It can happen here

MARGINALIA

By Paul Reidinger › paulr@sfbg.com

Dr. Göbbels, if he were to pay us a friendly visit today, would doubtless find much to his liking in our modern multimedia circus. We might not have a propaganda ministry (Göbbels's official title was "minister of propaganda and national enlightenment" — indeed!), but we do have the bellowing minions of Fox News to spread the reactionary gospel and impugn those who dare to propose another way. Nazi Germany had no media tool to match Fox News' dizzying dazzle, and perhaps Göbbels would be envious, or perhaps not; his pupil and leader Adolf Hitler was largely the creature of radio and of gigantic, orgiastic public rallies and might not have played well on TV — just as, in our own time, a certain self-styled "war president" manages to give offense to large swaths of a disillusioned population each time he smirks or mugs within view of a network camera.

Gore Vidal once suggested that if fascism were to come to America, it would come not in the person of a little man with a funny mustache who shouted and waved his arms but as an American archetype: a honey-voiced grandfather, say, who smelled reassuringly of bay rum while speaking reassuringly of Mom, the flag, and apple pie. Clearly the man he had in mind was Ronald Reagan and not our present Yosemite Sam variant, but the two central points still hold: that fascism could come to America and, if it did, that it would rise from an American cultivar and take a distinctively American form whose familiarity and clichés would lull. One cannot help noticing that while the word "freedom" is often on the crooked lips of Bush and company, it is almost always accompanied by the word "hate," a telling juxtaposition for those of us inclined to find such juxtapositions telling.

Davidson Loehr's America, Fascism and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher (Chelsea Green, $12 paper) does not read like a collection of sermons — the pieces are much too succinct, for one thing; also beautifully essayistic — but if this is heresy, then give us more heresy. The word heresy, Loehr notes in his introduction, is drawn from a Greek word for choose, while fascism is descended from the Latin word fasces, which refers to a bundle of sticks bound together. The imagery behind the speaker's podium in the House of Representatives is a nice example of the latter.

Loehr, a Unitarian minister in Texas, does not mince his words; "we are in deep trouble," he says, and our society already meets the tests for fascism set out by the political scientist Lawrence Britt, among them strident nationalism and militarism, scapegoating, fear mongering, a fixation on crime and punishment, controlled mass media, overt religious influence in government, contempt for intellectuals, the arts, and human rights, and corporate cronyism and corruption. These are the stories that fill our newspapers every day now.

Even hard-core lefties giggle slightly when I suggest to them that the fanatic right's seizure of power, decades in the making, is the result at least in part of formal studies of Nazi methods in Germany. But why the idea would surprise anyone, I don't know, since it is already understood that the scientific apparatus of Nazi Germany was looted by the victorious Allies of both West and East; our progress in nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and jet aircraft was drastically accelerated, as was that of the Soviet Union, by know-how taken from the Germans. Is it such a stretch to suspect that Hitler's political methods -- in particular, deployment of the lie audacious enough to frighten doubters into co-opted silence -- would have attracted the interest of those who meant to seize the government of a wealthy, sophisticated, technically advanced nation with the military means to make certain dreams come true?

Although Hitler — who, like George W. Bush, assumed power without winning a majority vote — has entered history as der Führer, he kept the title chancellor, from 1933 until the bullet in the mouth in the bunker in April 1945. He understood the value of retaining familiar forms; he passed himself off as a conservative, a German patriot, until it was too late for real conservatives and German patriots to do anything about him. The Reichstag became an acclamatory body, but it remained. First, of course, its building was burned, in that Sept. 11–like incident of 1933 to which the Hitler government responded with the so-called Enabling Act, which ended what remained of democracy in Germany and conferred massive new powers on the chancellor. These powers were promptly used to attack domestic dissent through spying and terror, persecute unpopular and blamable groups, and foment war. Although war was always Hitler's goal, it was his undoing, as it was the undoing of many grandiose and unrealistic leaders before and has been since.

We may yet be thankful that George Bush chose to invade Iraq. Like Napoleon's invasion of Russia, like Hitler's invasion of Russia, the Iraq war has already taken shape as a historic, epochal blunder, and it may yet destroy its deluded author and his wicked regime as those earlier wars destroyed theirs. Is it possible that some slithering Straussian student of history in the Bush or Cheney retinue studied the story of Hitler just a bit too closely? *