The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

I am very curious, wondering if you, as many Republicans do, think that the election was fraudulent?

People of my generation, from World War II in Europe, live permanently in a peculiar state of heightened vigilance. We are clearly more sensitized to the persisting threat of fascism than those who don’t feel or understand the darkness with the same intimacy.

I have been acutely aware of this, throughout Trump’s move into politics! Democracy is government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly, or indirectly through a system of representation, usually involving periodically held free elections.

The era of the Big Lie: Dating to Nazi Germany, the Big Lie was a strategy of propaganda that focused on the mass dissemination of a single or a few chief falsehoods to a target population. Like a pyramid, the Big Lie organized a configuration of smaller lies underneath. That is, it was a deductive deception, relying on the command of a single idea or a few large ones to manipulate the many ancillary thoughts to come. Swallow the big pill and the rest would follow. America first (Deutschland uber alles). Constant anti immigration. In short, Nazi fascism hinged on creating one streamlined, overarching lie. The Nazis built an ideology on a fiction, the notion that Germany’s defeat in World War I could be avenged and reversed by purging the German population of those purportedly responsible--the Jews.

I am not doing anything other than bringing up history, lest we forget lessons, that should be learned, also remembered. Trump’s Big lie that his loss was rigged, stolen, fixed or whatever he chooses to call it from day to day is our greatest danger to Democracy in recent history. Trump, is raking in the $$$, now over $220,000,000, for his next battle against Democracy. He will not go quietly or respectfully as previous presidents. Guaranteed China and Russia are laughing at us, sadly.

Merry Christmas, and yes, we say it too!

Poul Toftemark

Rosburg