Dear Progressive Reader,
Earlier this week, I spent a half hour on the phone with U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin. The full interview will appear in the December issue of The Progressive, but I will say that, even as an avid follower of the news, I was surprised by some of the revelations about the January 6 attack on the Capitol that are emerging during the hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We don’t think of coups as a U.S. problem,” Raskin told me, “because coups are usually something conducted against Presidents. But in this case, the coup was conducted by the President against the Vice President and against the Congress."
I have also recently been reading the book (mailed to me by a Progressive supporter in Oklahoma) How Democracies Die (Broadway Books, 2018), where authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt chronicle the ways that authoritarians have risen to power within democratic systems. In one chapter they talk about October 30, ninety-nine years ago, when Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome at 10:55 a.m. and was named premier by the king and given the power to form a new cabinet. Carleton Beals, a journalist who covered Latin America for The Progressive throughout the 1940s and 1950s, was living in Italy at the time. In his 1923 book Rome or Death, he writes about that day. Into his reporter’s notebook he copied the text of one typewritten flyer tacked to a wall: “Not against the agents of the public force marches Fascism, but against the imbecile and deficient political class, which during four long years has not known how to give government to the nation.”
In the summer of 1923, Senator Robert M. La Follette, founder of this magazine, travelled through Europe on a fact-finding mission. He wrote about his experiences in LaFollette’s Magazine in December, noting, “In Italy the Black-shirted Fascisti have elevated Mussolini to a dictatorship which overrides parliaments and courts of justice. The liberal forces dare not speak.” Trump in some ways seems to have admired Mussolini. As I wrote in March 2016, after he was tricked into retweeting a Mussolini quote, Trump defended his action to NBC news saying it was “a very good quote.” One of the goals of the January 6 committee, in Raskin’s view, is “to bring to light everything that happened.” American humorist and author Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, is credited with saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Hopefully the investigative record of this committee might help prevent such rhyming in our democratic future.
This week Facebook, embroiled in controversy and investigations into its role in January 6, and many other outrages, changed its name to “Meta.” Cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates his views on this maneuver, and Laura Merrifield Wilson lays out, in an op-ed, the case for regulating Facebook, pointing out that “it was always unrealistic to expect that the social media behemoth would ever police itself or place progress over profit.” Meanwhile, Claire Nelson gives a preview of next week’s vote in Minneapolis on the creation of a new Department of Public Safety. Annie Levin analyses the current national surge in unionizing and labor actions. And Mike Ervin explains how Republican efforts to ban mask-mandates in schools hurts children, especially those with disabilities.
The United Nations-sponsored COP26 conference on global climate will take place over the next two weeks in Scotland. Exact Editions, the company that hosts the digital version of The Progressive for our subscribers, is providing a free online resource of 156 fully-searchable books that are freely-available through this link until November 22: https://exacted.me/COP26ShowcaseGlasgow22Nov
Finally, this week marked the fifteenth anniversary of the murder of independent journalist Brad Will while covering a teachers’ strike in Oaxaca, Mexico. As I reported five years ago, “Brad Will was not alone. Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist.” As the Committee to Protect Journalists tabulated in its 2021 Global impunity Index, “No one has been held to account in 81% of journalist murders during the last 10 years.” November 2 has been designated as the “International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists 2021.” It will include a People’s Tribunal in The Hague that will hear a day of testimony from victims’ relatives, colleagues, and survivors of attacks. The proceedings can be viewed online here.
Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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