Thom's blog
How Democracy Dies
Even the usually restrained Barack Obama warns Americans we're slipping dangerously close to authoritarianism."You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we've seen societies where that happens."
Yes, he invoked Nazi Germany, adding, "Now, presumably, there was a ballroom in Vienna in the late 1920s or '30s that looked and seemed as if it - filled with the music and art and literature and the science that was emerging - would continue into perpetuity. And then 60 million people died. And the entire world was plunged into chaos."
It was a shocking reminder of Milton Mayer and his seminal work, They Thought They Were Free, first published back in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press.
Shortly after World War II, Mayer, an American journalist and college instructor, went to Germany and befriended a small group of 10 "ordinary Germans" who had lived and worked through the war, and interviewed them in depth.
Mayer's burning question was, "How does something like Nazi Germany happen?"
What he learned was every bit as shocking as President Obama drawing the same parallels. He wrote, presciently, "Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany - not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
"I came home a little bit afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under combined pressure of reality and illusion. I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.
"If I - and my countrymen - ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm."
Mayer tells the story largely through the words of the Germans he got to know during his year in Germany after the war.
-Thom
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Thom Hartmann Program
(Catching up with old podcasts)
In this show, 12/14/2017, Julio noted that his upload internet speed was only 12 megabits and that he's in a rural area in NJ.
Truth be told, rural NJ or non-rural NJ, all areas are limited to 12 megabits upload if you're on cable. That's an issue with all of my clients (I'm a computer consultant). Nothing to do with being rural.
FIOS has symetric upload/download speeds, but Comcast has asymmetric speeds, so you get fast download and slow upload. That's just the way it is. There may be higher cost business plans with faster uploads, but everyone's home plans are 12 megabits upload and that's it.
Hope you get this message! Do let me know via email if you get this comment. Thanks -- listener since Thom filled in for Al on Air America.