Adak, 24 May 1944 -- "any fake reason for pushing someone else down"

"Fascism can come from an uninformed sense of being ill-treated"

While describing his Adak hutmates to Rosa, Murray gave a prescient foretaste of MAGA talking points. The soldier he describes, Blake Huttula, went on to become a respected pharmacist and family man in his hometown of Elma, Washington.

"He is no respecter of the usual shibboleths. Somewhere in our society, he seems to feel, there is a group which manipulates things for their own benefit. Junior consequently alludes to this mysterious collusion. When somebody says somethings about big profits he says, "Well, you know what's behind that." When I asked him what was behind it one day, he grinned a knowing grin, as though there was were some deep secret we shared, and said, "You know." Another day he asked why reporters didn't tell the "real truth" about "things." When I protested that I didn't know what real truth he was talking about, he threw me another knowing grin. One thing which he says he would like to see exposed is the Federal Reserve Bank. When I asked him what wasn't in the open about it: "You know."

"This sense of protest by emotion is not, it seems to me, particularly healthy. Fascism can come from an uninformed sense of being ill-treated. The attitude is such a beautiful one on which to build myths of racial exploitation or Protocols of Zion or any other fake reason for pushing someone else down."