Ignorant, hate-filled autocrats have been spewing the same moronic rhetoric for centuries. They love to “otherize” and blame “they” and “them” for all their problems, real, perceived, and invented. Of course, the universal challenge is that sufficient numbers of people believe these power-hungry con-artists because, well, they share the same hatreds.
You don’t have to read Hannah Arendt or watch the American Masters “Facing Tyranny” profile of her that dropped last night on PBS to understand the dangers and consistent tendencies of propaganda-fueled tyranny, though you should.
Just watch the little-shit Neo-Nazi in the 1963 “He’s Alive” (S4/E4) episode of the masterful Twilight Zone series. Series creator, writer, and host Rod Serling dubbed the central character played by Dennis Hopper “a bush-league fuhrer.” Hopper’s character is schooled in the episode by a major-league fuhrer on how to incite mobs into true, hardened, and vengeful believers in “a free, white America” and in opposition to “vermin from foreign shores.”
Hopper’s conspiratorial character launches into the tirade below at the start of the show, a rant that is as current today as during McCarthyism, World War II and, for that matter, centuries of human existence.
“Examine foreign control and you will note with absolute clarity that the lines lead directly to Palestine! They lead directly to Africa! They lead directly to the Vatican! … There it is! There is conspiracy! … A conspiracy personified by the yellow man, by the black man, and by foreigners who come in and infiltrate into our economic structure. … There will come a morning when these men have taken over your home, they’ve taken over your daughters, and they’ll be sitting right there on your doorstep.”
Of course, when a few people opposed Hopper’s character and even attacked him and his sycophants, the Neo-Nazis branded them “Communists.” So what else is new?
Perhaps among the greatest conceits and laments of our time is to have hoped that we were growing out these dangerous, primitive impulses spread in Serling’s words by “frustrated men, sick men, and angry men.” If only.
Screen shots of Twilight Zone (S4/E4).