Fascism for Dummies

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…blah…blah…blah…
That’s been a time-honored sentiment for utopians and commercial jingle writers. Me? I’m too much a realist. I try to be like a good, consistent .300-hitter and not dwell too much on the 7 out of 10 times I fail. That helped immensely in my teaching days. You put your best effort out there, knowing you’re not going to reach all your students, and hope to have a lasting or at least useful impact on the ones you do reach. I’m much in mind of that reality these days when I sense that the nation is very badly in need of a remedial lesson on fascism. Every teacher--past and present--has a civic duty to step forward in service of country to try and teach that lesson.
But where to begin? The evils of fascism have been on full display for almost an entire century now…not only in classroom lectures, but in some truly great books, brilliant films, compelling TV dramas and documentaries, and painful eyewitness accounts. Yet, here we are in 2017 and so many of our fellow citizens seem perfectly oblivious to the threat and rather relaxed about what is clearly a national lurch to fascism. So the challenge is what can be said or done to reach them if they already have failed to understand what fascism is and master the elementary fact that it is not just bad for a free society, but anathema to one.
The “dummies” in question here are not the truly ignorant who are mere fish in a barrel for a well-armed comic. Nor are they the testosterone-stressed boys in the streets with their tiki torches and assault rifles. Their issues are so complex, so deeply psychological that they are really beyond any education that does not follow A Clockwork Orange methodology. 
No, the dummies in this case are the otherwise ordinary people you might run into at a neighborhood barbecue…you may have as Facebook friends…who may be the parents of your children’s friends. They are the people who a year ago were untroubled to hear Donald Trump boast, I'm the only one who can fix our problems…which is the very essence of the fascist personality. They are the ones who have time and again given him free passes--on his avowed sexual predation; his documented scummy business practices; his incessant, boldfaced lies--which is a key indicator of a people infatuated with fascism. They are the ones who say they will obediently give up their democracy if he asks them to, as half of Republicans said they will do in a recent poll. They are people content…almost satisfied…to see law enforcement come down brutally hard on minorities, allow immigrants to be stigmatized and banned without due process or just cause, and watch government take away their fellow citizens right to vote…all hallmarks of the typical fascist state.
These are people driven to a tolerance for fascism because the cashiers at their local department store say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”; because they don’t get to see as many white faces or hear as many white voices as they used to in their daily lives; because they consume Fox News every day, which is not only the nation’s chief propagator of fascism, but has been shown to actually turn people into dummies.
So how to reach them? Some of those great books on fascism, perhaps? Hannah Arendt on the “banality of evil”? Richard Hofstadter on America’s fertile ground for fascism? No…no…these people do not read…will not read. Movies then? Bertolucci’s 1900 is an epic view of the rise of fascism in Italy. The White Rose is an intimate view of living under fascism in Germany. Too foreign, though…too easy to say that’s them…that’s there…that would never happen here. Edward R. Murrow’s heroic denunciation of McCarthyism…which, like Trumpism, is a brand of fascism? But Murrow was a journalist and these people despise journalists. They think journalism should be like Fox and Friends and Hannity...something to reaffirm their ignorance.
I was in despair of ever finding a teaching tool to help me with this badly needed remedial lesson. But then I came across one of those viral links that suddenly, almost inexplicably, takes the Internet by storm. This one was for a US War Department public training film made in 1947. Coincidently titled Don’t Be a Sucker,  it was created by the “greatest generation” for “the greatest generation.” In 17 minutes it provides the easiest, most straightforward lesson on the dangers of fascism…not over there but here at home. Hard to believe that such a simple, black and white “education” film could speak so clearly and urgently to our time, but it does. So if you really don’t know what all this fuss about fascism is about or you know someone else who is, this film really is fascism for dummies.