{"id":21058,"date":"2019-12-17T06:39:44","date_gmt":"2019-12-17T14:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=21058"},"modified":"2019-12-17T06:39:51","modified_gmt":"2019-12-17T14:39:51","slug":"monday-morning-a-referral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=21058","title":{"rendered":"Monday Morning – a referral"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.<\/em>” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guess who? No, not that one. One of his predecessors, dangerously underestimated in these early words written by Dorothy Thompson<\/a>, one of America\u2019s most urgent, eloquent voices against Nazism. Her description of Hitler, as cited above, and her later flaming resistance against all things fascist led her to be thrown out of Germany in 1934, after having been one of the first successful female correspondents for the American media in Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The woman was a marvel. Self-made, in many respects, suffragists, radio journalist, book author, political activist, she was a public speaker, on air for 15 nights and days straight after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. She became a source of facts and opinions for millions of American women who now had an alternative to what they were regaled with by their husband. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Her 1941 essay in Harpers, <\/em>Who Goes Nazi?<\/em><\/strong>, is one of the most astute psychological assessments from a non-psychologist that I have read. Ever. She basically invents (or describes?) an upper-middle class dinner party with various and diverse guests (notably absent, alas, any person of color, which is probably historically an accurate scenario) and predicts for each person how likely they would join the Nazi movement if arriving on our shores. (It is no co-incidence that one of her three husbands, Nobel prize – winner Sinclair Lewis, wrote one of his famous novels, It can’t happen here, <\/em>during their short marriage.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you took that essay and simply replaced the historically fixed term Nazi<\/em> with a contemporary equivalent of immoral, unethical politician, you might have a perfect fit between the types of people she describes and those threatening an end to democracy who we are currently observing here and many European countries. Think impeachment and removal. Or the absence thereof, as the case may be…. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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December color!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Just as I worried in yesterday’s blog, I worry here: why don’t we learn from history? When it is all laid out for us in perfectly witty, insightful, premonitory writing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It\u2019s fun\u2014a macabre sort of fun\u2014this parlor game of \u201cWho Goes Nazi?\u201d And it simplifies things\u2014asking the question in regard to specific personalities. Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes\u2014you\u2019ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success\u2014they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Believe me, nice people don\u2019t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Who Goes Nazi?<\/a><\/blockquote>