On CNN's Questionable Decision

Trump's Town Hall moment

I wrote this article before the CNN interview; the photo was added later.

Today, it is 90 years ago that students in Berlin burned thousands of books while singing Nazi songs and listening to a speech by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. It is a moment that the world had been warned of a century earlier by the poet Heinrich Heine when he wrote: Where one burns books, one will soon burn people". And sadly, as we all remember, especially in the month when we remember the end of the European part of the Second World War horrors, that's precisely what the Nazis did.

If you had asked me ten years ago if fascism would revive in the Western world, I would probably have said something along the lines of the need to keep the lessons of history alive but that I didn't think it would be likely that I would see fascism reviving as a popular movement in my lifetime.

I was wrong.

More effective than burning books is banning them, and there is a surge of book bans in the United States, where Florida and Texas seem to be competing for the top spots on the list of most banned books. Several laws have greatly expanded Florida's possibilities to ban books, especially those covering race, gender, or sexual orientation. One of these laws in Governor DeSantis's state, the Stop WOKE Act, prohibits instruction that could make students feel guilty or responsible for the past actions of other members of their race. Another one of those new laws prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in several grades.

Fascism has a habit of slowly becoming acceptable in democratic societies. It creeps inside a system in many disguises and changes it from the inside step by step. Sometimes it tries to violently and publicly take over the government. Still, after failed Bierkeller Putches or 6th of January attempts, it retreats underground, organizes itself better for the next move, grows its organization, finances, and media influence, and above all, aims to present itself as part of the normal democratic process. Who remembers Hitler in morning dress, bowing in deference to a heavily decorated Von Hindenburg in 1933. Briefly, he looked like a typical German chancellor. The photo was popular in the international press; it showed the reassuring image the fascists needed and the image that the world hoped for.

Tonight CNN will do a prime-time Town Hall meeting with Donald Trump. This is a hall in an imaginary town where everyone is either Republican or a GOP-leaning independent. We've seen it time and time again: fascism creeps into society, disguised as normal and then recognized as normal. We should know better. I recently wrote about that in this article.

As a media organization, CNN has a responsibility to avoid normalizing a power-hungry mob leader in front of an audience filled with supporters of his cult. This is the man who tried to overturn free, fair, and democratic elections to stay in power, has shown not to shy away from violence, and sent his mob to destroy democracy. So many dictators got a second chance, from Hitler's Bierkeller Putch to Lenin fleeing to Finland and Fidel Castro's failed first attempt to take over Cuba. Creating a unique spectacle of Trump with a supportive crowd on prime-time television is cheap entertainment. It falls short of any standard that CNN is supposed to follow for proper journalism.

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Notes:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/cnn-trump-town-hall-abomination-michael-fanone-1234732510/

https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/simon-wiesenthal-center-annual-volume-2/annual-2-chapter-5.html