Deplorable Language

If you repeat the lie often enough…

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Hank: I feel insulted being addressed as if I were 6 years old.

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Depp: Insulted by libellous language?

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"EVERYONE knows…
they're BAD people… 
I alone can fix it.

Hank: No, being talked down to with overly simple expressions like, “She’s a very bad person,” and “They’re bad people.” Using unsupported sweeping generalizations like, “Everybody knows,” with no proof as to who says it. Or megalomanic pronouncements like, “I alone can fix it.” That’s how some people talk to kids.

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Depp: But it simplifies the message, it appeals to a certain swath of voters.

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Hank: Deplorables? Whoops, sorry. E.M. Forster wrote an essay called “Two Cheers for Democracy”. Forster understood the danger. “Two cheers for democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: There is no occasion to give three.” That’s what Forster said.

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Voice-over

Countless memes comparing Trump with Hitler (sometimes inadvisedly) have been circulating for months. But this comparison is about language use, attitudes, conspiracy theories and extremism. That is how Hitler started out. We are not comparing track records in heinous acts. People who don’t understand the dangers of conspiracy theories and extremism often dismiss non-adherents as educated elites. As if schooling was something to be ashamed of. In this case, a little education, a little knowledge of history, could nip a calamitous consequence in the bud.

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Economist on Trump, Chomsky on Trump: Trump as Hitler

Morning meeting with the editor…

Economist Dec 8, 2015

Journalist: Possibly the most commonly asked question these days is why Trump is getting so much support.

Editor: The Economist published a graph correlating his support rising each time he made an outrageous statement. Media theory that sensation outsells good news?

Journalist: If he became president he would be an international embarrassment.

Editor: But more of a worry is the reason why people are getting behind him.

Journalist: People believe he’s rich so he would fix the economy? Ha. He says things that other politicians are too afraid to say in public? Many of the American public secretly believe the outrageous things he says?

Editor: All of the above. Triumph of emotion over reason.

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Voice-over

Many meticulous predictions of how a Trump presidency would play out are disturbing. Snippets from Noam Chomsky:

"Trump is appealing primarily to less educated white sectors of the population, lower middle class and working class, people who are angry, frustrated, frightened, bitter that they have been cast by the wayside… Hitler’s hostility drove forward a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason."

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Hitler and Churchill: Watercolorists

Villain, Hero, Artistic Argument

Hitler and Churchill discuss art…
Hitler: Make the painting big, make it simple, and eventually it becomes a cultural icon.
Churchill: Painting a picture is like trying to fight a battle.
Hitler: As for the degenerate artists, I forbid them to force their so-called experiences upon the public. If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison. I will purge the nation of them.
Churchill: I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
Hitler: Germany will either be a world power or will not be at all. The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.
Churchill: At one side of the palette there is white, at the other black; and neither is ever used neat.
Hitler: I am an artist, not a politician. I want to end my life as an artist.
Churchill: When I die and go to heaven, I want to spend the first million years painting – so I can get to the bottom of the subject.
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Voice-over
Hitler and Churchill.
One was a villain.
One was a hero.
Together they created the epic of a terrible war.

Some might argue that, just as police and criminals are opposite sides of the same coin, Hitler and Churchill had a lot in common (for a comparison and contrast of the two go here).

But looking at Hitler’s and Churchill’s pronouncements about art, it is clear that Hitler had a totalitarian view of art whereas Churchill, for all his forthright prose, approached art as a challenge in the arena of democracy.
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