I was reminded recently to rewatch the chilling scene from the 1972 movie “Cabaret,” in which a young man stands up in a rural beer garden in pre-World War II Germany, singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”
As the others at the tavern, young and old, begin to join in with the rousing music, taking to their feet, voices rising, the camera pans the crowd, across civilians and young men in uniforms, swastikas on their arms, until the one leading the singing finally raises an arm in salute, which of course we know as the symbol of Europe’s dark descent into fascism.
It was America, and its many heroes, risking their lives, my father among them, that finally rescued the world then.
Well, as the skies over 2024 America darken, I get the same feeling of foreboding, of evil brewing, as one is meant to watching that scene from “Cabaret.”
So many of my fellow Americans and, sadly, some of my Connecticut neighbors _ who, for some reason I can’t understand, seem especially angry, vengeful and even hateful _ have signed on for Trump fascism and all the dark places he is promising to take us.
Let’s be honest. The racism and misogyny and fascism is out in the open.
It’s what he’s saying. He tells you that dark-skinned people are stealing and eating your cats and dogs to eat. The nation’s blood is “poisoned.” He will use the military to go after America’s own, “the enemy within.”
His very dark and ominous Madison Square Garden weekend rally included a scripted joke labeling Puerto Ricans, Americans, garbage. He’s trying to divide us, as authoritarians do.
Trump promises a day of extreme violence once elected. He says he will go after his critics, prosecute and imprison those who have disagreed with him.
Those who stormed the Capitol at his urging Jan. 6, attacking police and screaming to hang the vice president, what Trump now calls a “day of love” will be pardoned. The special counsel independently prosecuting Trump, based on multiple felony indictments by juries, will be fired.
Remember when President Richard Nixon was disgraced for firing the special counsel investigating him. How quaint, when a majority of the country was still appalled at the idea of a criminal chief executive.
Trump is now making it a campaign promise to fire the special counsel.
He will build huge encampments for rounding up and deporting people. Those are people who you probably know, who work and live in your communities, who smile at you every day.
And we thought his first act of cages at the border and separating parents from children was bad. What’s coming if Trump wins is unimaginably worse, but high on the agenda.
This is what he clearly promises. This is what you’ll get if he’s elected. People are signing up for it. You can see their twisted mouths in song, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” as the camera pans the crowds here in modern America.
The people who worked most closely with Trump in his White House, many of them Republicans, are sounding the loudest alarms about the dangers of a new Trump regime.
Among them are apolitical four-star generals, who have made careers out of keeping America safe, who warn that Trump is a fascist.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has signed on as a Trump consigliere, eager to be at the front of the pack of America’s new ruling class of oligarchs,
And Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest man, the owner of the Washington Post, who has tangled with the former president in the past, has signaled he’s ready to do whatever Trump wants.
Bezos, in a decision announced at the eleventh hour, essentially ripped up an endorsement the newspaper was preparing to make of Kamala Harris, in a long tradition across a half century of the Editorial Department making presidential endorsements.
You know the prospects of a fascist regime that goes after a free press is looking more possible, when the owner of one of the nation’s leading newspapers preemptively tries to make the dictator-in-waiting happy.
It feels a lot like that kid singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” when he raises his arm in salute in “Cabaret.’ What a sad, cowardly turn in Bezos’ remarkable career.
When the world’s second richest man is getting scared, we all should be.
And yet a lot of other newspapers, including The Day, have bravely rejected this dangerous drift toward authoritarianism by Trump and endorsed Harris on editorial pages, where opinions still find home with a free press.
Hang in there. We’ve won this fight before.
See you on the other side of Tuesday, hopefully in a still-free America.
This is the opinion of David Collins
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Publish date : 2024-10-30 12:08:00
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