Topic: Photos
Follow-Up: Low-Rent Crystalnacht (...it continues)
At some point in these pages you will find a continuation of what started with the "Low-Rent Crystalnacht" idea here (and published in Just Above Sunset on the weekend here).
I don't like what is in the air, but I want to avoid being one more lefty yelling Nazi and fascist like so many others. Bush is not Hitler. And Karl Rove is not Hermann Goering. Yes, Rove's grandfather was Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Statthalter - Nazi State Party Chairman - for his region. He was also a partner and senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo AG engineering firm, which built the Birkenau camp - according to this research. But so what? The father of Arnold Shwarzenegger was a Nazi officer, but Arnold is our governor out here now. That's all in the past.
Lots of folks like to point out the seizures in late 1942 of five enterprises Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the president, managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen. Prescott Bush got caught red-handed and a whole bunch of assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Yeah, there were these Nazi financial transactions, from 1924 on, and maybe through 1951 actually, involving Prescott Bush and the private bank, Brown Brothers Harriman. Yep, Averell Harriman seems to have been involved. (Read all about this stuff here.)
But really, George Bush is not his grandfather. Arnold Shwarzenegger is not his Austrian father. And I taught the grandchildren of Averell Harriman back in the seventies at that fancy prep school in upstate New York. Nice kids, and not Nazis as far as I could tell. But the family did run the oldest fox hunt in America, yearly, on their big estate down in Geneseo.
"The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters."
- William Shenstone, Works in verse and prose (1764).
Everyone has their faults.
But is there something fascist and Nazi-like in the air? The idea that Andrew Sullivan floated - the cult of the Great Leader - fascinates me, particularly in how it makes certain attitudes and behaviors (like the minor Crystalnacht-lite vandalism noted previously) almost inevitable. But I don't know. I just put this week's Just Above Sunset to bed and may take a rest. It's about 110 right now here, really, and I'm drained. Los Angeles is in the middle of a four-day heat wave. Let it rest.
But just to keep the issue alive, here you can watch an ABC news video from last week's Republican National Convention - a clip from the floor of Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. You will see a young Republican supporter kicking a female protester inside the Garden as she is lying on the ground being held by three secret service agents. The protesters were arrested. The young Republican was not. A search is on for his identity - and here and here you can announce you know this young fellow, if you do.
The question that comes to mind for me is simple. When a political leader becomes something like a cult leader, in the sense that his decisions and actions cannot be doubted or even questioned - as that would be unpatriotic and an attack to the personality of the leader - is such behavior to be expected, or even glorified? Or put it another way. When you base your campaign on your attitude - and not on your ideas or your actions or your decisions or your accomplishments - does such behavior in your followers, well, just follow naturally? Even more simply? If all you have to run on is swagger and sneers, then, when people buy into that, what else did you expect?
There will be more of this.
As for the young Bush enthusiast, my young prep school students back in the seventies looked much like this.
Posted by Alan at 17:37 PDT
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Updated: Monday, 6 September 2004 17:47 PDT
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