Available on demand now until Sun., Nov. 8, and free to listeners (but donations gratefully accepted), is the Berkeley Rep radio theater production of It Can’t Happen Here.
Written in 1935 during the rise of fascism in Europe, Sinclair Lewis’s darkly satirical It Can’t Happen Here (text available online – https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20171242/html.php) follows the ascent of Buzz Windrip, a demagogue who becomes president of the United States by promising to return the country to greatness. In the fall of 2016, Berkeley Rep unveiled a new stage adaptation of this prescient best-selling novel. One week after that production ended, the presidential election roiled our nation. Reality TV host and real estate mogul Donald Trump became president of the United States.
Now, Berkeley Rep reprises that production with the same director, but this time as a radio play in four episodes, just in time for the 2020 presidential election. Much of the original cast has returned, including David Kelly as the candidate Buzz Windrip, and Academy Award nominee David Strathairn joins it as the liberal protagonist, Vermont newspaperman Doremus Jessup.
It Can’t Happen Here was quickly adapted into a play and produced by the WPA’s Federal Theater Project on October 27, 1936, in 21 U.S. theaters in 17 states. To honor that event taking place on the eve of the 1936 election, and once again affirm the critical role that theater can play in the nation’s social discourse, Berkeley Rep has partnered with Los Angeles’s Center Theatre Group and over 60 theaters nationwide to broadcast this new radio play version.
The radio adaptation is by Tony Taccone and Bennett S. Cohen, liberally adapted from the novel, with sound design and music by Paul James Prendergast. Lisa Peterson directed the production, which came together in recent weeks by long-distance recording owing to the coronavirus crisis.
The broadcast has an introduction and four episodes, each about a half-hour long. It can be paused for breaks. Following the play, there is an extra feature with the authors and director explaining how the production came into being and how they interpret its present-day meaning.
Others in the cast include Elijah Alexander, Danforth Comins, Scott Coopwood, William Thomas Hodgson, Anna Ishida, Sharon Lockwood, Eddie Lopez, Alex Lydon, Tom Nelis, Greta Oglesby, Charles Shaw Robinson, Gerardo Rodriguez, Carolina Sanchez, and Mark Kenneth Smaltz. Citizens, campaigners, soldiers, workers, radio voices, prisoners, and many others are all played by members of the company and the sound designer.
Sinclair Lewis embraces a wide cast of characters ranging from intellectuals to politicians, local officials and judges, working people and their families. The show includes a healthy mix of women’s as well as men’s voices, and a range of political outlooks, including a Communist and a Socialist, that will sound very contemporary to today’s listeners. Among the various media mentioned in the production is the Daily Worker, forerunner of today’s People’s World. Lewis delineates how some hold steadfast in their embrace of free speech and fair government, while others, some readily and others opportunistically, are seduced into the web of conformity and collaboration with the new order.
The story of It Can’t Happen Here is relatively familiar, even though a prospective film version was never produced at the time. Suffice it to say (no plot spoilers here!) that Lewis does not wrap up his tale of alarm and warning with a pretty red, white, and blue bow. The struggle for democracy is ongoing in every generation, not the least our own on the cusp of a crucial election in which the future course of America will be written.
This is a masterful production that for some of the oldtimers among us will recall the pre-television glory days of radio theater—and introduce a worthy semblance of that epoch to younger listeners.
A medical staff takes a swab from a child near a residential area in Qingdao in east China’s Shandong province on Oct. 13, 2020. After a small number of cases appeared in the city, authorities launched a mass testing campaign to screen every single resident within days. From the earliest days of the pandemic, Chinese mitigation and containment strategies have set the standard for the rest of the world. | Chinatopix via AP
For as long as I can remember, I have been engaged in a practice many would consider masochistic. Get those images out of your head, I don’t mean that. Or that. No, my self-defeating habit is all too mundane to the casual observer: I read China stories in the Western media.
It’s not as bad as it sounds. Over time, you build up a sort of immunity to the indignation that is the gut reaction to any of these pieces. Eventually, you can even stop rolling your eyes. Sadly, that doesn’t last. Every so often, you encounter a headline so ignorant and offensive it brings all that old fury back, roaring forth in a tsunami of rage and ruining years of therapy.
The idiocy in question, found in an outlet I won’t name: “Can we trust Chinese COVID-19 science?”
I don’t mind sharing something personal here, dear reader. After seeing that headline, I had a few very rude things to say about this publication and its author. They are, alas, unprintable. But let me cool down for a moment and take that question seriously, even though it deserves no such treatment.
Where would we be without Chinese COVID-19 science?
Well, first of all, we wouldn’t have learned about the virus in late December. Doctors and scientists in Wuhan noticed pneumonia-like symptoms in patients and informed local health authorities, sending crucial details up the chain and setting the overall epidemic response in motion.
The WHO also wouldn’t have been informed of a pneumonia of unknown cause on Dec. 31, when those same authorities shared their preliminary findings. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control also wouldn’t have been told the same thing on Jan. 3—though given how the U.S. still waited months to take real action, maybe we should put that data point aside.
The genetic sequence of the virus—the foundation of all treatment, testing, and vaccine work—wouldn’t have been made public record. After 40 hours of near-constant work, Shanghai scientists shared the full genome of COVID-19 with the world, uploading the sequence to the open-access Genbank database on Jan. 5.
China is closest to having a vaccine ready for mass public use, with multiple candidates in final trials. Here, a worker manually inspects syringes of the SARS CoV-2 Vaccine produced by SinoVac at its factory in Beijing on Sept. 24, 2020. A Chinese health official said in late September that the country’s annual production capacity for coronavirus vaccines will top 1 billion doses next year, following an aggressive government support program for construction of new factories. | Ng Han Guan / AP
Universal adoption of mask-wearing wouldn’t have happened either. Both the U.S. CDC and World Health Organization were slow to encourage the practice, instead saying only sick people needed respiratory masks in the early weeks of the pandemic. China’s National Health Commission was the only major health authority to consistently stress the importance of masks for the entire population, healthy or otherwise. So that’s another obvious best practice gone if we ignore Chinese science—but judging by the refusal of some in the U.S. to wear masks even to this day, this isn’t even wholly hypothetical.
Mass testing and contact tracing is another Chinese policy which has been proven to work in containing the virus. Adapted from the country’s earlier response to the SARS epidemic, a network of temperature checks, fever clinics, and widespread nucleic acid tests helped choke out the virus and keep it localized. You don’t need to look too far to see an example of how essential these methods are; the U.S. steadfastly ignored China’s blueprint and now has more cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world.
And what of that elusive COVID-19 vaccine? China currently has four in the third stage of clinical trials and is likely to be the first country to have a viable inoculation ready for mass production. Will the skeptics refuse potentially life-saving treatment just to avoid giving China any credit? The answer to that question might be “yes,” considering how blinkered some are in their anti-China psychoses.
Some in the West, eager to downplay any positive examples from China, point to other Asian countries engaged in similar practices. But those places had weeks or months to prepare and modeled much of their response on what Chinese health officials were sharing with them. Ignoring China’s experience would force the rest of the world to develop these ideas independently, buying time with prolonged human suffering.
Maybe that’s what these “journalists” want. After all, there’s little more important to them than scoring points against a country they see as a mortal enemy. The shock and surprise with which they greeted China’s triumph over the virus betrayed their real sympathies. Rather than express relief that a country of over a billion people stemmed the tide of outbreak and prevented new cases and deaths, they could barely contain their disappointment. To them, the virus was an opportunity to castigate China’s system and prove Western capitalist “democracy” as a superior method of governance.
That opportunity has blown up in their faces. Those headlines from January and February arrogantly declaring “democracies are better at fighting outbreaks” are now the stuff of tragedy, as infection and death tolls rise in countries that previously exulted over China’s struggles. Commentators who gleefully predicted China’s collapse—practically fantasizing about mountains of corpses all the while—are now backpedaling, crafting absurd arguments to show they were right all along.
Hence the bizarre headline which started this little thought experiment. In the absence of a credible alternative to China’s pandemic control methods—and by extension China’s socialist system—all these cynics can do is poke holes in the country’s success by spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Because their own governments failed so spectacularly, their only option is to tear down countries that have returned to relative normalcy. Their envy and hatred are palpable.
The fact is we already know the answer to that headline’s insipid question. We’ve known it since infection counts began dropping in March. By now, whatever doubts were lingering then should be long gone. If nothing else, the fact you can visit a restaurant or bar here in Beijing where I work and see it full of contented patrons shows people here trust their country’s science. I certainly do, and won’t be returning home to the U.S. to visit until I can be sure things have improved. Judging by the present state of affairs, my guess is that’ll be sometime in 2048.
So go ahead, oh wise and clever commentators. Don’t trust Chinese science. It’s your right.
But when the rest of the world is back to normal thanks to a Chinese vaccine, you’d better stick to your principles and stay inside.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — Strangers on the internet hailed Duncan Socrates Lemp as a martyr for their anti-government movement after a police officer shot and killed the 21-year-old man during a pre-dawn raid on his family’s Maryland home.
A hashtag campaign spreading Lemp’s name on social media has been a mixed blessing for his grieving family. While grateful for the support, Lemp’s parents told The Associated Press that it has made them uneasy to see his death galvanize a loose network of gun-toting supporters of the “boogaloo,” the nascent movement’s slang for a second civil war
During two interviews in recent days about the March 12 shooting, Mercedes and Matt Lemp said their son wasn’t a threat to the tactical unit officers who stormed their Potomac house around 4:30 a.m. And they don’t believe he was part of any extremist movement.
“It’s a bit strange,” Matt Lemp said. “And while it’s nice to know that people are thinking of him positively, he didn’t — and we don’t — agree with a lot of what they’re saying,”
Self-described “boogaloo bois” have joined protests against coronavirus lockdowns and racial injustice, carrying rifles and wearing tactical gear over Hawaiian shirts. The shirts refer to “big luau,” a riff on the term “boogaloo,” which comes from the title of a 1984 sequel to a breakdancing movie.
It’s not all fun and memes: Federal authorities have linked the movement to domestic terrorism attacks and plots, including the slaying of a federal security officer and a sheriff’s deputy in California. An Air Force sergeant was arrested for the killing.
Boogaloo promoters point to social media posts by Lemp as evidence he supported their movement. Mercedes Lemp recalled her son mentioning “boog bois,” but called assertions that her son was a member of the boogaloo group “very strange because it is not what he was at all.”
“It definitely gives me a bit of uneasiness because it’s not a true representation,” she said.
A post on Lemp’s Instagram account shortly before his death included the term “boogaloo” with a photograph of two people holding up rifles. His last tweet, on Dec. 31, said “the constitution is dead.”
A person who identified himself as Duncan Lemp under a username that friends said Lemp had employed on other social media accounts wrote on an internet forum called “My Militia” last year that he was “an active III%’r and looking for local members & recruits.” That’s a reference to the Three Percenters wing of the anti-government extremist movement.ADVERTISEMENT
Friend and colleague Thomas Smith said he and Lemp worked together as software engineers for a federal government defense contractor in 2019.
“He was a staunch believer in the constitution,” Smith said. He added that Lemp also frequented the 4chan imageboard. The forum was a launching pad for the boogaloo movement.
Lemp’s parents, 19-year-old brother, and girlfriend, Kasey Robinson — who gave birth to their son this month — are waiting for prosecutors to determine whether the Montgomery County police officer was justified in shooting Lemp.
Detectives had a no-knock warrant to search Lemp’s home for guns. Robinson said she was sleeping next to him when police opened fire from outside the house, according to a family attorney.
The family’s account of the shooting contradicts statements by the Montgomery County Police Department, which said Lemp was armed with a rifle and ignored commands to show his hands and get on the floor. A “booby trap” affixed to Lemp’s bedroom door was designed to fire a shotgun shell at anyone entering, according to police.
The department hasn’t said if any body cameras recorded the encounter.
Detectives obtained the no-knock warrant after receiving an anonymous tip that Lemp illegally possessed firearms, the department said. Lemp had a criminal record as a juvenile that made it illegal for him to possess or buy firearms until he turned 30, according to police. Investigators recovered three rifles and two handguns from his home.
The morning her son was shot, an explosion jolted Mercedes Lemp awake in a basement bedroom. She ran upstairs and saw masked officers rushing into the house. They isolated her in a guest bedroom. She heard Duncan’s girlfriend shout, “You’re killing him!” Later, she heard an emergency medical technician say, “Unresponsive.”
“And that’s when I knew they had killed him,” she said.
Lemp’s father, Matt Lemp, woke up in a ground-floor bedroom to the sound of shattering glass, an explosion and gunshots. Officers cuffed him at gunpoint. Nobody told him that his son was dead until hours later, after officers took them to a police station.
“None of those people were talking to us,” he said. “They were barely human.”
Lemp, who was white, died a day before police in Louisville, Kentucky, fatally shot Breonna Taylor, an unarmed Black woman, during a drug raid. Taylor’s death fueled national protests and police reform initiatives.
Montgomery County officials have ignored or rejected written requests to meet with Lemp’s parents and disclose more about the investigation, said family attorney Rene Sandler.
“They deserve to be acknowledged,” Sandler added.
On Twitter, Robinson frequently shares memories of Lemp and rebuts rumors about the shooting.
“He was a techie. Not a terrorist,” she recently posted.
Robinson’s attorney, Cary Hansel, accused police of falsely portraying Lemp as an extremist to justify the shooting.
Mike Dunn, a 20-year-old boogaloo supporter from Virginia, said Lemp contacted him over Facebook last December and offered to code a website for him. Lemp’s killing sealed Dunn’s commitment to the movement, which turned the hashtag #HisNameWasDuncanLemp into a rallying cry.
“I realized how quick and how surely and how easy government would overreach. When they took somebody that was a friend of mine, it made me wake up to how much they’ll do,” Dunn said.
Duncan Lemp’s son was born last Wednesday. Robinson and the child are living with Lemp’s parents.
“It’s really the only way that we’ve been able to survive,” Mercedes Lemp said.
One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is mass conformity to a psychotic official narrative. Not a regular official narrative, like the “Cold War” or the “War on Terror” narratives. A totally delusional official narrative that has little or no connection to reality and that is contradicted by a preponderance of facts.
Nazism and Stalinism are the classic examples, but the phenomenon is better observed in cults and other sub-cultural societal groups. Numerous examples will spring to mind: the Manson family, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Church of Scientology, Heavens Gate, etc., each with its own psychotic official narrative: Helter Skelter, Christian Communism, Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy, and so on.
Looking in from the dominant culture (or back through time in the case of the Nazis), the delusional nature of these official narratives is glaringly obvious to most rational people. What many people fail to understand is that to those who fall prey to them (whether individual cult members or entire totalitarian societies) such narratives do not register as psychotic. On the contrary, they feel entirely normal. Everything in their social “reality” reifies and reaffirms the narrative, and anything that challenges or contradicts it is perceived as an existential threat.
These narratives are invariably paranoid, portraying the cult as threatened or persecuted by an evil enemy or antagonistic force which only unquestioning conformity to the cult’s ideology can save its members from. It makes little difference whether this antagonist is mainstream culture, body thetans, counter-revolutionaries, Jews, or a virus. The point is not the identity of the enemy. The point is the atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria the official narrative generates, which keeps the cult members (or the society) compliant.
In addition to being paranoid, these narratives are often internally inconsistent, illogical, and … well, just completely ridiculous. This does not weaken them, as one might suspect. Actually, it increases their power, as it forces their adherents to attempt to reconcile their inconsistency and irrationality, and in many cases utter absurdity, in order to remain in good standing with the cult. Such reconciliation is of course impossible, and causes the cult members’ minds to short circuit and abandon any semblance of critical thinking, which is precisely what the cult leader wants.
Moreover, cult leaders will often radically change these narratives for no apparent reason, forcing their cult members to abruptly forswear (and often even denounce as “heresy”) the beliefs they had previously been forced to profess, and behave as if they had never believed them, which causes their minds to further short circuit, until they eventually give up even trying to think rationally, and just mindlessly parrot whatever nonsensical gibberish the cult leader fills their heads with.
Also, the cult leader’s nonsensical gibberish is not as nonsensical as it may seem at first. Most of us, upon encountering such gibberish, assume that the cult leader is trying to communicate, and that something is very wrong with his brain. The cult leader isn’t trying to communicate. He is trying to disorient and control the listener’s mind. Listen to Charlie Manson “rapping.” Not just to what he says, but how he says it. Note how he sprinkles bits of truth into his stream of free-associated nonsense, and his repetitive use of thought-terminating clichés, described by Robert J. Lifton as follows:
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” — Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: : A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, 1961
If all this sounds familiar, good. Because the same techniques that most cult leaders use to control the minds of the members of their cults are used by totalitarian systems to control the minds of entire societies: Milieu Control, Loaded Language, Sacred Science, Demand for Purity, and other standard mind-control techniques. It can happen to pretty much any society, just as anyone can fall prey to a cult, given the right set of circumstances.
It is happening to most of our societies right now. An official narrative is being implemented. A totalitarian official narrative. A totally psychotic official narrative, no less delusional than that of the Nazis, or the Manson family, or any other cult.
Most people cannot see that it is happening, for the simple reason that it is happening to them. They are literally unable to recognize it. The human mind is extremely resilient and inventive when it is pushed past its limits. Ask anyone who has struggled with psychosis or has taken too much LSD. We do not recognize when we are going insane. When reality falls apart completely, the mind will create a delusional narrative, which appears just as “real” as our normal reality, because even a delusion is better than the stark raving terror of utter chaos.
This is what totalitarians and cult leaders count on, and exploit to implant their narratives in our minds, and why actual initiation rituals (as opposed to purely symbolic rituals) begin by attacking the subject’s mind with terror, pain, physical exhaustion, psychedelic drugs, or some other means of obliterating the subject’s perception of reality. Once that is achieved, and the subject’s mind starts desperately trying to construct a new narrative to make sense out of the cognitive chaos and psychological trauma it is undergoing, it is relatively easy to “guide” that process and implant whatever narrative you want, assuming you have done your homework.
And this is why so many people — people who are able to easily recognize totalitarianism in cults and foreign countries — cannot perceive the totalitarianism that is taking shape now, right in front of their faces (or, rather, right inside their minds). Nor can they perceive the delusional nature of the official “Covid-19” narrative, no more than those in Nazi Germany were able to perceive how completely delusional their official “master race” narrative was. Such people are neither ignorant nor stupid. They have been successfully initiated into a cult, which is essentially what totalitarianism is, albeit on a societal scale.
Their initiation into the Covidian Cult began in January, when the medical authorities and corporate media turned on The Fear with projections of hundreds of millions of deaths and fake photos of people dropping dead in the streets. The psychological conditioning has continued for months. The global masses have been subjected to a constant stream of propaganda, manufactured hysteria, wild speculation, conflicting directives, exaggerations, lies, and tawdry theatrical effects. Lockdowns. Emergency field hospitals and morgues. The singing-dancing NHS staff. Death trucks. Overflowing ICUs. Dead Covid babies. Manipulated statistics. Goon squads. Masks. And all the rest of it.
Eight months later, here we are. The Head of the Health Emergencies Program at the WHO has basically confirmed an IFR of 0.14%, approximately the same as the seasonal flu. And here are the latest survival rate estimates from the Center for Disease Control:
Age 0-19 … 99.997%
Age 20-49 … 99.98%
Age 50-69 … 99.5%
Age 70+ … 94.6%
The “science” argument is officially over. An increasing number of doctors and medical experts are breaking ranks and explaining how the current mass hysteria over “cases” (which now includes perfectly healthy people) is essentially meaningless propaganda, for example, in this segment on ARD, one of the big mainstream German TV channels.
And then there is the existence of Sweden, and other countries which are not playing ball with the official Covid-19 narrative, which makes a mockery of the ongoing hysteria.
I’m not going to go on debunking the narrative. The point is, the facts are all available. Not from “conspiracy theorist” websites. From mainstream outlets and medical experts. From the Center for Fucking Disease Control.
Which does not matter in the least, not to the members of the Covidian Cult. Facts do not matter to totalitarians and cult members. What matters is loyalty to the cult or the party.
Which means we have a serious problem, those of us to whom facts still matter, and who have been trying to use them to convince the Covidian cultists that they are wrong about the virus … for going on eight months at this point.
While it is crucial to continue reporting the facts and sharing them with as many people as possible — which is becoming increasingly difficult due to the censorship of alternative and social media — it is important to accept what we are up against. What we are up against is not a misunderstanding or a rational argument over scientific facts. It is a fanatical ideological movement. A global totalitarian movement … the first of its kind in human history.
It isn’t national totalitarianism, because we’re living in a global capitalist empire, which isn’t ruled by nation-states, but rather, by supranational entities and the global capitalist system itself. And thus, the cult/culture paradigm has been inverted. Instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it.
I wish I could be more optimistic, and maybe offer some sort of plan of action, but the only historical parallel I can think of is how Christianity “converted” the pagan world … which doesn’t really bode so well for us. While you’re sitting at home during the “second wave” lockdowns, you might want to brush up on that history.← The War on Populism: the Final Act
A medical staff takes a swab from a child near a residential area in Qingdao in east China’s Shandong province on Oct. 13, 2020. After a small number of cases appeared in the city, authorities launched a mass testing campaign to screen every single resident within days. From the earliest days of the pandemic, Chinese mitigation and containment strategies have set the standard for the rest of the world. | Chinatopix via AP
xenagoguevicene 