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Michael Murry
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Posted 10/31/07
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#1
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I just had an unexpectedly amusing experience, fellow Crimestoppers. Carol and I bought a DVD of the movie Dr. Zhivago (1965) last night at a local department store and spent some time today viewing the "special features" included on the three-disk set. As most of you may know, the film by British director David Lean (Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, et cetera) starred Omar Shariff, Rod Stieger, Tom Courntey, Geraldine Chaplin, Julie Christie, and Alec Guinness. Because the Soviet government at the time still did not consider Boris Pasternak's novel orthodox enough to publish, the film makers had to find someplace other than Russia to make the movie. They chose Francisco Franco's fascist Spain.
Towards the end of the "making of ..." featurette, Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin's daugher) recalls that during filming late one night (about 3:00 am) the script called for a crowd of local Spanish extras to march through the streets of "Moscow" (near Madrid) waving huge red communist banners and singing the Communist "Internationale." Ms Chaplin said that, much to the crew's surprise, the Spanish extras all seemed to know the song. As well, they sang it with particular enthusiasm -- so much so that the police-state police showed up to "monitor" the proceedings. The really amusing part, though, came when Ms Chaplin related how local Spanis villagers, roused from their sleep by the boisterous singing of the Internationale, began popping open wine bottles in celebration. It seems they thought that the joyful singing meant that Franco must have died.
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Stan
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Posted 11/01/07
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#2
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That's a great story. It is also a story of redemption. Spain, over the last 15 years has become a prosperous, productive democratic country. I have been there several times over the past 10 years and have noticed a drastic change from when I was there in the early 70s. Franco was a brute . Somehow brutes have that appeal note the anointment of Rudy Guliani as nominee and the Brute in Chief in the WH.
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Michael Murry
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Posted 11/01/07
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#3
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In The March of Folly (her classic study of ruinous ruling regimes), the late Barbara Tuchman explained:
"The American government [circa 1949-1954] reacted not to the Chinese upheaval or to Vietnamese nationalism per se, but to intimidation by the rabid right at home and to the public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected."
Substitute "Terrorism" for "Communism" as the preferred fascist bogeyman du jour, and we still see the American government reacting primarily to "intimidation by the rabid right at home" and not to the various sorts of legitimate grievances that abused and occupied foreign peoples often have against not only their own corrupt regimes but America's, too. Both Nazi Germany (before WWII) and America (afterwards) actively supported and sustained Franco's fascist dictatorship. For this reason, among many others, I've often maintained that although a few fascist governments might have lost the Second World War, Fascism itself won and simply transferred its worldwide headquarters to the capital city of the United States of America.
As well, whether we call it "reactionary panic," "mystic dread," "abstract angst," or just plain "fear itself," the frenetic flogging of some nameless nemesis remains the principal atavistic cattle-prod with which the American government stampedes the citizenry (i.e., the "Fate Driven Herd," or "The Nation of Sheep") into surrendering their own interests in exchange for some presumed "security" proffered by their protection-racket persecutors. Like I wrote in "Lunatic Leviathan":
This threat implied the old ¡§protection rent¡¨ Where thugs would offer safety from ¡§that guy¡¨ And when the victim asked what ¡§guy¡¨ he meant He¡¦d say: ¡§The one you¡¦re looking in the eye¡¨ As much as I loved and respected my mother and step-father -- both hard-bitten survivors of the Great Depression and World War II -- we never could bridge the gap between us on the subject of "patriotism." They remembered a President FDR whom they felt understood and cared about them. A polio victim in a wheel chair who led the country to victory over both domestic and foreign enemies, they knew their country's leader as "a crippled man who taught a crippled nation how to walk again." I had no such feeling about Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Mihous Nixon, whom I felt had wantonly squandered and betrayed the sincere patriotism of people like my parents. When I would try to explain why I wanted no part of the American government's unnecessary war against the people of Vietnam, my parents would ask: "Who will protect us from our enemies if you don't?" I would answer (since cannon fodder my age couldn't vote at the time): "Who will protect me against my own government if you don't?" Americans -- and especially the hapless Democrats of today -- not only still respond to "intimidation by the rabid right at home," but seem to have acquired something of a "Stockholm Syndrome" masochistic taste for it. From what I can tell, the people of Spain have been through all that Fascism shit and do not want any more of it. Good for them. Although still triumphant in America, at least Fascism may finally have died a long-deserved death on the Iberian penninsula.
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Stan
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Posted 11/02/07
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#4
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Just to add a few points to your excellent summary of incipient fascism in America. As you say it is a protection racket similar to the old mob ploy. There are bad guys out there and we will protect you for a price. That price includes surrendering your constitutional rights, and allowing the enforcement arm of the government, the war department, unlimited funding. The most insidious part of this is that normal citizens are not only roped in by the fear they are made part of the protection racket by emplying them in the war industries. That way they have a stake (a regular job) in this protection racket continuing forever.
I think I blame the average American for the quandary that they are in. They are notoriously alliterate, they find self governance tiresome, they are easily swayed by bread and circuses, and they don't choose leaders, they allow others to choose for them. If there is a tendency in governance, it is toward rule by a strong man. In the age of Pericles, he forced democracy upon the Athenians and they went along through his sheer power of persuasion. The oligarchs, like the fascists, were always waiting in the wings for their chances.
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