Reading the other day I read these words: “America is not burdened with the history of tyranny and totalitarianism that haunts Russia. We have a 229-year record of success with constitutional democracy that should outlast the Trump era.”
I thought to myself “I hope so but our history is not as successful as the writer thinks and and D.Trump is so far out of the box our history may teach us another lesson.”
For one thing no other president ever called a portion of the free press the “enemy of the American people.” Here is his tweet: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC,@CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” He lumps together the main news sources in America, NY Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, as fake news sources.
Take President Nixon who had the most hostile relationship with the media in recent years. He had his enemies list which had names of media people on it. He considered some of the media his enemies but not in the longest day did he deem them enemies of the American people.
At the CPAC convention he repeated this assertion. He said: “the dishonest media did not explain that I called the ‘fake’ news the enemy of the people. . . . .I’m not against the media. I’m not against the press. I don’t mind bad stories if I deserve them….but I am only against the fake news media or press.” Of course those named entities are the enemy of the people.
At his Hitler-type gathering Saturday in Melboure, FL it is reported D.Trump declared that “safety is a civil right, and we will fight to make America totally safe again.” One of the first steps in doing this impossible task especially since he is no longer totally safe as I explained yesterday is to identify and silence the enemy. As you know every dictator needs an enemy. For Trump it is the free press.
Three lessons you should take from the use of those words: “enemy of the American people,” which by the way should send a shiver down the bones of anyone who believes in a liberal democracy. First, (1) the type of leaders who used those words in the past; (2) the fragility of our system of checks and balances to the whims of a president during a national emergency; and (3) the willingness of those in uniform to follow orders.
(1) Enemy of the American People.
“The Cheka was used by Vladimir Lenin to consolidate his power after the November 1917 Revolution. . . While in theory the Cheka had to operate by the letter of the law, this was not the case and such was its power that no one could do anything about it if they were arrested for being an ‘enemy of the state’. The Cheka became judge, jury and invariably executioner.”
“Several reasons could be named for Joseph Stalin’s terror. First of all, he believed that the country had to be united – with him as leader – if it was to be strong. . . . The purges affected not only those who openly opposed Stalin, but ordinary people too. During Stalin’s rule of the country over 20 million people were sent to labor camps, where nearly half of them died. . . . After Stalin’s death all of the victims of the purges (or as they were called, “enemies of the people”) were gradually rehabilitated.”
“This was an extremely brutal operation carried out by communists from the towns called twenty-five thousanders who were sent to run the villages. I’ve got a quotation from Grossman about the kulaks . . . He said, . . . “They looked on the kulaks as cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive. They had no soul. They stank. They all had venereal diseases. They’re enemies of the people. There was no pity for them. They’re not human beings. What were they — vermin.”
“Mao Zedong, former Chinese leader, embraced the concept of calling individuals or associations that were critical of his policies ‘enemies of the people’. As he explained: ‘members of society are divided into two major categories: the ‘people’ and the ‘class enemy’.”
“Breaking the back of labour was the first necessary step towards the Nazis’ other goals: the re-arming of Germany in preparation for the most destructive war in history, the construction of a classless Volksgemeinschaft (national community) and the destruction of all “enemies of the people”—a campaign that would end in the industrial murder of millions of European Jews.”
The BBC noted: “Being branded “an enemy of the people” by the likes of Stalin or Mao brought at best suspicion and stigma, at worst hard labour or death.”
Trump is now in the company of Vladimir Lenin, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao.
Oh, and I should not forget Pol Pot. A review of the movie “Enemies of the People” stated “Yet one aspect of Democratic Kampuchea remains neglected, and relates to the way the Khmer Rouge used language to facilitate their murderous policies . . . ” Thus we see in the D.Trump presidency echoes of the worst dictators ever to have lived.
🙂
John: A good time was had by all. Short-ribs ala Khalid, caesar salad, double-baked potatos, and, pineapple up-side down cake for dessert. Trump was the only entree that disappointed.
Khalid :
How did your … Dinner Party … that you hosted last night, go? SWELL? 🙂
wa-llahi! One thing we know for sure from tonight’s Trump speech, there’ll be more prisons, more, cops, and, more repression for minorities. It was a big night for white trash in general, and, brown-shirted boneheads, in particular. Glorious Leader obviously knew his audience well. Trump’s dictatorship is most loved, and, slavishly, served, by members of the lumpen proletariat.
Wa-llahi! Glorious Leader’s speech was a real stinker. His pseudo-Mussolini postures were awful. Pure snake-oil from start to finish. Using Owen’s wife as a prop was disgraceful. Trump could crawl under a snake’s belly.
I wonder why he’s eliminating Iraq from his new immigration ban? Could it be that we have lots of troops participating in a big fight over there? Not a word about that. Is the issue in doubt? You certainly wouldn’t know, unless, you regularly follow the foreign press. It seems domestic media are self-censoring of late. The situation is strangely reminiscent of press attitudes during the early VN War years.
I found this on the frontpage website from May 2016. “Every Republican is compared to Hitler:”
An excerpt:
“By the Reagan years, the left had achieved a banality of Hitler analogies. Everything Reagan did was just like Hitler. All of Reagan’s associates were just like Hitler. It was Hitlers all the way down.
President George W. Bush inherited this banality of Hitlers. To left-wing Truthers, open and covert, 9/11 was the Reichstag fire, the Patriot Act was the beginning of a national dictatorship and Bush was a dictator. As Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.” Hitler wasn’t elected, Bush was, but you can’t expect a left-wing loudmouth to know history.
Congressman Charles Rangel compared the Iraq War to the Holocaust. . . Senator Durbin compared Gitmo to Nazi concentration camps. Senator John Glenn compared Republican arguments to Nazi propaganda. “It’s the old Hitler business… if you hear something repeated, repeated, you start to believe it.” Like repeatedly accusing Republicans of Nazism.
. . . Al Gore claimed that “The administration works closely with a network of rapid-response digital Brown Shirts”.
Democratic Senator Robert Byrd . . . compared efforts to block Democratic filibusters to Nazi Germany.
To most people, Nazi analogies summon up images of the Holocaust and a ruthless dictatorship. To the left however, any populist reaction against their rule is Nazism.
And so the only thing we can truly be certain of is that any Republican nominee will be Hitler. It doesn’t matter what he believes. It doesn’t matter if Democrats considered him a moderate 5 minutes ago. Accusations of Nazism remain the default argument for a Democratic Party turned far to the left.
Republicans aren’t progressive. Therefore they’re Hitler. It’s really that simple.”
Bill:
I suggest you just posted and example of fake news.
FBI Director Comey not only succeeded in electing
our President Trump for us but he succeeded in weaponizing
the phrase ‘fake news’. and ‘voter fraud’. just like
the word ‘ conspiracy theory’. and ‘UFO’ was weaponized
in the 1960’s by J Edgar Hoover after he whacked
President Kennedy and elected LBJ for America
and they recovered a UFO at Rosewell NM.
Still have not watched the doc Sirius on YouTube?
aw shucks!
Yep FBI Director Hoover whacked Presidential
candidates Martin Luther King , Bobby Kennedy
while neutralizing Nixon by giving him a ‘deep
throat’.
FBI Directors neutralized Jimmy Carter by
surprising him in October; had George Wallace
shot by Bremer who was hypnotized by the same
man who hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan; had Ronald Reagan
tested for reflexive reaction with a bullet and got Al Gore
at the new electronic voting machines in Florida.
They tried taking down Bill Clinton with a missile
used on TWA flight 800.
ugh!
in other fake news
Local Jewish Federation Hires Former FBI Agent Orsini As Its First Director Of Community Security
February 27, 2017 6:41 PM By Jon Delano
2.
World renowned JFK assassination pathologist
Dr. Cyril Wecht exposed FBI Director Hoovers involvement in
Coup D Etat.
FBI agent Brad Orsini was sent to silence Dr Wecht
permanently.
He failed.
http://www.post-gazette.com/frontpage/2007/07/11/Wecht-investigator-s-discipline-file-opened/stories/200707110253
Wecht investigator’s Brad Orsini discipline file opened
July 11, 2007 11:00 PM
By Paula Reed Ward Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A federal judge yesterday unsealed records revealing that the lead FBI agent in the criminal case against Dr. Cyril H. Wecht was disciplined elsewhere for forging other agents’ names and initials on chain-of-custody forms, evidence labels and interview forms.
Related documents
See more information about the disciplinary reports of FBI agent Bradley W. Orsini.
I’m hosting a dinner party, tonight. Trump’s speech is on the menu. All the neighbors are invited. Among the guests will be a farmer, a psychiatrist, a retired prison educator (state), a factory worker, and, a green-carded Bobo Dread I-man. I’ll be the solo Muslim. Not all of them hate the President….yet. It’s my fondest hope Glorious Leader will wander off-script, and, trap himself, in some spectacular way.
Great observation, Jim.
MEK, Mujahideen-e-Khlaq, is considered by MOIS/VEVAK, to be the foremost internal threat to vilayet-e- fahqi, rule by the Islamic jurisprudence specialists (religious experts). The Mullahs have a phobia about the Mujahideen. MEK started out as a Marxist-Leninist outfit with a clear secularist ideology. They had some success in the late seventies, and, early eighties. MEK bomb-crews were particularly effective. IRGC and VEVAK dealt harshly with MEK. Waves of summary executions drove them from the country. Over the course of its’ decades long existence in exile, MEK has worked Islamism into its’ formerly leftist leanings in the same way as Hizballah (Lebanon) did. Unfortunately, it’s much too late to try and ideologically compete with vilayet-e-fahqi’s hammer-lock on Iranian psychology. The Mullahs have had almost fifty years to inculcate, and, condition, the Iranian people with Khomeini’s thought. MEK is no longer a feasible vehicle to undermine the Mullahs. Supporting them has been a waste of resources.
When Trump says that the lügenpresse is the “Enemy of the American People” he is depersonalizing his complaints. It is not about him, it is about the damage that the media does to the nation. This conflicts with the meme that The Donald is a supreme egoist. It is a point to be considered – Trump has got it right.
Who suffered most from the lies about the Iraqi nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the general population or George W. Bush? I would maintain that it was and is the men who were killed and the families that they left behind. It was not the former president and it was not the lying reporters and government officials who concocted the “facts”.
The Israel First neocons still have their perches in the press and think tanks. They are the heart and soul of the Never Trumpers and their deluded battalions of pussy marchers. Not one in my ken paid a single copper cent for murdering thousands of Americans and perhaps millions of Arabs. None of them or their families will shed blood on the front lines of an unnecessary war with Russia or Iran.
Trump is the first major public official to name these moral vampires for what they are. Yes, they are Enemies of the American People, however much they prosper and and indulge in vulgar entertainments like the White House Correspondents Dinner.
In your history of the phrase “enemy of the people”, Matt, you left out one important question, that is, “Is it true”? Trump is not a superior wordsmith. He does not invent phrases. He communicates in the language of the average American. His choice of words is not festooned with learned footnotes as is yours.
But Trump accurately describes the dominant zeitgeist of the celebrity Washington press corps which is not recruited from a cross section of the country. These people, who brought us WWII, who provoked the Middle East fiasco we are embroiled in, and who have whitewashed the massacre of American sailors aboard the USS Liberty in 1967, are Enemies of the American People.
TadzIO:
Did you ever notice how you are continually trying to explain away what Trump is saying by suggesting it does not mean whet the normal interpretation of his words would be but something else. I’m just telling you no other president or leader in America has ever used those words “enemy of the people” and the only people who have are despots. You do know that Trump equates himself with the nation as those other dictators have done.
You talk about Bush’s misconceived Iraq War and the lies drummed up by the intelligence agencies. Are you aware Trump is doing the same thing telling the intelligence agencies to come up with information to justify his preconceived ideas? You are right Bush never suffered and thousand of Americans did; do you think it will be different with Trump now handling the nation.
Sorry to inform you but the Israeli firsters sit down with Trump almost every day. One of the first persons he had dinner with after being swarn in was that despicable Sheldon Adelson who is trying to buy an Iran war — his money for American blood. He has already advocating dropping a nuke on Iran. Sure none of your kin may suffer when that happens but have you no care for the tens of thousand of innocent Iranians who will die? Trump has surrounded himself with just the people you seem to think no longer control our policy.
When you say the history of the term “enemy of the people” is true I blush. You really believe the kulaks or middle class were the enemy of the Russian people, or the Jews were the enemy of the German people, or the educated class the enemy of the Cambodian people. How could you?
I do have to say you have a Trumponian view of American history suggesting that without the press we would have avoided WWII. It is also curious how you suggest the liberal press brought us the Middle East fiassco. I thought that was the neo-cons who did that. And by the way, the people who whitewashed the USS Liberty attack were the occupants of the White House namely LBJ who is quite vile and quite similar to Trump. The captain of the Liberty was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor but LBJ did not want to give it to him so he had the CNO pin it on him at a quiet ceremony in the Washington Navy Yard.
The neocons who instigated the Iraq War were liberals parachuted into the GOP in the early 1970s mostly by television networks. Their government incubator was the staff of Sen. Henry Jackson [D-WA]. The main newspapers that propagated their lies were the New York Times and the Washington Post, flagships of the liberal media. Their default ideology is left liberal, though their real concern is exclusively ethnic. Party loyalty is to them of less importance than the lives of American soldiers.
Your take on LBJ is spot on.
As for “enemy of the people” it is a trite commonplace phrase. My guess would be that Cicero used it on Cataline and it was old hat then. Whenever I see it my first image is Henrik Ibsen’s famous play of the same title. Surely you understood that when I said that the neocons and the media that follows their lead were enemies of the people I was referring to them alone and not to any of the groups you referred to.
” The liberal National Press is antagonistic to the interests of a free people in a Constitutional Democratic Republic when they forsake disinterested reporting and engage in partisan propaganda journalism ”
Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning. Gadzooks, Trump is in the company of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao? If he was , your door would have been knocked down at three in the morning by now. Your paranoid fantasy is a paean to Free Speech. Rock On! 🙂
John:
He talks like them. Give him some time and he’ll get there.
Matt wrote: “A Hitler-like rally in Melbourne Florida.”
Talk about Fake News.
Obama had a dog; Hitler had a dog;
Obama had a fawning sycophantic press; so did Hitler;
Obama bombed Libya; Hitler bombed Libya;
Obama was just like Hitler.
Or: Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Trump severely criticized the Press. Conclusion: Trump is just like Hitler.
Matt:
Let’s see: No American President has called the Press/Media the “enemy of the people.”
Thomas Jefferson words are tantamount to doing that very thing:
(Professor Daniel Lattier (2015) compiled these quotes from Thomas Jefferson)
1. “The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.”
2. “I deplore… the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them… These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food.”
“Sound food,” for Jefferson = books.
3. “‘From forty years’ experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.”
4. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.”
5. “As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers.”
7. “I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time…”
Reading newspapers does not mean one is “informed.”
8. “A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one.”
9. “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/thomas-jefferson-had-some-issues-newspapers
Of course, both Jefferson and Trump also spoke glowingly of the First Amendment. They respect the First Amendment, and use their Free Speech rights to criticize it.
Another Founding Father, John Adams, so hated a free press that he and his Federalists passed a Sedition Action which criminalized criticism.
“The U.S. Sedition Act first outlawed conspiracies “to oppose any measure or measures of the government.” Going further, the act made it illegal for anyone to express “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against Congress or the president. . . . Additional language punished any spoken or published words that had “bad intent” to “defame” the government or to cause the “hatred” of the people toward it.”
CRITICISM OF THE PRESS IS AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE. George Washington said newspapers were stuffed with “scurrilities and baseless declarations.” Agnew called them “Nattering Nabobs of Negativism.”
Matt, we’ll begin to worry when President Trump tries to enact Sedition laws to silence his critics.
As far as the analogies to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, I’ll say this: “Far out!”
NYT, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS etc have for decades had a decidedly liberal spin. Liberals like them. Conservatives view them with Jeffersonian skepticism.
Do they always spin liberally? Yes! Are they always fake? NO! Are they sometimes fake! Yes!
Exactly. In case you missed it two weeks ago the Iranian opposition MEK’s political frint NIRC issues a report saying Shia Iran is traunung sunni ISIS terrorists. Total BS which will be used to fulfill the scenario you now see clearly. We are going to get hit and it will be blames in Iran. MEK is also funded by Mossad. Its coming… soon so that Obama can be blamed.
Jim:
Goof poiny. Trump and his supporters need others to blame. Trump even put it on Obama for the bothched raid as if he had nothing to do with it. The said thing is they will believe when we get involved in a war that it is Obama’s fault, or even Hillary’s.