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The Sarasota Herald Tribune published the following OpEd, Speech offers an ominous survey of authoritarian, fascist tactics by Florida Veterans for Common Sense, member, Pete Tannen.
By Pete Tannen
If you couldn’t get into the Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota on Veterans Day to hear Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s extraordinary speech, we apologize. The demand for seats was overwhelming and the church hall was quickly filled with spectators.
But here are some key points that Ben-Ghiat, a renowned American scholar on fascism and authoritarianism, made about strongmen and the common playbook they use to gain and maintain power. It is a playbook that includes these steps:
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, noted scholar on authoritarianism and a professor of history and Italian Studies at New York University, was the featured speaker at a Nov. 11 forum held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota. The forum was co-sponsored by Florida Veterans for Common Sense.
- Start out by telling people how badly the country is being run, how totally corrupt the government is and how crooked the elections are.
(Do you remember when former President Donald Trump said our government in Washington was so terrible that he needed to ‘drain the swamp’? Well, Trump was simply parroting a slogan that Benito Mussolini used when he formed the Italian Fascist Party in 1919.)
- Once you get people to believe that life in the country is awful and that government is their enemy, you must convince them that you – and only you – can solve the mess.
(You should also make clear, however, you need total control of the government to fix everything –and that you must be able to use violence when necessary.)
(Mussolini, for example said his opponents were on a ‘witch hunt.’)
Sound familiar? These are the ploys fascists and strongmen all over the world still use to grab power.
They’re all reading from the same scripts. They’re all spouting the same outright lies. They’re all doing the same rewriting of history. They’re all promoting the same religious intolerance. They’re all embracing the same desire to ban books and censor and muzzle the media.
Strongmen nationalize and plunder businesses at will; they appoint family members and friends to control major companies and essentially tell the CEOs how to operate. In the end, it becomes a total nightmare for the corporate world.
Could it happen here? Stay tuned.
In the meantime, you can help stop the extremists here in Florida by informing yourself and your friends about the threat, and by supporting organizations that speak out to protect our democracy.
Pete Tannen is a Sarasota writer and a member of Florida Veterans for Common Sense, which co-sponsored Ben-Ghiat’s Nov. 11 talk.
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