General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I spend a lot of time in the company of Trumpers. I've learned something important. [View all]DFW
(54,473 posts)I had occasion to be in East Berlin several times when it was still a Soviet colony. Perfectly normal people, even college students, as I was the first time I was there, were out there saying that they lived in a socialist paradise, and that we in the west were their ideological enemies. They needed the Berlin Wall as protection, etc. etc. They were fascinated to meet with an American student who spoke German, but spouted the party line word for word. They listened only to their own media, and there was just no other truth for them. They, as intelligent regime supporters were doing fine, and implied that anyone who wasn't had only themselves to blame. On the way back to West Berlin, over the years, starting with my first visit as a college student, I was taken aside by the East Germans and interrogated for an hour or more in a windowless room where I was the only one without a gun, a uniform or the right to stand up. Heil Honecker.
Sound familiar?
Fox "News" is only the radical right's version of an old tactic: control the media, control their minds. They can be friendly. They can be intelligent. So can a trained dog. The dog will still do what he has been trained to do. So will the indoctrinated humans. They may be your friendly co-workers today. They nonetheless will participate in your firing squad if Fox "News" tells them it's the right thing to do.