Fascism Has Crept Into What’s Left of the Republican Mind

When I first began learning about WWII, the first book I read was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Until then, it was the biggest book I had tried to read. I was 13 or 14 when I started and it took me about a month to read it coupled with my other school work. WWII is the only thing my dad has read about for 50 years. I inherited his peculiar memory although mine is stretches to other fields. Dad could tell you which U boat was where, when it sunk, who was the skipper, what ships it had sunk and how many crew were aboard when it sank.

After I read the most terrifying book I have ever read, Eyewitness Auschwitz, I asked him how so many people fell for Hitler’s spell? He went to the bookshelf and handed me a copy of Orwell’s 1984. I still remember reading it with a flashlight under my covers because I would read into the wee hours on any school night if something had my attention.

“War is peace.”

“Freedom is slavery.”

“Ignorance is strength.”

I kind of understood how it happened then but nothing teaches like experience.

The other day when Simon & Schuster cancelled the book deal they had with Josh Hawley, he lamented in a tweet that they had stifled his free speech and that what they had done was ‘Orwellian.’