#littlemanwithin — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #littlemanwithin, aggregated by home.social.
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When The #TwilightZone Imagined #Fascism in #America in a 1963 Episode Starring #DennisHopper
in History, Television | March 25th, 2025
"Watch through The Twilight Zone, and you’ll find yourself spotting no end of familiar faces: Julie Newmar, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, Elizabeth Montgomery, William Shatner, even Buster Keaton. The 1963 episode 'He’s Alive' is at least doubly notable in that respect, featuring as it does a young (but in acting sensibility, almost fully formed) Dennis Hopper as Peter Vollmer, a ne’er-do-well made into an aspiring dictator by none other than Adolf Hitler. Played by Curt Conway, a specialist in doctors, judges, and other authority figures, the undead Führer offers his young disciple instructions like the above, from an early scene before his identity is revealed.
"'How do you move a mob, Mr. Vollmer? How do you excite them? How do you make them feel as one with you?' Hitler asks. The answer, which he then provides, is first to join them: 'When you speak to them, speak to them as if you were a member of the mob. Speak to them in their language, on their level. Make their hate your hate. If they are poor, talk to them of poverty. If they are afraid, talk to them of their fears. And if they are angry, Mr. Vollmer… if they are angry, give them objects for their anger. But most of all, the thing that is most of the essence, Mr. Vollmer, is that you make this mob an extension of yourself.'
"If accused of scapegoating minorities, he should address the throng thus: 'Should I tell you who are the minorities? Should I tell you? We! We are the minorities.' Soon, we see Peter in full neo-Nazi gear delivering just such a harangue, thoroughly Hopper-ized in diction, to a modestly attended rally. How could these ordinary-looking attendees be a minority? 'Because patriotism is a minority. Because love of country is the minority. Because to live in a free, white America seems to be of a minority opinion!'
"Though hardly artful, this rhetoric eventually makes him into a popular figure, albeit one whose rise is cut short when he turns to conspiracy to accelerate his rise to power.
"And what of the spirit of Hitler? 'Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare?' Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling asks in his episode-closing monologue. 'Any place, every place where there’s #hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s #bigotry.' It was against such broad social phenomena that Serling so often used his scripts to argue, and with 'He’s Alive,' he made use of an unusually vivid ideological example.
"A veteran of the Second World War, which had ended less than twenty years earlier, Serling surely had even fresher memories of the threat of Hitler than did the general American public — and understood even more clearly what could happen if those memories were to fade away."
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05LaTuuKPlI#CharacteristicsOfFascism #USPol #WorldPol #Twitler
#TheBalladOfTheLittleMan #LittleManWithin -
#Fascism!: The US Army Publishes a Pamphlet in 1945 Explaining How to Spot Fascism at Home and Abroad
June 1st, 2023
" #Fascists come to power, the text explains, in times of #hardship, during which they promise 'everything to everyone': land to the #farmers, #jobs to the workers, customers and #profits to the small businessmen, elimination of small businessmen to the #industrialists, and so on. When this regime 'under which everything not prohibited is compulsory' inevitably fails to deliver a perfect society, things turn violent, both in the country’s internal struggles and in its conflicts with other powers. To many Americans at the time of World War II, this might seem like a wholly foreign disorder, liable to afflict only such distant lands as Italy, Japan, and Germany. But a notional American fascism would look and feel familiar, working 'under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’ Fascist leaders are neither stupid nor naïve. They know that they must hand out a line that ‘sells.’ "
Read more:
https://www.openculture.com/2023/06/fascism-the-us-army-publishes-a-pamphlet-in-1945.htmlLink to pamphlet [via @internetarchive ]:
https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up#TheBalladOfTheLittleMan #USPol #WorldPol #LittleManWithin #TrumpSucks #CharacteristicsOfFascism #CorporateColonialism
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Choosing to let kids go hungry
by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims
Oct 29, 2025"The official website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (#USDA) claims that on November 1, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will run out of funding. The USDA asserts that Democrats are blocking funding to secure 'health care for illegal immigrants' and funding for 'gender mutilation procedures.'
"All of these claims are false.
"Around 42 million Americans — including 20 million children — rely on the SNAP program to avoid going hungry.
"But 'the well' has not 'run dry' on SNAP. The program has a reserve of about $6 billion that could fully fund SNAP for several more weeks. The USDA’s current position is that these funds 'are not legally available to cover regular benefits' and can only be used to provide nutrition assistance in response to a national disaster or other emergency.
"This, however, directly contradicts guidance that the USDA issued on September 30 which explicitly states that contingency funds can be used for regular benefits (emphasis added):
" 'In addition, Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.'
"This guidance has been removed from the USDA website now that the Trump administration has decided that withholding the funds is politically advantageous."
Read more:
https://popular.info/p/choosing-to-let-kids-go-hungry#LittleManWithin #FoodInsecurity #SNAPCuts #TrumpSucks #USPol #HungerGames #TransRightsAreHumanRights #NoHumanIsIllegal
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"So show no mercy, no more mercy
For the little man within..."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU3M2anr6Dk
#ResistFascism #LittleManWithin #WorldParty #80sMusic #TrumpIsANazi #NoKings
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First up, a rare demo version of #WorldParty's "The Ballad of the Little Man"
"He was doing fine in '39
Thank God he did not win
He kept playing on his fiddle
As he watched old Rome cave in
He sold love away from his children's hearts
And told them it was sin
Now we're all at the mercy, we're all at the mercy
Of that little man withinNow he's sitting in the gardens
As the acid rain comes in
He got it covered full of rhino heads
And boots of leopard skin
He got the means, he make the harvest high
But you can count those hungry people die
We're all at the mercy
Of the greedy man withinSo if you're feeling lonely, baby
If you're feeling blue
If you listen to your little friend
You know he'll tell you what to do
But if you hear his words and you get confused
Start believing they're all true
Then you have just been fooled again
Who said we won't get fooled again?
By the little man within..."- #KarlWallinger, #WorldParty, 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm6YuQdT8bQ
#LittleManWithin #Fascism #Nazis #TheLittleManWithin #80sMusic #TheBalladOfTheLittleMan #RevolutionDanceParty #Authoritarianism #FridayNightMusicVideos #FridayNightMusic #MusicVideos #FridayNightVideos #JukeboxFridayNight
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@KathyLK Remember this from the 1980s? #KarlWallinger summed up the "#LittleManWithin" in this song!
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The Ballad of the Little Man
"He was doing fine in '39
Thank God he did not win
He kept playing on his fiddle
As he watched old Rome cave in
He sold love away from his children's hearts
And told them it was sin
Now we're all at the mercy, we're all at the mercy
Of that little man withinNow he's sitting in the gardens
As the acid rain comes in
He got it covered full of rhino heads
And boots of leopard skin
He got the means, he make the harvest high
But you can count those hungry people die
We're all at the mercy
Of the greedy man withinSo if you're feeling lonely, baby
If you're feeling blue
If you listen to your little friend
You know he'll tell you what to do
But if you hear his words and you get confused
Start believing they're all true
Then you have just been fooled again
Who said we won't get fooled again?
By the little man within"- #KarlWallinger, #WorldParty, 1986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm6YuQdT8bQ
#Inauguration2025 #LittleManWithin #Fascism #Nazis #TheLittleManWithin #80sMusic #TheBalladOfTheLittleMan #Project2025 #FarRight #ChristoFascism
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#Obama also had something to say about the size of #Trump's rallies. Lol! Way to get under his skin. What a small man (and I mean that in the #LittleManWithin way).
#2024Debate #Elections2024 #USElections -
Vote as if your lives, your loved ones' lives, and your planet depends on it -- because this time, it does! We can't let the "Little Man Within" win again! Don't let #KarlWallinger's message die with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm6YuQdT8bQ
#Elections2024 #LittleManWithin #Fascism #WorldParty #TheLittleManWithin #80sMusic #TheBalladOfTheLittleMan -
What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain
By Marcel Danesi, 07/30/2023
"My research analyzes real speeches made by politicians past and present, including those of #Trump, #Orbán and #Putin, using cognitive linguistics — a branch of linguistics that examines the relationship between language and the mind. What I have found is that throughout history, speeches by #dictators and #autocrats have one thing in common: they use #dehumanizing metaphors to instill and propagate hatred of others.
"It is well-documented that for example words like 'reptiles' and 'parasites' were used by the Nazi regime to compare outsiders and minorities to animals. Strongmen throughout history have referred to targeted social groups as 'rats' or 'pests' or 'a plague.'"
#LittleManWithin #DivideAndConquer #Propaganda #Dictators #Fascism #TheBalladOfTheLittleMan