I just came across the term Weimarization in Michelle Goldberg's interview [S$] with Chris Hedges:
There has been a kind of Weimarization of the American working class …
From the context of the article -- Hedges has a thesis that the leaders of the Christian Right are equivalent to fascists -- and my weak grasp of history leavened with a quick Googling, I understood Hedges to mean a condition where a class of people feels uneasy about life, and is consequently susceptible to manipulation, especially through appeals to fear, by another group who seeks power.
Google only returns about 300 hits for this term, as of post time. How do you interpret the term?
The interview is well worth reading, by the way. My in-line characterization of Hedges's thesis should not be taken to mean that he thinks the flocks of the churches are all fascists, but he does have a pretty dim view of some of the pastors. He has considerable credibility, having graduated from divinity school before becoming a reporter, and his beat has included many of the world's most troubled spots over the past couple of decades.
Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for the link.
Update: There is a bio of Hedges and a list of some of his recent articles on Truthdig. This one builds on the theme of Salon interview, focusing on the military. Pretty scary.
2 comments:
Look up the Weimar youth movement which was in existence in Germany in the early part of the 20th c. It can be considered a utopian movement which turned its back on society at large and you can see the seeds many of youth movements including such disparate elements as the Boy Scouts and Ravers in that utopic notion. Many turned to facsism and saw light in the initial phase of the Nazi party. A great many were disillusioned hence their capability to be pulled towards facism as a quick fix to a much deeper problem.
re Anonymous in 2007 -- reflects the compulsion to somehow blame even pre-Hitler activities on Hitler and Nazis. A comes before B. Weimar came before Nazism. Weimar was a predominantly Jewish construct -- see here:
http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%207794.pdf
"It was in political and public life, however, that the
Jewish role was most prominent. Jews played an important role in the first
cabinet formed after the 1918 revolution (Hugo Hasse and Otto Landesberg),
the Weimar Constitution was drafted by a Jew (Hugo Pruess), and Jews were
conspicuously present in the abortive attempts to create radical revolutionary
regimes, especially in Bavaria. The revolutionary government in Munich was
headed by a Jewish intellectual, Kurt Eisner, and after his assassination, two
other Jewish leaders, Gustav Landauer and Eugen Levine, assumed positions
of major influence in the “Raterepublik” (“Soviet” Republic”).
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