Good Morning. I am missing a place where I can dump my thoughts. And I don't remember anymore, if Morning Open Threads are scheduled on Sundays. So, foregive me if I allowed myself to make me one. I just wanted to point you to an article I thought was pretty good. It's an article of the German weekly News Paper "Die Zeit" on their online website www.diezeit.de.

I have to admit that I think googling for news.google.de that we get pretty much the same melange of trash and some better articles as we get on news.google.us. There is nothing that you can't read in German about what happens in the US. So, this article I will point to, is an example that everything is interconnected and just because I found it on the German website of "Die Zeit" doesn't mean it's a German article.

The author is Fred Turner.

FRED TURNER
is Professor of Communication at the University of Stanford. His most recent publication The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.

So, I guess that's an American author and the article was originally written in English. I found the German version translated by Matthias Schulz:
Donald Trump: Ein zeitgemaesser Faschist and the google translated English version (which needs to be heavily edited to make sense):
Donald Trump - A Contemporary Fascist
Medial modern, politically extreme right: the toxic cocktail of Donald Trump - By Fred Turner

I liked this article, because it compares how the good old Europeam fascists of the 20th century spread propaganda to the ways a contemporary fascist like Trump uses social media to do the same.

That should give you a taste:

At first glance, Donald Trump as an authoritarian, but not as a fascist . He does not have stormtroopers, does not hold mass meetings with torchlight, and he also does not use any symbols from ancient Rome. The masses, he attracts run crisscross through the stages and wearing brightly colored T-shirts. So far Trumps followers have committed none of the calculated acts of violence that were typical of the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century. And Trump has not even presented a coherent political program, quite the contrary: He jumps back and forth between talk show and Twitter feed , caresses his friends attacked his opponents, sometimes furious, sometimes admiringly (mostly for himself).

It's still tempting to dismiss Donald Trump as brutish Narcissus, as a businessman, which it has accidentally landed in the political arena. But while his popularity is growing again and it dangerously approaches the White House, it is important to remember that Trump is actually a fascist , and one that fits perfectly in the era of social media.

There are just Trumps individualism and his claim to be a unique person, coupled with the ability to communicate through individualized media such as Twitter with his followers, which account for its popularity. Trump has the racist and xenophobic worldview of fascism and its fixation on charismatic leaders connected with the ideals and medial mechanisms of American individualism. So a thoroughly American form of authoritarianism has developed that still might prove itself as contagious.

The article goes on to describe how few american journalists have tried to search for how Trumps ideas are rooted in the fascism of the 20th century and why it is not much known in the US. A historical view back of how close Americans came to Authoritarianism starting with the 1930ies follows and describes propaganda efforts in the US via photo exhibitions, psychedelia and finally twitter.

Leading American intellectuals were of the view that Hitler came to power mosly because he had used the possibilities of modern mass media to reach the soul of the people. All these media - film, newspaper, radio - are applied to one-way communication, in which one voice is speaking to many, and in Germany this one voice the was voice of Hitler. If America's leadership really wants to go against the Axis powers, the thinking goes, that they have to use new forms of propaganda which doesn't aim at the masses, but at individuals, but individuals united as Americans.

The author goes on to describe the psychedelia and the introduction of the laptop as tool for propaganda.

Then in the 1960s the museum exhibits from the Second World War were used as a model for multimedia projects of hippie culture, especially in the Greater San Francisco: projections of images, colors and sounds should liberate the viewers. Such psychedelia brought figures such as the Apple founder Steve Jobs to propagate the laptop as a tool of personal empowerment and the Internet as a system that would lead to a more democratic America. Even today social networks such as Craigslist, Facebook and Twitter from the Greater San Francisco raise the same claim.

and

Like Hitler and Mussolini Trump celebrates the myth of greatness.
This is the historical irony of the candidacy of Donald Trump: He has used the media technologies that have been developed to combat during WWII totalitarianism and to strengthen individualism, and transformed them into tools to promote those fascist ideals against which the United States once fought.

The author goes on to describe some twitters from Trump and Clinton and comes to the conclusion that

For traditional media Trumps tweets were the purest stimulants. He now dominates the television so much that one might think that a propaganda minister for the media was conducting the play in the background. But there is nothing of that sort. Trump has only his television compatible personality, and thanks to the social media, he has the opportunity to present himself as a star in an endless American Drama of personal struggle and for professional success. By playing the main role in this story, it seems to prove that he is a man of action, a man who can reach for the Americans what they themselves can not achieve.

There have been such men in earlier times. Only a few were as successful as Trump, to use the forces of individualism, which form the basis of democracy, for their own, antidemocratic purposes. Trump is a media figure - and a fascist - of our times. His rise to the Republican presidential candidates shows that a charismatic leader, in the age of social media, can build up an apparently personal and direct relationship to millions of people. In short: a fascist has not to use the power of weapons at gunpoint to come to power.

I liked this article because it made me think in how far our own use of social media is part of the propaganda that brings fascists to power. I guess I better keep my head down. I had to say that though, because I can't stop my mind from thinking about it.

Ok. That's all I wanted to say. This is an Open Thread, so talk about whatever comes to your mind.

Enjoy your Sunday, in my corner of the woods, it's getting a bit cooler. Yeah!! And I am going out to enjoy a fresh breeze. Talk to you later, may be ...