If anybody was curious as to the origins of Extremist Radio, you don't really have to go any further than the weekly broadcasts of Father Coughlin, whose rants filled the airwaves throughout the 1930s until finally even the Catholic Church had enough and banished him from his radio sermons.

I've posted Coughlin earlier on Newstalgia, early on when I could only provide a ten minute clip. But here, from this broadcast of August 27th 1939, you get the hear him in his entirety, including his warm-up speaker Father Curran who, judging from his particularly acid tone and beaming antisemitic rants, was something of a hatchet man for his illustrious boss.

But without naming names, Coughlin did his level best to elude:

Father Coughlin: “The concentration of power has led to a three-fold struggle for domination, concludes His Holiness in this excerpt. Of course there is a struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere itself. And then the fierce battle to acquire control of the state so that it’s resources and authority may be abused in the economic struggle. And last, the clash between states themselves, Unquote. And so my friends, I speak to you of the evils of Capitalism. But I would impress upon your minds that these evils, as serious as they are, should be traced back to their parent evil – to the evils of trying to get along without God. Of trying to succeed without following the pathway of Christ. Of trying to keep Christ’s principles from the banking house, from the factory, from the school. Of trying to keep Christ’s teachings outside the Labor Unions, the home, the hearts of the people and the government.”

So if you ever thought the hate was more subtle in the past - you would be terribly wrong.

It's just timeless.

With the people of Norway still in a state of shock over the Friday bombings in Oslo and the massacre of innocent people at a Youth Camp outside the city, the picture is slowly emerging of a vision of hate rarely seen in Norwegian society. The nation as a whole is coming to grips while the world in general reacts with shock.

Yes, it can happen there. In the city that, for the last hundred years, has given us the Peace Prize. Not immune to the lunatic fringe and the sickness that comes well-armed. Even there.

Here is a re-cap of this day as presented on the BBC Radio 4 Program PM. With interviews and insights and maybe a bit more light shed on what impotent and fearful look like in Norway.

(Harry S. Truman - knew a thing or two about hysteria)

(as long as you're downloading, could ya toss in a few pennies to the folks who put this up?)

When Harry S. Truman left public office on January 1953, he didn't slip into the comfortable shadows of the ex-Presidency. If anything, he stepped up his very public criticism of the wave of hysteria that had taken over the country since the end of World War 2.

Harry S. Truman: “I’m rather skeptical of fake crusaders, who dig up and distort records of the past in order to take the attention of the people away from their political failures of the present day.”

Giving an address at the Alumni Dinner for the City College of New York on November 1953, Truman lashed out at the hysteria mongers and offered some history to prove that this sort of thing had been tried ever since this country got started and that common sense eventually prevailed.

Truman: “These attacks which we are seeing on our basic institutions such as our departments of government, our institutions of higher learning and our churches have their parallel in waves of hysteria that have swept over the country in the past. One of the first of these was the agitation that culminated in the Alien and Sedition laws. This occurred at the end of the eighteenth century when France, which had been our ally in the revolution, seemed to have been transformed from a friend into a threatening enemy. At the same time, the majority of Americans here at home were rising up politically against the Federalist Party. Unscrupulous politicians tried to play on the fear of France in such a way as to injure the growing power of Jeffersonian Democracy. As a result, the Alien and Sedition laws were passed. The Sedition Law provided penalties of fine and imprisonment for people who indulged in criticism of the Government of The United States. It was enforced exclusively against the editors and orators who supported Jefferson . . . we don’t have many editors to do that to today, but . . . (laughter). But this wave of hysteria was only temporary. The people were horrified by the use of the Federal power to suppress the free expression of opinion. They moved to the ballot boxes and pitched the Federalists out of office. And the Federalist Party never recovered. I hope somebody’ll learn a lesson from that.”

Apparently they haven't. But they keep trying. And they're still trying.