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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Big Menace of the Big Brother-President, 6 May 2007
Lee Roscoe has recently (© 2005) adapted Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here to the stage. This play is a militant agitprop work and is available to people who want to produce it for an audience in a militant perspective to fight against the present erring developments of Bush's presidency and to advocate the necessity to impeach him and his vice-president as the last defense against their systematic attack on the Constitution, hence the American people and the World's population. This enables us to rediscover the plot imagined by Sinclair Lewis in the mid 30s who was afraid of the possibility for a populist candidate to become President of the US and lead the country to some kind of fascist dictatorship. Apparently this fear is being revived in the world, or rather in some countries by the war on terror launched by President Bush and that has brought some fairly frightening developments against basic civil rights: the possibility for the police to know what you borrow or check in and out in public libraries and the restriction under which the librarian is not to tell you about it; the negation of habeas corpus for a whole set of people who have been imprisoned in Guantanamo for years without any basic constitutional or plainly universally recognized rights like the possibility to communicate with the outside world, the right to have a lawyer, the right to be informed about the charges that are leveled at them, the right to be tried in a normal court in due time and following proper procedures, etc (the procedure is so unbelievably wrong that quite a few of these prisoners have been released without any charges after several years of detention amounting to so many years of suffering, social cultural or professional damage, and even psychological torturing, and no damages, compensation or reparation when released); and of course the normal reaction of some American people who believed what they were told and started leveling harsh words at opponents and even at times taking harsh measures against opponents. The text of this play is being circulated on the Internet. The same mindset is developing in other countries, like for instance in France where some consider that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy for instance is leading to the same kind of mechanism that will necessarily lead to a police state if not fascism.
The process imagined by Sinclair Lewis is simple: a populist elected candidate and the defense of the absolute freedom of all markets to liberate the creative energy of capitalism and get us out of all possible crises. This will lead to work camps for unemployed people; the ruin of all independent newspapers and the hunting down of all alternative expression and media as unpatriotic if not anti-patriotic; the ruin of all businesses that do not support the policy of the President; the creation of some kind of militia to keep an eye on everyone; the increase of the powers of this militia that would have authority over all other police forces and even over justice. Of course one of the first triggering elements this President would need is some menace from a foreign country, hence a war against this menacing country, be it true or imagined, and a designated accomplice inside the country defined as anarchist, communist or terrorist. And the old world is then perverted enough for fascism to be born in the very sanctuary of human rights and civil liberties, and then "M and M" becomes Militia Man.
It is interesting to see this revival. It reveals several elements that we must keep in mind if we want to understand what is happening in the world. People are really afraid of the future in this changing world. People are afraid of change because it precisely is change and comfort means no change.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A frightening analysis of something that could happen., 2 Jun 1997
By A Customer
I found this book to be quite unnerving
because a lot of the problems it talks about
can be found in America today. No, we aren't
through an economic depression, but I have
observed that a lot of people would like the
government to control more about their lives,
which has the potential to lead to a fascist
dictatorship. I know, people might say "It
can't happen here", just like in the book, but I
think that Sinclair Lewis was right in the
idea that it could happen.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
We have power, and power is its own excuse, 26 May 2006
This is a book of 'a 'Liberal', scorned by all the nosiest prophets for refusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys ... at worst, the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long term preserve some of the arts of civilisation.'
Why is he a liberal? Because 'everything in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit', and 'the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.'
But this formidable book contains also a clear warning: 'the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.' 'We can go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and tolerance is so thin.'
This book if the story of a democratically elected US dictator: a demagogue with a racist and antifeminist agenda, who turns the US into a fascist State: 'He treated the entire nation like a well-run plantation on which the slaves were better fed than formerly, less often cheated by their overseers, and kept so busy that they had time only for work and for sleep.'
This book is the work of a visionary (Mao's China, Franco's Spain, Stalin's USSR, Pinochet's Chili, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Suharto's Indonesia, Hitler's Germany, Castro's Cuba...): 'People were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues ... men looked about to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say there was a drought ... for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on the Chief.'
Opponents were incarcerated, shot or put in work-camps. Books were gleefully burned and the media turned into mere propaganda.
The fascist State here, however, is torn asunder from within (personal infighting, power cliques, brutal murders) and from without (those people who without fear of their lives continued to fight for freedom, democracy and tolerance).
The main character in this book, a courageous editor of a newspaper, should be an example for today's newsmen, who are completely gagged by the powerful and paralyzed by autocensure.
Sinclair Lewis is also not blind for general human weaknesses: permanent insatisfaction, envy, following of prophets 'who had felt called upon to stir up the masses to save the world and save it in the prophet's own way', or falling for 'men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness than slower-witted men, however worthy.'
This book is a tremendous achievement and still very actual.
A must read.
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