[New book by US scholar reveals how 6 media barons in US & UK aided Hitler's rise before WW-II]
When i read this paper, i am afraid.
I hope that US democracy is stronger than it appears nowadays.
Andrew Moravcsik, a professor of international affairs and politics at Princeton University, wrote in a review of the book in Foreign Affairs: “They (newspapers) spread a polemic, sensationalistic, and personalist style of news writing that often crossed the line into outright untruth — a power in which they reveled.”
Funny how some things don’t change at all.
The general message is on point, though. Powerful people in America supported what was happening in Europe and Asia at the time. Even during the war the US auto industry produced vehicles for the Wehrmacht.
Nowadays, in France, 90 % of the medias are owned by 30 persons, all owning billions and, as far as I know, all politically near the power and rather conservative.
One of the most important of them is Vincent Bolloré, a true octopus, sending his tentacles everywhere.
When he owns a media, he choose the responsables and controls tightly the political line.
He is buying Hachette, and that will give him the control of the majority of the French publishing companies.
Icing on the cake, he is not a mere liberal conservative, but he actively supports ultra-right. during the last presidential election, he supported Eric Zemour, the ultra-right candidate.
The situation is similar in America. Nearly all media is owned by a few massive corporations.
Yet you don’t see this as a warning sign of things to come? A warning sign of haves and have nots? This is far worse than the idea of socialized medicine. Prospering countries, except the U.S. have socialized medicine and other such programs. They are thriving, while the U.S. is losing their middle class and becoming a third world country. Losing the middle class isn’t a sign of become Socialists. It’s a sign of pure Communism or at least an Oligarchy, where the rich own everything and the general population own nothing. This is why greedy corporation are fighting socialized medicine and alike and attempting to brainwash as many as they can to believe it’s a bad thing. Greedy corporations want to own it all and control people via the government. Right now, it’s greedy corporations running things in our government and it will only get worse if we don’t fight back- through voting and speaking out without violence, of course.
That’s the dirty little secret of WW2…many many regular people, but also “captains” of industry either overtly supported the nazis or in private did, because anti-Semitism was rampant in those days (far far more than today). And afterall, what is a corporation other than a small dictatorship? Unfortunately the lesson learned from WW2 seems to have been, how can we (conservatives) achieve the same goal as Hitler without anyone noticing. And unfortunately there are plenty of people working towards that goal - read Chris Hedges’ American Fascism.
6 Medias barrons supported Hitler - what about America’s wannabe Hitler the Trumpster, the rise of that media monster and his enablers is a relevant segue.
Todays situation in American is an Indication of how well people have forgotten the lessons society thought it learned from WWII.
The situation is similar everywhere corporate greed exists. Yes, that would be globally.
The hostile takeover of governments is their goal - check out Murdoch’s career ambitions
Jul 25, 2022 #foxnews
A dive into the long history of television news in America to understand what the conditions were that made Fox News’s emergence possible. We look at what Fox’s underlying social, cultural, and philosophical toolkit and formula looks like. What it’s predecessors were (TVN, Roger Ailes’ consultancy, Nixon’s adverts), Reagan’s rolling back of FCC regulation and the fairness doctrine, the stories that made Fox (Lewinsky Scandal, 9/11, Obama, The Tea Party, Trump), and their post-rational, postmodern methods. Finally, how we counter the O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson playbook.
#foxnews
0:00 - Fox News
03:39 - A History of TV News 11:50 - Constructing Nixon
22:09 - A Baby Fox & A King Maker
28:24 - Deregulating the Ideologues
37:06 - Fox News: Fair & Balanced
43:04 - 9/11: The Image of Terror & American Patriots
48:59 - Obama, Birther Movement, & The Fox Party
01:00:31 - Postmodern News
01:03:20 - The Fox News Formula
01:14:04 - A Wider Problem
… becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, challenges the Christian Right’s religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society.
Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the movement as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned between 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert it. The movement’s call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools.
The (Christian’s) movement’s yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for a new, frightening America.
American Fascists, which includes interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques, examines the movement’s origins, its driving motivations and its dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power.
The Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does not openly call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the movement is not yet revolutionary. But the ideological architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in place.
The movement has roused its followers to a fever pitch of despair and fury. All it will take, Hedges writes, is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy American democracy. The movement awaits a crisis. At that moment they will reveal themselves for what they truly are – the American heirs to fascism. Hedges issues a potent, impassioned warning. We face an imminent threat. His book reminds us of the dangers liberal, democratic societies face when they tolerate the intolerant.
It a shame the folks who need this book the worst, are the one’s who refuse to invite any new information into their lives. Denial and hatred for critical thinking, and fear of learning, all part and parcel of the insulated shell they’ve had to build around their minds.
I think corporate greed is primarily a Western problem – although it has global consequences.
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Western thinking perhaps, but “Western” Problem.
See the greed among the Saudis, and other oil producing nations, makes one puke,
Japan, talk about mega corporations,
China, one doesn’t create that many billionaires without being fundamental greedy pigs,
Hey, how about them Russians, utterly destroying civilian lives, for what, greed baby greed,
Australians you’d think we should be able to trust, but look at the Murdoch they produced, more greedy pigs, coming at us from all directions.
Enough self flagellation for everyone to get their fair share. 
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Greed is universal but corporate greed is a particular kind of greed unique to the West.
I do agree that in the US it is evident in its most extreme form. And at cost of the nation’s general welfare at that.
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