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You just crossed over into ... THE DEAD ZONE (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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https://bsky.app/profile/stephenking.bsky.social/post/3mivkkec6js2u

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[–] 80 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

Only kind of related, but I recently started reading "It Can't Happen Here" by Upton Sinclair Sinclair Lewis, and I had to put it down after like 30 pages because it was so creepily prescient. Like down to how the demagogue politician spoke.

The book was written in 1935.

Edit: before posting this, I was like "don't say Upton Sinclair, don't say Upton Sinclair " oops.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Nothing about our culture or tendencies in the last hundred years has changed as much as 21st century humans really like to believe that it has. Just as a for instance, the first cosplay convention was also in the 30s.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Daaaamn, were people cosplaying their favourite Jules Verne character or something?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    More like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    You're telling me those Sherlock Holmes fanatics weren't dressing up like him and characters from the books when they met up?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Possibly, but, as far as I know, the first conventions where cosplay became popular were largely contemporary comic and science fiction related. That’s why I mentioned Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers specifically. So popular were these two characters in fact that Flash Gordon for instance had a Sunday comic, a daily comic written by a different person than the Sunday one, a radio show, and the serial that was linked in my previous comment, all at the same time.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    That book, along with War Is A Racket, by Smedley Butler, should have been required reading for every American over the last century.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    instead they had us read books written by a socialist who thought it was so obvious that communism was a good idea that we would need warnings against authoritarianism masquerading as communism. and the interpretation they gave us was "see! communism is bad!"

    i don't know how anyone can read 1984 and not realize that the message is that a centralized authority is the problem

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    I see how.

    The lack of the rest of the sufficient context.

    Oh and also, we don't teach at all how evangelical Christianity was literally weaponized against 'communism/socialism', by capitalists, since before WW2, since FDR was trying to do the New Deal.

    We don't teach that because uh, well basically that propoganda worked, and has continued to work, for nearly 100 years now, to the point that the people affected/brainwashed by that, well they have inordinately outsized control over what gets into school textbooks.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    *Sinclair Lewis, not Upton Sinclair

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