Authoritarianism Changes Dreams

An absolute MUST read. So many Americans cannot and will not believe that what happened in Germany could never happen here... Think again, it could, roots have already taken hold. thinkingblue

Excerpt:  The final chapter of “The Third Reich of Dreams” is reserved for those who—in their dreams, at least—resisted the regime (“I dreamed that it was forbidden to dream, but I did anyway”) and those who were Jewish. Beradt writes that such dreams “constitute a separate category, just as the Jews themselves were a separate category under the Nazi regime” and were the focus of “direct, not indirect terrorization.” A Jewish doctor dreams he’s the only physician in the Reich who can cure Hitler. When he offers to donate his services, a blond youth in Hitler’s entourage cries, “What! You crooked Jew—no money?” Later, a Jewish lawyer dreams of travelling through icy Lapland to reach “the last country on earth where Jews are still tolerated”—but a customs official, “rosy as a little marzipan pig,” throws the man’s passport onto the ice. Ahead, unreachable, the promised land shimmers “green in the sun.” It is 1935. Six years later, the mass deportations would begin.
In Germany, “The Third Reich of Dreams” was reviewed as “surprising and gripping evidence” and an “important historical document.” As the psychoanalyst Frances Lang has noted, it’s strange, then, that Beradt’s book has gone “virtually unrecognised” in America. Perhaps it was difficult for such an idiosyncratic history to compete with the more urgent, straightforward accounts that appeared in the nineteen-sixties. (The book is contemporaneous with both Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and Raul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews.”) And yet there is still time for the collection to enter the canon of Third Reich literature, and perhaps for it to gain wider circulation. Lang, who practices in Boston, learned of Beradt’s work via a footnote in Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams” and wrote about it in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In her own practice, she has noticed a widespread uneasiness following Trump’s election. She has asked her friends and colleagues to begin collecting dreams.

 https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-dreams-change-under-authoritarianism

A QUESTION TO ALL TRUMP REPUBLICANS

By Bruce Lindner

So here’s my question for today’s Republicans. In fact, before I proffer it, let’s clear the deck of EVERYTHING else. Forget for the moment about the Mueller investigation. We surrender, Mueller came up short. No collusion, no obstruction, yada yada. Set aside his manic tweeting, the revolving door at the White House, the corruption, the clear evidence that he’s a few marshmallows short of a s’more. Forget even about the Ukraine scandal and the near-certainty that he’s going to be impeached over it.
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Forget about ALL OF THAT!
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And riddle me this:
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Why are you all mum about Trump’s subservience to Vladimir Putin? And don’t you DARE try tell me he isn’t. There’s not a single one amongst you who’s that fucking stupid. He’s been blowing this thug kisses and giving him reach-arounds since the day he oozed into office. He’s met with him not in just conditions of privacy, but in absolute SECRECY. He even confiscated the hand-written notes of an aide who documented one such meeting. He passed classified intelligence directly into the hands of two Russian agents in the Oval Office, yet nary a peep from any of you. In fact, had it not been for the Russian media, the American people would have been none the wiser, since Trump booted our own media out of the room minutes before.
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He’s divided us from our allies seven ways from Sunday, inched us closer to totalitarianism, parroted the fascist policies of none other than Nazi Germany!
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But no condemnation from any of you. Not so much as a discouraging word.
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You Republicans, the very people who like to boast that you’re the “party of national security,” the political descendants of the mantle of Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan, who wrap yourselves in Olde Glory and sing the Star Spangled Banner at your NRA meetings and Trump’s hootenannies... you don’t seem to have ANY problem with him carrying out the agenda of Stalin’s ideological successor.
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Look at that face in this picture.

Take a long, hard look at it. I challenge you to sift through the millions of pictures online of Donald Trump and come up with one remotely similar. That’s not the face of a Commander in Chief. That’s the face of a man who knows how to greet his superior. Or at minimum, the face of a man who wants to impress.
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But enough about him. What’s YOUR problem?

Bruce Lindner writes on Facebook, read more here: https://www.facebook.com/macbruce