The Fascists are not "Coming to America." They are already here!
An essay review of Prequel by Rachel Maddow
The author had many possible vectors to a suitable backstory to tell her own carefully researched story of America's flirtations with fascism.
Just to name those that come immediately to mind. She could have easily included: The birth of the KKK during reconstruction. The original red scare in the failed allied attempt to save the White Russians from defeat by the Reds in 1917.
How about the 1934 attempt to recruit General Smedley Butler to lead a fascist revolution inside America?
Or, Hitler's use of America's eugenics society as a model for both his race hygiene and euthanasia programs?
Then of course we must not forget Hitler's incessant attempts to undermine and divide American society by both direct and indirect means (such as the 1942, submarine saboteurs incident) all in a vain effort to keep us out of the war (already checked off on his Mein Kampf calendar).
And finally, how about American industrial bankers and oil magnates who, for profit, finagled ways to help finance the German war machine in the post WW-I years?
If it were my story (and clearly it is not) I would also have considered adding Vladimir Putin's use of a Hitler-like plan to intervene in our 2016 election, resulting in America's first self-acknowledged authoritarian ruler.
Any one of these could have served as prequel to the story America's future undoubtedly is about to unleash upon us as the chickens come home to roost after an accumulation of our many flirtations with fascism.
However, the author chose none of the above. But instead chose her own iconic example. A brutally honest prototypical one, deeply researched, devoid of polemics, and convincingly prophetic.
The story she tells uncovers and displays the quintessential model of "made in America fascisms to come."
Her example springs uniquely out of American racist soil. It then gets played out in a sprawling American tableau: from its grassroots origins to a court room climax with eighteen indicted co-conspirators in the dock. All finally being tried for a host of seditious and treasonous crimes.
But their trial is scuttled "
Without giving the plot away. Allow me to just say that this book is a tutorial on how actual clandestine fascist cells get up and running in the US. About how different elements of society, from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom, linked through a pervasively venomous racist ideology, are used to divide and undermine our society.
The author's example shows how, by working with a determined enemy deep within America's dark racist undercurrents, fascist efforts can easily succeed at undermining the stability of our society.
I won't spoil the details of what actually happens in the story, but will end this review by hinting to the fact that the story told here has a three-billboard roadside message in its subtext.
The first billboard says, don't trust the "cat and mouse game" played out between fascist-leaning US police authorities (including Hoover's FBI), and the fascist themselves.
Its a con game and a fraud: They are all existential fascists. Both sides are playing for the same team. The "winks and nods" you see are just signals by the good old boys that the fix is in. You can now open the legal loopholes so the culprits can escape all consequential accountability. That is, until Hitler made bolder and bolder efforts to keep the US out of a war he was already making preparations for as early as 1933.
The second billboard has to do with the machinations of a group of rich, effete, high-brow, often talented and renowned elements of American high society, who also were "winking and nodding" at Berlin with treason (or profits) on their minds. Like a revolving door, they were in and out of the Reichstag as part of the parallel above board mutual admiration societal dance with fascism in all its many aspects.
The third and final billboard, diagrams the libertine-like clandestine operations taking place on the ground. Operations that gave every appearance of being an organic grassroots American intramural scrum. But in the end, we see that in fact, and in deed, they were little more than a well-orchestrated top-down German-guided spy operation.
The lead vignette of the story warmed my heart too. Not only because it took place at the University of Arkansas, the black branch of which I attended as an undergraduate, but also because it zeroes-in on the visceral element that was at the center of German attention from the outset: racism, antisemitism and interracial sex.
It turns out that Hitler had sent Heinrich Krieger to that august institution (where Bill and Hillary would later team-teach courses in law) to report back on how it was possible, contrary to the US Constitution (the 14th Amendment in particular), that the US legal system was able to get away with making nonwhites second class citizens?
Essentially what Krieger's memorandum reported back to his "soon to be Fuhrer," was that it is simple: In America, race trumps legality.
In order to protect the white gene pool from dilution, US laws are simply "criminally finessed and fudged" so that they mean anything the judges need them to mean in order to maintain white supremacy in a steady state. Much of that memo ended up in Germany's Nuremberg laws forbidding marriage between aryans and Jews.
This is the vignette that kicks off the author's sprawling story about fascism in America. The little corporal's interest in American miscegenation laws was the only clue the author needed to unravel the puzzle and unwind "the rest of the story." Which is itself a high class forensic analysis of how fascist groups get up and running in America's body politic. Five stars.
