All the serious bloggers are passing round names of other blogs, I am such a tiny fish in a wee puddle with so few readers that I don’t know how much good I can do shining lights on others. But I will make the effort….so many of these blogs (as well as many on my blogroll to the right!) really have wonderful, amusing, infuriating, validating information to share. One I found today and am enjoying I will share right here: Orcinus–a blog made up of Northwest writers.

My favorite piece this morning in that long list of reading pleasures is the one entitled: “If conservatives really, really hate being called Fascists #3″ because it just hammers the much less well explained and documented point I have tried to make about American politicians literally slipping down that slope. Just because our polls don’t speak German and scream “Seig Heil” does not mean it can’t happen here; Orcinus makes the point that proto-fascism is NOT out of American reach, alas. Some of my favorite bits just because I HAVE to revel in finding someone who agrees with my worries:

+++ Therefore a woman belongs at the side of a man not just as a person who brings children into this world, not just as an adornment to delight the eye, not just as a cook and a cleaner. Instead woman has the holy duty to be a life companion, which means being a comrade who pursues her vocation as woman with clarity of vision and spiritual warmth.

– Paula Siber, “The New German Woman,” 1933, from Fascism [1995, Oxford University Press], edited by Roger Griffin+++

Gee, does that remind you all of anyone we hear and see on the public stage of late? Not only does it sound like Ann Coulter’s secret lesbian dream-date, but the religious right has been pumping this forever. And that is the mildest quote from the well-researched article, the rest are far scarier, for instance:

+++Hitler made an explicit link between “liberal” feminist and suffrage movements — which even then were working to undermine the traditional disempowerment of women — and Jews shortly after obtaining the chancellorhood in 1933. The next year he denounced the so-called New Woman as the “invention of Jewish intellectuals.” He also urged German women to reject as unnatural the “overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes” as embodied in “Jewish intellectualism.”+++

Man, is it just me, or does it remind anyone else of the GOP reaction to Clinton? And it cannot be a coincidence, can it, that as anime film makes Jesus into a sort of super hero, the Orcinus writers mention this:

+++Since Sept. 11, 2001, however, a lot of this talk — as well as the vision of the “warrior Jesus” — has returned with some intensity to the mainstream, though there had already been some seepage from the far right in the previous decade. Much of it, in fact, is closely associated with the increasing prevalence of pseudo-fascist thought as part of our political discourse. As we’ve well established by now, any American fascism is going to be wrapped in a flag and thumping on a Bible, extolling the virtues of “tradition” that includes sex and gender roles. And that’s what we’re getting.+++

And a final warning, of how greed and pro-corporate government sets this wheel of horror in motion, then you really must go read the whole thing to wake in time to stop the night mare:

+++In other words, “movement conservatives” are being molded into a mindset that increasingly resembles classic fascism, but it’s being done by leaders who mostly find this mindset convenient and readily manipulable. Unfortunately, the history of fascism is such that the arrogant corporatist belief that they contain these forces is not well grounded.

What’s important to understand is the real dynamic: A growing populist “movement” is being encouraged increasingly to adopt attitudes that, taken together, become increasingly fascist. Greater numbers of individuals are being conditioned to think alike, and more importantly, to accept an increasingly vicious response to dissent. This does not mean that genuine fascism has arrived as a real political force in America; but it does mean the groundwork is being created for just such a nightmare,+++

Find it all at http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/