News Unfit to Print

I find it funny that you have to work hard to find real news in the major media of the United States. You don't get facts like the following printed anywhere near the front page or on major TV media:

How should America's university presidents respond to the savagery in Iran today?

The incarcerated student protesters forced to lick toilet bowls. The imprisoned dissidents beaten to death in holding pens, some with their fingernails torn out. The many murdered protesters, including Neda Agha-Soltan, the now-iconic young philosophy student shot in cold blood. The banning of foreign and domestic journalists from honest coverage or even access to news events. The arrest of professors and shuttering of academic institutions.

... Stephen H. Norwood's just-published, brilliantly researched, utterly thorough and morally upsetting The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press) shows how they got it wrong in the 1930s. A chilling chronicle of pro-Nazi enthusiasm, shabby indifference, and amoral tolerance toward Hitler in elite American academe of the 1930s, this book should exert direct impact in this season of cracking heads and bones in Tehran. It relentlessly names names, depositing fact after sordid fact before the reader in a way that leaves its implications for then and today overwhelming.

... At a conference last year about Columbia University's ties to Nazi Germany, he detailed how its longtime president, Nicholas Murray Butler, invited the Nazi ambassador Hans Luther to campus in 1933, remained friendly with Nazi-run German universities into the mid-30s, and punished Columbia faculty members and students who protested.

... In 1936, Conant dispatched a delegate to help celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Nazified University of Heidelberg, despite its bonfire of "un-German" books in 1933. Conant allowed the German consul in Boston to place a laurel wreath, swastika affixed, in one of Harvard's memorial chapels. Conant continued to maintain until Kristallnacht, Norwood writes, that Nazi universities remained part of the "learned world" and should be treated politely. In the 1950s, Conant, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, drew repeated denunciations from Congressional officials for his efforts to free Nazi war criminals, including some of the most bestial.

This article "The Shame of Academe and Fascism, Then and Now" by Carlin Romano, literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years, teacher at the University of Pennsylvania of philosophy and media theory, lays it all out in black and white, no holds barred. Where can you find this kind of "hard hitting" journalism? Try finding a copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yes, a free press lives, but in the nooks and crannies. Putting cold facts in a journal that ensures that 98% of the American public will never see it means that the US has a "free press" but those who own the media ensure that nobody will ever sees this kind of "news".

I watch the clown show in the US where hecklers and maniacs attack those politicians who have gone back to their local constituencies to hold meetings on health care. I think of the staged "outrage" of Nazis in the early 1930s that destroyed democracy in Germany and I wonder. Can it happen again? I don't see any hard hitting media in the US pointing out the evil manipulation in these staged "spontaneous" demonstrations. Yeah, right, just like the Nazis had spontaneous demonstrations.

The only thing I'm sure of is that the Republican Party seems determined to recreate the brownshirts and tear down democracy in the name of "nationalism" and "conservatism" and "family values". I see dangerously idiotic political right that would rather destroy everything that give up its stranglehold on politics.

The capitalist class, the media, the professionals, the solid middle class in Germany all allowed manipulation by Hitler because they were terrified of "socialists". Well... in the 65 years of "socialist" rule since 1945, Germany seems pretty healthy and properous. But the 14 years of Nazi power destroyed Europe and killed tens of millions. What were these people thinking? What are the idiotic mullahs in Iran thinking? What are the American people thinking?