"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Fuhrer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
-- Dorothy Thompson, 1935
"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 understand it, it could not be released because of national security...".
-- They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer, 1955
"Whoooo could imagine, that they would freak out, in Kansas, Kansas, badoobie-doobie-do, Kansas, Kansas...""... STOP groups like the ACLU from removing all mentions of Christmas from the public square!" -- Christian Response e-Alert, December 2004
-- Help I'm A Rock, The Mothers of Invention, 1966
On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst von Rath, a low-ranking German official, at his embassy in Paris. Two days later, Kristallnacht ("Night of Crystal"), a pogrom that destroyed synagogues, Jewish-owned homes, stores and community centers, commenced.
Kristalnacht was incited by a well-organized "intense campaign against Jews [which] began on German National Radio," Milton Mayer wrote in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime's Propaganda Minister, directed the campaign that appeared to move ordinary Germans to action against Jews: Are the German people going to be "sitting ducks all over the world for Jew murderers?" the radio voice challenged. "Are the German people to stand helpless while the Fuhrer's representatives are shot down by the Jew swine? Are the Schweinehunde to get off scott free? Is the wrath of the German People against the Israelite scum to be restrained any longer?"
Ten years after World War II, Milton Mayer went to Germany, where he spent a year searching to find out how ordinary Germans -- not Nazi Party leaders -- seamlessly and somewhat comfortably accepted and embraced fascism.
In a television interview in 1986 -- nearly fifty years after Kristalnacht -- Frank Zappa, a rock musician and free speech advocate, warned that America itself was headed "toward a fascist theocracy."
Only a few months ago, right wing Christian fundamentalists were claiming that Christmas -- and therefore Christians -- was under attack. They vowed that they were not going to take it any more.
Milton Mayer's year-long pilgrimage to Germany and his conversation with "ordinary Germans, Frank Zappa's warning on CNN's Crossfire and the Christian right's campaign against church/state separationists makes for an unusual trifecta. Yet these disparate threads of the past and present represent clear trends in America's political landscape as George W. Bush settles in to his second term.
Frank Zappa's Warning
The late Frank Zappa, best known for fronting The Mothers of Invention -- a difficult-to-categorize late sixties/early seventies group of disparate musicians -- was a dynamic figure; a composer, singer-guitarist, bandleader, graphic artist, filmmaker, satirist, political commentator and author of The REAL Frank Zappa Book.
He was also a passionate defender of the First Amendment and testified before Congress on censorship-related issues. His most publicized appearance was on September 19, 1985, before the US Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, where he spoke out against the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music censorship organization founded by then-Senator Al Gore's wife Tipper Gore, and several other political wives, including those of five members of the committee.
During his 1986 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, Zappa made it clear that the hullabaloo surrounding the censorship of rock lyrics was an attempt to suppress free speech. In the tradition of the late Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, Zappa said that he didn't "believe there are any words that need to be suppressed."
After getting steadily bashed by his counterpart, the conservative Washington Times columnist John Lofton, he turned toward him and told him to "kiss my ass." The program, which hadn't started out with any references to smooching, devolved to that point after an exasperated and infuriated Lofton kept accusing Zappa of refusing to condemn rock lyrics that encouraged incest.
During those early days of "Crossfire" -- and some might argue it has remained that way until only the past few years -- the left was barely distinguishable from the right. "From the left" was Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.'s covert cultural division in the early 1950's and 30 years later could barely muster up a coherent progressive thought, and "from the right" was a younger and surprisingly less irascible Robert Novak. (To view the entire interview, see ifilm.com.)
Later, when Lofton claimed that America's families were under attack and threatened by out-of-control musicians, Zappa stated clearly that the "the biggest threat to America is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that path." (For more on Zappa's life see Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
Reprinted from Dissident Voice:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr05/Berkowitz0401.htm
