Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/13/watch-the-trailer-for-hbos.html
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TV shows about fascist takeovers of the United States are starting to get played out. There’s The Man in the High Castle and Hunters on Amazon Prime, Watchmen and The Plot Against America on HBO, United States Senate Hearings on CSPAN…
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We are living it now are we not?
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I read the book. Almost too hard to read.
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When you live it day by day in the 21st century, it ain’t interesting any more.
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I think you have to be pretty delusional or oblivious to find things like this exciting or entertaining right now.
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Roger That!
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Reality TV in the age of Furher tRump
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Seriously, the fucking Nazi’s again? Can’t we come up with ANY new ideas? How about:
- The Ottomans take over the world (fun hats for all)
- The Puritans take over the world (no, wait, that’s Handmaid’s tale, never mind)
- The Russians take over the world (Red Dawn fighters FAIL)
- New Zealand takes over the world (Taiki Watiti runs Hollywood, everyone very happy)
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The plot against America? Which plot against America? We’re currently going through the one where Traitor Trump sabotages the country’s coronavirus response because he thinks that testing will show too many coronavirus cases, and too many coronavirus cases would be bad for his reelection campaign. It’s not that the sociopathic bastard is out to murder us – he just doesn’t see our lives as valuable.
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Humbug to Alternate Histories – call it Fiction or History, pick one – and Double-Humbug to Fascist America Alternate Histories. So tiresome.
We need a Smedley Butler film. History – not fiction, not alternate. How about it, Ken Burns?
Because Business Plot:
Recommended reading: the ambitious and admirable Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America by David Talbot (Author) and Spain Rodriguez (Illustrator)
That’s right: Spain fuckin’ Rodriguez – or, as I think he preferred, simply Spain.
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Trout as big as your leg! Free healthcare for everyone!
(OK, OK, I should get my priorities straight.)
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Maybe not exciting or entertaining, but if it can help open even a few people’s eyes to what’s happening irl, I’d count that as a win.
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I JUST learned about Smedley!
I would watch that.
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The book was really good, showing the myriad of quotidian ways that fascism creeps into and eats at a liberal democracy (including the development of high-profile kapos). A lot of it will seem very familiar to Americans in 2020, but the book was written long before 2016.
Combine Roth’s base work with David Simon’s and I’ll be watching, too.
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Serious question: Is there counterfactual literature premised on crazy but positive historical twists? Like, I dunno, John Brown winning the war, or Hitler being raised by Unitarians, or something like that?
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speaks into police radio <<<
“cepheus42 is on to us. Pick him up”
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Probably not exactly a positive twist (I haven’t read it), but there’s a novel in which Hitler emigrates to the USA and cranks out pulp SF novels that express his Nazi ideology.
Norman Spinrad was intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and much science fiction and fantasy literature can be to the racist ideology of Nazi Germany.
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Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union kind of fits that bill; the story is set in an alternative-history version of the present day in which the United States voted to implement the 1940 Slattery Report, which would have set aside land in Alaska for the temporary refugee settlement of European Jews during World War II.
In the alternative history of the novel this has both positive and negative long-term outcomes for the Jewish people and the world as a whole. Many more Jewish refugees were spared from the Holocaust, but the war drags on a year longer and ends with Berlin getting nuked. The State of Israel also failed to get off the ground in part because there wasn’t as much perceived urgency to establish a new Jewish homeland.
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