Stepping Stones for Baby Steps

When I was a teenager, and probably for years before that, the various TV stations showed a lot of the World War II era movies.  The vast majority of them were in black and white, and all of them were explicitly anti-Nazi.  Not all of them targetted the same set of evils that German fascism embraced, but taken together, one could get a picture of the reason that fascism was Bad (yes, that is the technical term).

Many years have passed and "conservatives" and corporations have bought up broadcast media to the point where very few "independent" outlets remain, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of the more firmly anti-Nazi movies aren't shown anymore, even at 3 am.

Casablanca is an exception, but I suspect that it's more marketed and promoted as a "Classic," which, don't get me wrong, it is.  But the other movies, most of which reside title-lessly in my fuzzy memory (the one with the guy's hair in his face all the time, the one with Jimmy Stewart, the one with the street musician playing a Mendelssohn tune he identifies as Wagner to the Gestapo) seldom if ever crop up on the screen these days.  You can get '40s music on cable channels these days; you can't get '40s movies (well, TCM; but TCM is scattershot and includes silent films, lots of stuff from the '30s, '50s, '60s, and occasionally the '70s).

This matters because all these flicks posited a resistance and its costs.

And the costs of resistance were not small.  There were reprisals.  For example, Lidice.

So.  We have to continue to push back against fascism because it only gets worse.

• Hannah Arendt:

  The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”

  Includes more links to Hannah Arendt's work.
• Washington Monthly (Nancy LeTourneau):

  This is an interesting development (taken from Variety.com):
  
  The White House has shut down its public comment line some time in the past few weeks, instead telling callers, with an automated message, that they should contact the administration via Facebook Messenger instead. There’s only one problem: Neither the new White House administration nor President Donald Trump seem to currently maintain an active Facebook Messenger account.
  
  Beyond that, Sam Stein summarizes how various federal departments are being told to cease communications (taken from Huffington Post.com).
  
  Multiple federal agencies have told their employees to cease communications with members of Congress and the press, sources have told The Huffington Post.
  
  The freeze has startled aides on the Hill and people at those agencies, who worry that it could abruptly upend current operations and stifle work and discussions that routinely take place between branches of government.
  
  Agencies reporting that they have received such messages from the White House so far include:
  
  the Department of Health and Human Services
  the Environmental Protection Agency
  the Department of Agriculture
  the National Institutes of Health
  the Department of Transportation

  Mmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
  
• [ETA:  More from Crooks and Liars.]
• And the New York Times used the word 'lie' in a headline about Trump.  (Crooks and Liars, with photo of hard copy.)