Trump stoking bigotry and calling journalists ‘enemies of the people’ is reminiscent of Hitler. It’s hard to imagine – until it isn’t
A young British journalist, he’d worked as a correspondent for The Times in that city in the 1920s before transferring to New York and Washington DC. Returning to Germany in July 1932, he saw “storm Troopers slashing and smashing up and down the Kurfürstendamm”, and war propaganda: “huge exhibitions of ‘the Front’, soldier figures standing in a real-life size trench playing with a dummy machine gun”, he wrote.
Until it wasn’t hard. As Cockburn wrote: “Hitler. He came to power. I was high on the Nazi blacklist. I fled to Vienna.”Cockburn’s story is retold in a forthcoming book by his son, journalist Patrick Cockburn, due out this fall from Verso. It’s a timely intervention, inviting us to consider how different what Claud called the “Devil’s Decade”, is from our own.
Homogenous, even in an age of media proliferation, the most influential media spent June in lock-step, disparaging one elderly candidate’s fitness for office after a stumbling performance in a debate. This August that same media devoted precious time to carefully “fact-checking” the drivel of the other elderly candidate after an entirely unhinged press conference. The same candidate has promised to suspend the constitution and be a dictator “on day one”.
Quitting the Times to found the Week, a newsletter that became famous for its scoops and takedowns of those in power, Claud’s work was not risk-free. His opposition to fascism and the complicity of western democracies in enabling its rise made him a target for enraged rulers and rightwingers in the UK and overseas. Too impecunious to sue, the Week was often threatened and finally banned, in January 1941.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Why is Labor trying to reform the RBA and why is Peter Dutton opposing the changes?The Coalition has indicated it won’t support the reforms, which it says could let Labor allies take control of interest rates
Read more »
Why Trump keeps talking about fictional serial killer Hannibal LecterThe former president, described as a “crypt-keeper for the 1980s”, has mentioned Lecter or The Silence of the Lambs in speeches 20 times since November 2022.
Read more »
Why Trump keeps talking about fictional serial killer Hannibal LecterThe former president, described as a “crypt-keeper for the 1980s”, has mentioned Lecter or The Silence of the Lambs in speeches 20 times since November 2022.
Read more »
Why Trump keeps talking about fictional serial killer Hannibal LecterThe former president, described as a “crypt-keeper for the 1980s”, has mentioned Lecter or The Silence of the Lambs in speeches 20 times since November 2022.
Read more »
The four reasons why Kamala still hasn’t figured out Trump’s basic appealIn four key ways, the Democrats, after nearly a decade, still haven’t figured out some of the basics of Donald Trump’s appeal – most notably when it comes to his connection with the very voters they need to court in key battleground states.
Read more »
‘Two bowls of poison’: Why China dreads both Trump and HarrisThe future of the US relationship with Beijing has been a backseat issue in the presidential campaign, but neither result bodes well for Xi Jinping.
Read more »