It Can’t Happen Here

Considering recent events, It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, is a fictional novel I suddenly recall from my high school days.  I chose it to read from among several suggested books during my senior year humanities class.  Let’s see.., without dating myself too much, that was about the 1970’s, or so. 

Published in 1935, “it is a cautionary tale about the rise of fascism in the United States. During the presidential election of 1936, Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, observes with dismay that many of the people he knows support the candidacy of a fascist, Berzelius Windrip. When Windrip wins the election, he forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court, and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state. Jessup opposes him, is captured, and escapes to Canada.” — The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

My recollection is somewhat blurred by the years, but looking back, I find that the book was eerily prescient.  Written well before the rest of the world knew the details about Hitler and Mussolini, it fairly outlined the classic play book version of a fascist takeover.  Interestingly, although the story is meant as satire and fraught with bloated caricatures, the similarities to today are striking. 

The author chooses as a protagonist, Jessup, who is described as a mild mannered Vermont Republican – a stereotypical Yankee.  Jessup, among others, sees through the populist hype of Democrat, Windrip.  Nevertheless, he and the conservative opposition are powerless to counter the magic of Windrip’s demagoguery…

 “All the while, Walt Trowbridge, possible Republican candidate for President, suffering from the deficiency of being honest and disinclined to promise that he could work miracles, was insisting that we live in the United States of America and not on a golden highway to Utopia.“

Yes We Can!

Predictably, Windrip wins popular support and within a matter of months accomplishes what the succession of past and current, real life, CFR run, bankster contolled, tag team administrations are still in the process of doing.  He destroys our Constitution and institutes a police state.

Funny.., the things you remember.  Many books have influenced my thinking through the years and, like many, I have undergone a great deal of political evolution.  Concepts and theory interacting with personal experience have led to a perception of things quite different from that found in standard high school civics texts.  But curiously, many concepts put forward in Lewis’ story have stuck with me.  And one, in particular, perhaps unbeknownst to me, has been an a priori driving factor throughout my career in grassroots organizing.

Having to go underground to escape Windrip’s intelligence network, Doremus Jessup briefly finds himself as part of a loose coalition of freedom fighters composed of Young Republicans and The Young Communist League.  Outwardly far-fetched and certainly a source for situational comedy, this coalition, nevertheless, had its own logic.  Lewis understood that both groups, theoretically,were inherently antifascist, i.e., ideologically incapable of cooperating with any government/monopoly capitalist collusion.  Hence, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, and so forth. 

Of course, things have changed since Lewis’ time.  Today’s GOP Neocons hardly reflect the limited government, non interventionist, and proconstitution values of  historical ‘purist’ GOP ideology.  Ironically, the Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty, castigated as ‘radicals’ by the present day GOP leadership, is the proper heir to GOP founding principles.  As for communists and statist socialists, a maturation of political consciousness and scholarship have revealed them as the manufactured dialectical dance partner of monopoly capitalists in a false paradigm choreographed by a single financial power elite.  They are exposed as no real option to fascism.  They merely represent another form of tyranny and are alternate stand-in front men serving the same moneyed interests.

Regardless, the idea of alliances based on enlightened self interest remains sound.  Further, I truly believe in the power of reason over mindset.  Most people still have the capacity for intellectual honesty.  Only the most inveterate ideologues and committed operatives are immune against challenges to core beliefs.  It is within these alliances that fertile ground exists with the capability to sprout new ideologies.  They often serve as crucibles birthing new politics as theory and action collide.

Case in point: the 911 Truth Movement.  Comprised of Libertarians, Green Party socialists, and everything in between, Truthers have pressed to reopen a sincere investigation and to expose the government cover up of the events of that day.  Here is a group that has folks sitting in the same meeting that wouldn’t normally associate on a political level.  Libertarians don’t go to single payer health care rallies.  Socialists and progressives don’t attend Tea Parties.

911 Truth is, however, uniquely positioned to lead the way past the phony Left/Right paradigm and focus on The New World Order as the real enemy of freedom and democracy.  Truthers understand that neither Democrats or Republicans have a monopoly on engineering false flag events.  They understand that both Left and Right are capable of oppression and slavery.  They hold the key to unlocking a new paradigm.  The elite have imprisoned us in a matrix of false political reality.  911 Truth is the doorway out.