Believe My Lies!
There's a cell for you, if you don't believe my lies
Psychotic Behavior
It Can’t Happen Here
Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word--just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours--not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini--like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days--and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!"
— It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!"
"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen."
"The answer to that,… 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America.
Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana… Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions. Remember the Ku klux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, . . . Remember our Red scares . . . Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition--shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen inAmerica! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!
… the President had proclaimed that a state of martial law existed during the "present crisis," and more than a hundred Congressmen had been arrested by Minute Men, on direct orders from the President.
There were riots, instantly, all over Washington, all over America.
… from a powerful loudspeaker … brayed the voice of President Berzelius Windrip:
"I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in America! To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again. You have been scorned. They thought you were the 'lower classes.' They wouldn't give you jobs … They said you were no good, because you were poor. I tell you that you are, ever since yesterday noon, the highest lords of the land--the aristocracy--the makers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help me--help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you--give the swine the point of your bayonet!"
The M.M.'s hadn't … known this would be such sport. … and hadn't the President of the United States himself told each of them, personally, that he needed their aid?
— It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
One Big Happy Family
"More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever."
— It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
