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Mark R. Stoneman

Historian, editor, and translator for hire (German to English). Longtime resident of Washington, DC, now in Conway, NH, as a caregiver (he/him).

  Fascism

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    📽️ I distracted myself from contemporary authoritarianism with the wonderful 1954 Italian film “Chronicle of Poor Lovers” (Cronache di poveri amanti). It takes place in Florence in the mid 1920s and focuses on the lives of people in the Via del Corno. Everybody seems to know everyone else’s business in this street, and life seems pretty normal, even good, despite material privations. But there are also the whispers and occasional off-key tones of a few fascists. Then comes a brutal beating and later the work of a death squad, with individual residents among the murderers and the murdered. The film’s title references the young couples that are broken up and formed in the course of this adversity.

    Film screen capture of esidents of the street looking out of second- and third-floor windows to hear a very loud argument in one of the other rooms.

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    📽️ “The Murderers Are Among Us” (Die Mörder sind unter uns), dir. Wolfgang Staudte (DEFA, 1946), is streaming on Arte. Filmed in the rubble of early postwar Berlin, it represents an important attempt to come to terms with Germany’s immediate past and to see a way through the present.

    Film still: The faces of actors Hildegard Knef and Wilhelm Borchert looking outside through the broken glass of the apartment they share in the film.

    Hildegard Knef and Wilhelm Borchert

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    📽️ Am watching “So Ends Our Night,” dir. John Cromwell (United Artists, 1941), a “story of people without passports” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1939 novel Flotsam.

    A great line early on spoken by an Austrian police officer sending two stateless Germans across the border to Czechoslovakia in 1937:

    You refugees! It’s not like handling a first-class criminal. You’re detracting from the dignity of my profession.

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    Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

    – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 19.

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    Cover of latest Stern magazine shows Trump and Putin bowing to each other over the corps of Ukraine. German text is discussed in main post.

    The title of this cover from a prominent German news weekly borrows from a famous Ronald Reagan quote: “Axis of Evil” (Die Achse der Bösen). Only this time a Republican president is casting the United States on the side of evil. The remaining text points to the “danger of war in Europe” and asks “what Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine means for us."1 The cover also mentions a statement by Joschka Fischer in an interview: “Germany needs conscription again."2

    POSTSCRIPT: See comments for connection to 1939

    1. “Us” could refer to Germany, given the magazine, but note the European flag that the two bowing men are standing on—with the corpse of Ukraine laid out face down between them. If the corpse is hyperbole, the betrayal and its geopolitical consequences are very real, ↩︎

    2. Fischer was a politician in the Greens who served as Germany’s popular foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005. ↩︎

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    Italian fascist propaganda poster depicting Churchill and Roosevelt, both holding pistols, over a city in ruins and dead children, with a pirate flag in the background. A caption at the bottom reads 'Su loro ricade la colpa!'(On them rests the blame!)

    This Italian fascist poster prefigures the disgusting rhetoric of Putin and Trump: “On them rests the blame!” by Gino Boccasile, ca. 1942–45.

    Via David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4bp0064p.

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    Poster encouraging purchase of war stamps and bonds to support the war effort, showing faces of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito.

    “Stamp ‘em out! Buy U.S. stamps and bonds.” Poster by Thomas A. Byrne. WPA War Services of La., circa 1941–43.

    Via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518290/.

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    📽️ Watched “Il conformista” [The Conformist], dir. Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1970). The first half stitches together vignettes to make the character who joined the secret police. Then we see him on a job in interwar France. The denouement comes after Mussolini’s dismissal is announced on the radio.

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    📽️ Watched “‘Pimpernel’ Smith,” dir. Leslie Howard (British National Films, 1941), which imagines The Scarlet Pimpernel set in Germany in 1939.

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    📽️ Watched an antifascist drama set in the time before the United States was at war with Germany, “Watch on the Rhine,” dir. Herman Shumlin (USA, 1943). Despite the title, it takes place around the U.S. capitol, except for an initial border crossing from Mexico and a train to Washington.

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    📽️ I rewatched “Amsterdam,” dir. David Russell (New Regency, 2022) because machinations in and around the current administration give the story fresh relevance. Set in 1933, with flashbacks to the World War and postwar, there is cruelty, but also defiance, friendship, love, music, and dance.

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    Finished reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020). Highly recommended. Good antidote to feelings of confusion and helplessness in these troubled times.📚

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    Poster shows a cartoon of Hitler and Mussolini tacking together a broken puppet representing the axis; the puppet has a large red swastika on its chest.

    Poster: Cartoon of the German and Italian dictators trying to cobble together what was left of their obscene project in 1945.

    Source: Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2015646607.

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    Propaganda poster illustrating falling bombs from a plane bearing swastikas above a picture of a frightened mother and child. Background is pink. Spanish text is red. the bombs, plane, mother, and child are in varying shades of black. Spanish text: '¡Acusamos de asesinos a los facciosos! Niños y mujeres caen inocentes. Hombres libres, repudiad a todos los que apoyen en la retaguardia al fascismo. He aqui las victimas.'

    Poster from the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936–39. The main text reads, “We charge the rebels as assassins! Innocent children and women die. Free men, repudiate all those who support fascism in the rearguard.” The text, bottom right, with the arrow pointing at the mother and child reads, “Here are the victims.” Note, too, the black and red triangle of the Anarchists in the lower right-hand corner.

    Source of image and main text translation: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5188576r. This page also offers historical context and analysis.

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    A book that manages to historicize a century of strongman regimes in an accessible and readable way while maintaining intellectual and scholarly rigor is a helluva thing. If you haven’t yet read Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020), I highly recommend it.

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    Strongman regimes … turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture, or sexual assault.…

    Rulers who come into office with a criminal record … have a head start. They know that making the government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the ‘contagion effect.’ So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals, and murderers available for service.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 7.

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    Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

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    Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

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    At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

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    Molly White, “Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia,” www.citationneeded.news…

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    “Die Welt am Sonntag veröffentlicht einen Gastbeitrag, in dem Techmilliardär Elon Musk für die AfD wirbt. Mitarbeitende der Redaktion sind empört. Meinungschefin Eva Marie Kogel reicht ihre Kündigung ein.” www.spiegel.de…

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    Finally started reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020).

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