Some day, most likely not too terribly far into the future, children are going to look back at our age and wonder why no one sounded the alarm.
“You had free elections back then, or so I hear,” they’ll say. “Why was nothing said while the country was being hijacked by a minority through voter suppression, election nullification, gerrymandering, court packing, and the filibuster?”
“Why, when all the signs were there….the signs that have always defined it...the rampant nationalism, the fetishization of the military, the call for a return to an imaginary time when things were supposedly great, the demonization of minorities, the co-opting of religion, the destruction of labor rights, the corporatism, the corruption, the flagrant white nationalism, the propaganda…..why did they stay silent?”
“I’ve heard it whispered that you had a free press back then,” they’ll cry. ”Why didn’t they call it what it was?”
FASCISM
The “F- word” that the news media dare not speak. Broadcasters and newspapers, people who call themselves journalists, would sooner say “Fuck” on the air or in their papers than “Fascism.”
And it’s not that they’re stupid. They know damned well that’s what’s going on. They see it in Hungary. They see it in Great Britain. They see it in the Philippines and in Brazil and in India. Three quarters of a century after millions died to end it; after seventy-five years of “never again,” it is instead ascendant.
And when they speak of it in those other countries, they’ll at least occasionally use the “A-word” Authoritarianism. But they won’t even say that when reporting on what’s happening in America.
They won’t say it because they’re cowards. Cowards whose business model is dependent upon the very corporations benefitting from this fascism.
Cowards whose bosses, and perhaps even themselves, benefit personally from it. Cowards who hide behind phony bothsiderism lest they be challenged for actually reporting the truth.
Craven sycophants who won’t do anything that might upset their book deal. Greedy, money-grubbing whores masquerading as journalists, who don’t want to report on anything more labor intensive or upsetting than another young, pretty White woman gone missing.
And history….the type of history that’s not written in history books because those will be written by the fascist victors...but oral history, the type fascists have never been able to stamp out...will damn them all to Hell.