal democracies in Western Europe which would do business with American corporations? Yes. I think, frankly, those were sensible decisions.
It was a far superior plan to our post- WW I plan, and it paid strong dividends not just for the United States but for Europe and the world as well. You concede this a bit in your appreciation for the global architecture which we led to assemble in the `40’s.
We put our fingers on the scales for liberal democratic forms that would do business with American corporations and deliver profit from trade. We also put our fingers on the institutions of European unification. That was all to the good.
But our covert operations agencies also employed ex-Nazis in critical agencies and there were continual attempts to purge non-Marxist socialist parties from power through covert action. Those actions had people who were there to throw off the Soviet Union beginning in 1989 but at a bit of a cost that we now see appearing in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary.
It seems that liberal democracy needs political, economic and cultural equality in order to maintain stability. Policies that do not move in those directions (essentially New Deal Democratic policies at the least) start tearing apart the liberal democracy.
What we thought we did after World War II turned out to be a much better (and “less realistic”) plan than what we actually did. And what Europeans thought we did was even better than that. Had we remembered that and never created the Washington consensus in economics, we likely would be in a more congenial national and world situation. But instead greed and arrogance prevailed. The Russians required “tough love” so they wouldn’t become the dependent slobs we thought our unemployed were.
I not only concede it; I wish that the idealistic tinge d and generously realistic policies was the current style.
Sadly, we are under the illusion that as a country we are broke. And that means that in fact we are as it is vision, imagination, and will that got us out of the depression, allowed the post-war global institutions to be created, and created the optimism that insistent triumphalism about Vietnam and war darkened into gloom.
And not only has the US come unglued. So has the UK, Australia, Canada in their parroting of US conservatism , austerity, xenophobia, and racism. All are engaged in heavy surveillance of their own populations, and there are movements in all to roll back those things like health care, that were indeed working.
Sitting on laurels turns out to be destructive.
I’m largely in agreement with your points here. Undeniably, austerity budgeting and other regressive policies have been implemented here and elsewhere. I would remind us that the passage of the Arrordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank and other policies and regulatory rulings during the Obama Administration were decidedly not “resting on our laurels”. They were remarkable accomplishments, and if they are not protected so they become durable accomplishments there will be enormous increased suffering.
I had some confusion there as well.
Trump is still working his way through “Fascism for Dummies”. Good thing he keeps getting distracted by the Twitosphere.
He’ll get there. It will come to him in a twitter storm one night.
You know who else was a huge homophobic, anti Semite – Lech Walesa.
You know how many Jews lived in Poland in 1930’s? 3 million
How many in 1980? I’ve read fewer than 20,000.
The Poles had their `Jewish problem’ solved for them decades ago, but they just can’t stop fucking that chicken.
. . . problem solved.
. . . symbol, at least not in subject line. “Good” to know?
This place is a time capsule. I don’t really hold it against Booman since he has a real job where most of these posts originate, but modern it’s not.
What you fail to mention is the Walesa was seen by most Poles as an uneducated imbecile. There’s a reason he didn’t remain in power for long.
I’m a Jew. I have been to Poland many times. I was open about my heritage and most of what I saw was contrition about the past along with incredible generosity. There was some antisemitism. It was fairly easy to spot. People would be civil but the tone was off. They might ask a question like “How do you feel about the pope?” The pope at that time was Polish.
I’d estimate that at the time (1994 through 2001), roughly 30% of Poles tended toward authoritarianism and antisemitism (or, rather, tribalism — which is really what motivates hate movements).
Hard economic times have a way of elevating those who hate. Eastern Europe has been in a tough place for a while now. Be careful about generalizing about Poles or Poland. It’s really no different than generalizing about Jews or Judaism.
Is Poland part of the EU? You know who has had a fascist government since 2010 or so and Europe has done nothing about? Hungary. You know who else has a Nazi problem? Ukraine! And we, meaning the government, hasn’t done anything about those countries either. It’s not just a Trump problem. Part of the problem is European austerity. Until Merkel and the rest get their heads out of their ass, the problem will only continue to grow.
Picked up the following from Naked Capitalism, post from yesterday. Fiscal austerity is built into the Eurozone with restrictions on deficits and a goal of balanced budgets. The result has been continued unemployment and now around 9% but with very wide swings in places like Greece and Spain up in the high teens or more. Fiscal austerity also leads to current account imbalances for many countries.
And we know fascism is also alive and well in France, Greece and Italy. Seems immigration is also a trigger. Reminds me of Charlottesville.
And don’t forget Austria, where the center-right party is in talks with the “Freedom Party” to form a coalition government in the wake Austria’s most recent parliamentary elections. Patterns that seem to be emerging: there is a rural/urban disconnect, income inequality is bad and still worsening in much of the developed world, and austerity has left a large enough cohort of people behind that it becomes easy for demagogues to demonize “Others” (whether refugees, other ethnic minorities, etc.) and engage in conspiracy theorizing (if you’re a liberal, you’re clearly bought off by George Soros, who is of course the source of all that is evil). Note that the base of many of these fascist movements, including our own home-grown fascists in the US, have their base of support outside the major urban areas. A tourist or business traveler who spends significant time in Budapest, for example, might be impressed with its charming architecture largely untouched by the Soviet era and its cosmopolitan flavor, unaware of the horrors of what is going on in parliament or outside the city’s borders. Same, I suspect with Vienna to a lesser degree on the horrors thus far.
Yes, economics is the foundation and migration the trigger. In Eastern Europe the Russian bogeyman is also helpful for the fascists.
So symbolic leadership – We don’t like fascists! – isn’t really that important. What would help is economic leadership, as in a government that spreads the wealth more equally, no new wars in the middle east and detente with Russia.
You mention Ukraine having a Nazi problem. Aside from a violent presence among the Euromaiden protests a few years ago, is there any evidence from reputable sources to indicate that the neo-Nazis have taken over the government since Putin’s man got chased literally out of the country? My understanding is that parties like Svoboda did poorly during the last parliamentary elections and the other neo-Nazi party (whose name escapes me at the moment) was barely a presence. I don’t know if anyone is polling particularly in Ukraine, so would not know off hand if there were an increased interest in these groups ahead of the next parliamentary elections. As of now, the mainstream in Ukraine appears to want to move toward the EU. The so-called “people’s republics” in the Donbass region – aside from some Soviet-era nostalgia – haven’t exactly come across as beacons of progressive enlightenment.
I don’t know that they’re in government so much as the government is humoring them, like Trump does here.
The fascist parties did poorly, but there are fascists in government all the same, like the current speaker of parliament, Andriy Parubiy, who founded and led a neo-nazi party in the 90ies. He was also Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine during the civil war, which is particularly troubling as the fascist volunteer groups got experience and military connections during the same time. Fascists can come to power without elections if they are well organized enough.
That Russia supports the seperatists and uses the fascist presence to bash Ukraine doesn’t make the Ukrainian fascists any less dangerous to vulnerable groups.
Here’s a link to the status in the spring from a Jewish perspective, in NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/opinion/what-ukraines-jews-fear.html
Tl;dr version: Government puts up statues of Nazi collaborators and threatens to prosecute those who names them Nazi collaborators rather than national heroes, fascists march and the cops fail to hear their anti-jewish chants, and so on.
“Today’s Republicans need to take a hard look at that history, because it damn well is possible to do the right thing even when your base will punish you for doing it.”
I can’t be sure to what extent today’s republican leadership would disagree that the fascist/racist path they are taking isn’t the “right thing.” We’re talking about a party so morally compromised that they are defending a (alleged) pedophile, defend and protect a leader who is an admitted sexual predator while embracing the support of a base that openly practices a throwback to the most vile racism and bigotry and encourages with much blood lust, death as a solution for their political opponents. This is a party that has openly admitted that its tax plan exists to lavish more public wealth on the rich, and making the poor and middle class suffer to pay for it. All this while shamelessly calling themselves the “party of family values.”
The “moral compass” of leaders who tolerate and/or embrace all this is so out of whack I doubt they’d know what, let alone be willing to do, the “right thing” even if it smacked them in the face.
We lost a great guy and a local organizer yesterday in a horrible car-truck accident that shut down a local highway for the remainder of the day.
So sorry to hear about this, Martin. I haven’t lost a fellow organizer so shockingly soon for a few years, but I remember the sickened feelings the loss of them left with me.
Looking at Adam’s timeline, it’s something to sit with the idea that his 90-year-old Nana is still with us while he is gone.
I can understand why people seek faith in a monotheistic spirit. It’s just painful to sit with the senselessness and absurdity and unfairness of such a loss; reason provides little to no comfort. Unfortunately, the American evangelical movement and worldwide reactionary religious movements have caused me to react to monotheism with revulsion and caution.
Best of luck to you and those who Adam worked with and loved.
So sorry for your loss, Martin.
Sorry for you loss and condolences to his friends and family.
I’m very sorry for this loss in your community.
If anyone wants to take a look at the “dialogue” AG and his fellow travelers are engaging in the comments thread to his Biden diary from Nov 9, I’d appreciate the company.
Think of it as a birthday gift.
Please no. Trolls live for negative attention. That diary is a cry for help.
I accept your take. I’m just sick of them polluting so many community threads without consequence, day after day. At times it gives the appearance that they are representative of our community when they are not. Every once in a while I become sick of the hostility and bad faith.
I’ve gotten better at letting almost all of their stuff go. Ignoring them doesn’t seem to discourage their unpleasant desire to bully others, though. They don’t want dialogue. At times you just want to defend yourself and this community.
. . . “cowards/cowardly” for downrating his false/tiresome dreck . . .
. . . then scurries off to his hidey-hole in the diaries to “courageously” do battle with them there . . .
. . . mainly by misrepresenting (via selective omission) what they wrote in objection to his garbage here (e.g., mdl; I did peek after you aroused my curiosity . . . but just for a minute!).
You point out here that this is a particularly nasty habit AG has developed. He wants to draw community members into a dialogue he tries to control by selecting his chosen subjects of discussion and misrepresented slivers of comments from BooMan’s front page diaries. And Arthur lures a concentrated subsection of the community sympathetic to these techniques to join him in their personally bitter, factually questionable attacks.
They’re not trying to persuade. They come here to berate others. I’m sincere in expressing my disappointment that they’re unwilling to enter in good faith discussions.
AG isn’t a troll. It is true that he disagrees with you and can be insulting. And it is true that he has a rhetorical style that rubs many here the wrong way. But a troll? No.
If AG isn’t a troll words have no meaning.
It’s not his style, his opinions or his contentiousness. It’s — as I constantly point out — his absolute refusal to engage in the dialectic interaction on the site.
When disagreed with, he lashes out with caricatured accusations that betray a total inability or unwillingness to engage arguments or even to distinguish between other posters.
Lots of people are disagreeable here — I can think of one or two, of the top of my head, who pretty much always cause disagreements every time they speak up. But Gilroy is different. He’s a blight. And the tragedy is, it’s not necessary…he could easily shape up, if not for his angry, adolescent self-image.
If ag et al. are willing to confine themselves to diaries/diary comment threads, I’m willing to let them carry on their circle jerks there unmolested. So to speak.
I rarely look at the diaries anymore for precisely that reason.
That’s usually been my rule too. I hear ya.
Getting less and less patient to spend much time on those diaries. I do try to rec the diaries not authored by that particular group – especially if AG and company seem to be at the top or the only occupants of the recommended list. Wish more of us would put up some substantive diaries on topics of interest to us and the community. Some folks here are doing some serious heavy lifting in that regard and are to be commended. That may be the only way to drown out the noise.
I kind of wish I hadn’t. You and AG and Brodie bring out the worst in each other.
Thanks for your counsel.
Wow…it’s interesting because over the years I’ve been reading BooMan Tribune (and recommending it to others, etc.) and commenting, I have never once looked at any diary that wasn’t a BooMan front-page entry. (I’m like a timid restaurant patron who always orders the same dish.)
Until today. And just the visceral sensation of being on a familiar green-black-and-white BMT page, but with Arthur Gilroy as the lead writer…is horrifying; it’s like those sequences in “Batman” stories where the lunatics get out and the Joker is running Gotham City. I fled, horrified, immediately.
The Batman reference alone earns a 4. The imagery you provide to describe the diary in question is quite apt. I’m pretty selective about what I will look at when it comes to diaries. Someone whom I trust to have something interesting and sane posts, and I’ll check it out. Otherwise, why bother.
Thanks!
But yeah; I can’t overstate the visceral revulsion I felt. That familiar pattern of gibberish (with the line breaks and the photos and etc.) at the top of a diary! It’s like, well, seeing Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
I share the sentiment.
There’s a term from the frog pond’s distant past that would seem in need of reviving about now: serial blog wreckers. Whether or not that’s the intention in the case of a number of the participants I am in no position to judge. The outcomes speak for themselves: the flamewars, toxic interactions, and yes Trumplike posts are present in all their fetid glory.
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.
.
Isaac Asimov
.
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
— Carl Sagan
Another Sagan quote for good measure:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Both come from his last book, The Demon Haunted World.
Have the fascists ever been gone? I seem to recall our turning a blind eye to Japanese atrocities after the War and German ones too when it was most convenient to do so. We backed plenty of authoritarians in the decades that followed. We would have supported Hilter himself, had he come to power after the USSR was ascendant.
. . . extraordinary evidence” (or however that goes).
RE:
Evidence? How about:
Google any of those names and many others (e.g. Guzzetti, Bordaberry) whom the U.S. enthusiastically promoted despite records which were fascist in every sense of the term. There are countless others as well. Among the most well known, the CIA overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of our puppet, the Shah of Iran with his secret police who tortured his political enemies. Or our backing of Saddam Hussein (including renting him apartments in exile) in his quest to overthrow Abdul Qasim in Iraq. Or our aid to Idi Amin in Uganda, through the CIA, which is well documented.
All justified by our efforts to stand up to the Soviets. In light of that, I think it’s clear we would have supported anyone. If you think Hitler is somehow distinguished from those named above by the scale of his atrocities, I don’t believe the record bears that out. There was never any line beyond which one of our puppets was not allowed to cross so long as he remained loyal to perceived U.S. interests. (I say perceived because in the long run our hypocrisy came back to bite us many times over and it continues to do so.)
. . . that the USSR was ALREADY “ascendant” when the U.S. DIDN’T back Hitler (duh, the USSR sided with us against Hitler).
You compose your list apparently imagining I’m not thoroughly familiar with the history it contains. But I am. It just doesn’t comprise the extraordinary evidence demanded by your extraordinary claim.
Not true. The USSR was not a world power until after WWII. It was after Churchill gave his iron curtain speech that the U.S. began obsessing about the Soviet Union. That concern was supercharged when the Soviets exploded an atom bomb and even more so after their hydrogen bomb.
you move them around like that?
“Ascendant” was your original claim.
Oh, come on.
It takes a lot to beat or match Hitler, no doubt about it. But there were other animals like him in this world, even in modern times, guys like Pol Pot and Stalin.
Had a lengthy dialogue about this with a Polish nationalist on Twitter earlier; they claimed this was a ‘love of country’ event. We had a bit of back and forth and I mentioned leaving NATO and got, “Who talk about leaving NATO?”. I don’t think they have thought this through very carefully.