Philip Roth on "The Plot Against America"

[@sidkaskey]

As I write this in the early days of a pandemic I find Roth's novel prescient. How our current "America First" President will exploit the fear that this virus and the economic chaos it causes remains to be seen. But like the characters in his novel I feel the angst.

[@sidkaskey]

@rollo cavalier Ah a Trump cult member working hard to divide our country. Thanks for your effort.

[@illuddivinus3309]

Jesus fuck, his guy was Nostradamus.

[@thomasciarlariello]

Novels of H.G. Wells are what inspired Hitler and Nazis to consider how "Argosy" where Wells was published had also given a rejection letter to Hitler whose illustrations were often too misanthropic.

[@thomasciarlariello]

If Franklin D. Roosevelt lost to Charles Lindberg for president one could freely purchase isotopic fuels to freely conduct nuclear research without being Walter Pecked by bureaucrats.

[@thomasciarlariello]

In of early1940s Cleveland my father was often mistreated for having an East Asian face

[@JSmith380]

How does he get around Pearl Harbor? We don't have to speculate how Lindbergh would have reacted to it. That's what ended his "isolationism," which Roth falsely describes as extreme. Throughout the early 20th century, the American people overwhelmingly agreed with Lindbergh's opposition to involving ourselves in foreign wars unless we were attacked.

[@thomasciarlariello]

American warships in of 1938 sunk unarmed Japanese fishing vessels so January thru March "Astounding" serialized a racist story of "Asian villains" so Jeanette Ngo and "Science of Science Fiction" by Peter Nichols took offense at such a double standard of hypocrisy. "Special Effects " by Finch noted how WWII had military purchases of image optical printers.

[@kaydenpat]

Lived to see Trump in the White House.

[@HotspurFC-cu6ny]

He knew someone like trump was coming and tried to warn us 12 years in advance

[@andrewhidas1993]

I find it remarkable, here in 2018, two years into the isolationism, fear-mongering and chaos of the Trump administration, that the framing of this novel as "applicable" and a "cautionary tale," has to do, way back in 2004, with the Bush administration and the fears being fanned then to justify the Iraq War. All that seems almost quaint in comparison to what we are experiencing today. Mr. Roth's prescience and dissection of how autocracy creeps in to strangle freedom should not be minimized, whatever his protestations, given his essential modesty, that he wasn't setting out to do political commentary.

[@raggamuffin2682]

i dont think the origonal interview was 2018 it sounds like mid to lat 2008 maybe 2006.

[@kevinscott9242]

To Roth the nightmare is "What if Lindbergh were elected and we avoided WW2?". To Roth 60million ppl dying in a War that gave us a Soviet superpower is fine & dandy because the Jews got the State of Israel & powerful Jewish orgs weaponized the charge of antisemitism & racism. Katie Couric understands that she cant ask Roth about this; that's outside the Overton window.(another "benefit" of WWII for Roth & friends).

[@r.j.martin1818]

Charles Lindberg's greatest contribution as a politician was calling out the horror of how the U.S. Congress was allowing the U.S. Treasury to abdicate America's fiscal responsibility to a private Federal Reserve Bank. Roth reaches for the worn-out straw man argument that since most of the principal promoters and beneficiaries of the creation of the federal reserve system were Jewish, Lindberg had to have been anti-Jewish. Of course, this level of insight is not what one should expect from a Katie Couric interview.

[@markwoldin162]

Typical Katie Couric. Didn't get a thing out of that.

[@sidkaskey]

Pity.

[@momoski68]

Problem being it is a leftist thing to be antisemitic

[@titusmccarthy]

NOPE

[@suttree3233]

Not exactly, progressivism only bleeds into anti-Semitism by way of a leftist reaction to the situation in Israel, a situation analogous to apartheid in South Africa. It's a fair reaction, but every now and then you get a racist (nowadays many) raising his/her head and hiding behind the guise of humanitarianism. The right and especially the radical right is riddled with anti-Semitism, and moreover, those who, while perhaps not actively Jew haters, enable others to exercise their transgressive views by recognizing Judaism as an ethnicity, and not just a religion.