"May this day be the change point. Look around you; you are not alone. You are Americans!"—Sarah Palin
(both at Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at Washington DC on Martin Luther King Day, August 27th)
"No more politics as usual. The cause is restoring America."—Christine O'Donnell today, in her victory speech as the newest Tea Party candidate to win a primary
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Ask not where great speeches and rally cries come from. They never die. Great speakers, opportunists and propagandists know that, as they plumb the depths of history for the best lines, the best hooks. And so it is today.Many of the speeches of Tea Party candidates and Glenn Beck whose audience grows the more he follows it, could be written by one of the greatest speech writers of all time. There are so many similarities that here's the template, now handy for those future leaders who don't know the original speech. Around the world, people and parties that are essentially reactionary but call themselves "conservative" find these words inspiring.
A "Restoring Honor" template
The original "The storm is coming" speech, translated into English by Randall Bytwerk.
an excerpt:– as Glenn Beck said at the rally, "Something beyond imagination is happening."
" …The people rise up, the storm is coming! The day of freedom and prosperity is coming! The time of shame and disgrace is nearly over. The people have awakened! We have risen against oppression, have joined in an army of revenge. The good old days of party bigwigs are over. A new nation is coming …"
What's the difference between poison and a demagogue?
Words.
Some of the saffron nationalists I know in India would welcome the Goebbels parallel. Perhaps some of the Tea Party types secretly do, too.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment! This is great that you brought up India, a country that, given the population and social stresses, is remarkably tolerant and sane. These columns might interest people.
ReplyDeleteRewriting Indian History> by Rukun Advani, in The Hindu, and Understanding Hindutva by Averthanus L D’Souza, on the South Asian Citizens Web. The latter article especially, parallels Tea Party and other "socially conservative" movements and political opportunists, particularly when it comes to religious claim and religious intolerance. In Australia this claim is being made not by a fringe, but by the elite of our opposition "Liberal" party (whose conservative-Catholic leader calls Australia a Christian country), which has narrowly missed becoming government now that the Labor party is a minority government in a shaky coalition with independents. In neither the US nor Australia, nor any other Western nation that this is happening, has the relationship between God-claiming demagogues and fascism been as discussed as it is and has been for at least ten years, in India.