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Aug 21, 2010 | The End of Capitalism
One of the most descriptive and disturbing articles I've yet read about the Tea Party and the rise of neofascist movement in the United States. Max Blumenthal does not name it fascism, but it's clear to me that the "Take Back America" crowd are striving to purify the US and return it to a mythical lost golden era , and they are not afraid to attack immigrants, Arabs, African Americans, queer folks, women, and anyone else that would deny their messianic mission of restoring white male supremacy.
The fabricated outrage over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" is only the latest in a long string of xenophobic lies to divide, distract, and diffuse the legitimate outrage of working class Americans. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are leading these poor Tea Party suckers to destroy everything they claim to want to protect.
Wearing a tri-corner hat does not make you a patriot. Speaking the truth, and challenging the forces of tyranny, that makes a patriot. The tyrants of today are the corporations and banks that own our country, the Pentagon and security apparatus that violently impose their will, and the lying media like Fox News and CNN that fill our heads with propaganda 24/7. In short, the Tea Party are the unwitting pawns of tyranny.
Only a powerful grassroots progressive movement can blunt their hatred and redirect the public's outrage towards the capitalist system which has bankrupted us. [alex]
Days of Rage - The Noxious Transformation of the Conservative Movement into a Rabid Fringe
Crusading to restore a holy social order, Tea Partiers have promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives.
By Max Blumenthal in Alternetreclaimed from Veterans Today.
Editor's Note: The following is the new epilogue from Max Blumenthal's book, Republican Gomorrah, now out in paperback (Basic/Nation Books, 2009)..
"He will tell you that he wants a strong authority to take from him the crushing responsibility of thinking for himself. Since the Republic is weak, he is led to break the law out of love for obedience. But is it really strong authority that he wish? In reality he demands rigorous order for others, and for himself disorder without responsibility." - Jean-Paul Sartre, "Anti-Semite and Jew"
I am not sure when I first detected the noxious fumes that would envelop the conservative movement in the Obama era. It might have been early on, in April 2009, when I visited a series of gun shows in rural California and Nevada. Perusing tables piled high with high-caliber semi-automatic weapons and chatting with anyone in my vicinity, I heard urgent warnings of mass roundups, concentration camps, and a socialist government in Washington. "These people that are purchasing these guns are people that are worried about what's going on in this country," a gun dealer told me outside a show in Reno. "Good luck Obama," a young gun enthusiast remarked to me. "We outnumber him 100 to 1." At this time, the Tea Party movement had not even registered on the national media's radar.
In September 2009, I led a panel discussion about this book inside an auditorium filled with nearly 100 students and faculty at the University of California-Riverside. Beside me sat Jonathan Walton, an African-American professor of religious studies and prolific writer, and Mark Takano, an erudite, openly gay former Democratic congressional candidate and local community college trustee.
In the middle of our discussion, a dozen College Republicans stormed the front of the stage with signs denouncing me as a "left-wing hack" while a hysterical young man leaped from the crowd, blowing kisses mockingly at Takano while heckling Walton as a "racist." Afterward, university police officers insisted on escorting me to my ride after the right-wing heckler attempted to follow me as he shouted threats.
Who was this stalker? Just a concerned citizen worried about taxes? His name was Ryan Sorba and he was an operative of a heavily funded national conservative youth outfit, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Besides founding dozens of Republican youth groups across the country, Sorba has devoted an exceptional amount of energy to his interest in homosexuals. His intellectual output consists of a tract titled The Born Gay Hoax, arguing that homosexuality is at once a curable disease and a bogus trend manufactured by academic leftists. Adding to his credentials, Sorba has a history of run-ins with the law, he explained when I called him about the order.
My encounter with this aggressive right-wing cadre seemed a strange, isolated event. But the hostility turned out to be symptomatic of the intensifying campaign to delegitimize President Obama and his allies in Congress. The Right's days of rage were only beginning.
Through his first year in office, Obama seemed oblivious to the threat of the far right. He campaigned against partisanship, declaring that there were "no red states" and no "conservative America." Apparently, he thought it was merely a contrivance or myth that there were people who rejected science, demonized gays, assailed minority and women's rights - or that they genuinely believed in what they said. Speaking of changing Washington, Obama seemed to think that the entire history of politics since the rise of Reagan and the Right and their strategies of polarization was not deeply rooted but a superficial problem attributable to certain "divisive" personalities, easily wiped away with gestures toward bipartisanship. His view of the parties was that they were simply mirror images sharing fundamental beliefs but separated by "partisans." The skilled and devoted community organizer could bring them together.
Many of his supporters in the media, often part and parcel of political wars over the years, reinforced and amplified his innocence, proclaiming he was the one at last who could "bridge the partisan divide." Andrew Sullivan, a disaffected conservative who once called critics of George W. Bush policies "fifth columnists" but now fervently supported Obama, wrote that the new president was destined to become "a liberal Reagan who can reunite America." This optimism pervaded the Obama White House as the president and his aides sought out Republicans willing to vote for his programs. After all, why couldn't we all just get along?
In his autobiographical book The Audacity of Hope, Obama highlighted a key component of his political strategy: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." Once he was elected, conservatives concluded that they could reverse Obama's strength by transforming him into a human tableau for the most fearsome images they could conjure.
Obama's multiracial background was crucial in cultivating resentment among the shock troops. Those who rejected Obama's legitimacy to serve as president on the basis of his background gave birth to the "Birther" movement that sought to challenge his citizenship. The movement's most visible figure, and therefore the most eccentric, was Orly Taitz, a dentist and self-trained lawyer who had immigrated from the former Soviet republican of Moldova to Israel before settling in the conservative bastion of Orange County, California. Convinced by claims on the far-right Web site WorldNetDaily that Obama planned to create a "civilian national security force," Taitz told me she "realized that Obama was another Stalin–it's a cross between Stalinist USSR and Hitler's Germany."
After becoming transfixed by online conspiracy theories claiming Obama's family had forged his birth certificate in Hawaii, Taitz snapped into action. She filed a lawsuit in November 2008 with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen demanding an investigation into Obama's eligibility to serve as president. Taitz's plaintiff in the case was Wiley Drake, an Orange County radio preacher and former second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention who once publicly prayed for Obama's death. While her lawsuit went nowhere, and subsequent suits earned her angry rebukes from judges, Taitz became an instant media sensation, delivering heavily accented screeds against Obama before friendly interviewers from Sean Hannity to CNN's Lou Dobbs, who Taitz called her "greatest supporter" and who was eventually fired as an indirect result of his hosting of her.
In March 2009, Texas Rep. Randy Neugebauer signed on to a Birther bill proposing that future presidential candidates must prove their citizenship before becoming eligible to campaign. The Birther movement had found its voice in government and made an indelible impact on the Republican grassroots. By June 2009, 28 percent of Republican respondents to a Kos/Research 2000 poll said they thought Obama wasn't born in the United States, while 30 percent "weren't sure." "Obama should be in the Big House," Taitz shrieked to me, "not the White House!"
When Obama announced health care reform as the first major initiative of his administration, the conservative movement activated a campaign of demonization - transformational politics - designed to turn Obama into the "Other," making him seem as unfamiliar, and therefore as threatening, as possible. When the president urged the Congress to deliver a health care reform bill in 2009, the Right staged a living theater of political hatred, Obama's dream of bipartisanship transformed into a nightmarish version of "Marat/Sade." On September 12, 2009, tens of thousands of far-right activists belonging to a loose confederation of anti-government groups called the Tea Party Patriots converged on Washington's National Mall for a giant protest against the Obama health care plan. The date was significant: Fox News's top-ranked talk show host Glenn Beck had declared the birth of the "9-12 Project" to restore the sense of unity - and siege mentality - that Americans experienced on September 11, 2001. But this time, Obama - not Osama - was the enemy.
While covering the rally, I witnessed sign after sign declaring Obama a greater danger to America's security than al-Qaida; demonstrators held images that juxtaposed Obama's face with images of evildoers from Hitler to Pol Pot to Bin Laden; others carried signs questioning Obama's status as a U.S. citizen. "We can fight al-Qaida, we can't kill Obama," said an aging demonstrator. Another told me, "Obama is the biggest Nazi in the world," pointing to placards he had fashioned depicting Obama and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi in SS outfits. According to another activist, Obama's agenda was similar to Hitler's: "Hitler took over the banking industry, did he not? And Hitler had his own personal secret service police. [The community-organizing group] ACORN is an extension of that."
The seemingly incongruous Tea Party propaganda recalled signs waved by right-wing Jewish settlers during rallies against Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his support of the peace process, portraying him as an SS officer and as the French collaborator Marshall Petain. In 1995, amid the provocative atmosphere, a young right-wing Jewish zealot assassinated Rabin. The Israeli tragedy was a cautionary example of targeted hatred leading to violence.
Members of the Tea Party "Patriots" did not seem to care that their rhetoric was irrational, or that comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin was contradictory and obviously hyperbolic. Their motives were entirely negative. By purging government of the multicultural evil that had seized power through illicit means (several activists told me they believed ACORN helped Obama steal the election), they were convinced that a mythical golden American yesteryear would return. They had no interest in building anything new or even articulating an agenda, much less discussing the merits of policies. The Tea Party's primary concern was cultural purification - freedom from, not freedom to. Against the dark image of the president and his liberal allies, Tea Party activists defined themselves as the children of light. The racial subtext was always transparent.
The Tea Party's strategy rested on a guerrilla campaign of chaos and sabotage designed not only to intimidate Democrats but also to disorient independent voters who might have supported health care reform. The Tea Partiers were convinced this would be an easy feat, since they believed the majority of the country was on their side - that they represented the "Real America." At the 9-12 rally Matt Kibbe, one of the march organizers, told the crowd that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance, something ABC denied, saying "ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters." he name of a corporate-funded Beltway advocacy group, not the battle cry of Mel Gibson William Wallace in Braveheart.
Contrary to its image as a grassroots movement mobilized to stifle the machinations of Washington elites, the Tea Party movement was the creation of a constellation of industry-funded conservative groups with close Republican ties. The movement's leading puppet-master was Dick Armey, who directed resources and talking points to the Tea Party "Patriots" from his Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Among the corporate clients of Armey's lobbying firm, which he was forced to leave as a result of his involvement in the Tea Parties, was the pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb, a company with a clear interest in defeating health care reform. (Armey's other "real American" clients included the Marxist terror cult, People's Mojahedin of Iran, which received funding and assistance from Saddam Hussein in order to launch terrorist strikes throughout the 1990′s against Iranian civilian targets.) Armey collected a consulting fee of $250,000 directly from FreedomWorks and $300,000 from allied astroturf front groups. FreedomWorks paid out much of its money to an assortment of Republican political consultants.
If Armey was the Tea Party king, Sarah Palin was eager to be crowned the Tea Party queen. Just days after Obama's inauguration, Palin abruptly quit her job as Alaskan governor to vie for the honor. Palin's motives for quitting became clear when she inked a lucrative deal to write her political memoir Going Rogue, signed on as a regular contributor to Fox News, and received $1 million an episode for a reality show on cable television, "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Palin's book tour, which sent her through Middle America in a luxuriously outfitted bus, resembled both a presidential campaign and a traveling carnival.
Whether or not Palin intends to run for president, her growing media presence has magnified her influence within the Republican Party. Yet the ever-expanding Palin phenomenon was greeted with hostility by Republican politicos desperately seeking to expand the party's base after the drubbing in 2008. Former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt warned that Palin's nomination in 2012 would be "catastrophic" for the GOP. His doomsday prediction was backed by an October Gallup poll revealing her as one of the most polarizing and unpopular political figures in the country with a disapproval rating of over 50 percent. Unfortunately for Schmidt and other party pragmatists, those who approve of Palin represent the heartbeat of the Republican Party, its most fervent activists, and cannot be dissuaded from following her, even if she is leading the party off a cliff.
A November 2009 special congressional election in New York's heavily Republican 23rd district was the first major test of Palin's power. Along with a parade of nationally recognized conservatives, Palin endorsed Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate closely allied with the Tea Party, helping to force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin's ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that district in more than 100 years. After the disaster Palin and her allies claimed victory, insisting they had at least hastened the purge of ideologically impure Republicans from the party. She went on to endorse Rand Paul, the son of right-wing libertarian Rep. Ron Paul and a candidate in Kentucky's GOP senatorial primary, while Dick Cheney went out of his way to endorse Rand's regular Republican opponent, Trey Grayson, the Kentucky secretary of state.
Following the Tea Party script of avoiding social issues like abortion and gay marriage in order to obscure the large presence of the Christian Right within the movement's ranks, the self-described "hardcore pro-lifer" Palin recast herself as a libertarian concerned primarily with issues of "economic freedom." She claimed the Democratic "cap and trade" plan to limit carbon emissions would harm the livelihood of blue-collar workers, and she assailed health care reform as a Trojan Horse for "socialism" (though she admitted her family "used to hustle over the border" to take advantage of Canada's single-payer health care system). But no Palin attack had as much effect as the one she blasted out on her Facebook page claiming the Obama health care plan included a provision for "death panels" that would recommend euthanasia for severely ill patients like her Down syndrome-afflicted son, Trig. With the click of a button, Palin transformed the tone of the health care debate from rancorous to poisonous.
The source of Palin's "death panels" smear was a practiced propagandist, former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey. When President Bill Clinton introduced health care reform during his first term, McCaughey falsely claimed in an article published in the New Republic and widely circulated by Republicans, that the plan would force consumers to drop their private plans and buy into the government's program (the article would go on to win a National Magazine Award and then be retracted years later by the New Republic's editors). Now she was back in the spotlight, pushing a rumor that would be voted by the non-partisan fact-checking Web site Politifact.com as "the lie of 2009." McCaughey's latest innuendo was boosted by the cult of political crank Lyndon LaRouche, which mobilized to push the rumor into the mainstream.
In June 2009, one of LaRouche's top lieutenants publicly confronted Ezekiel Emanuel, the National Institute of Health's chief bioethicist and brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, accusing him of seeking to reintroduce Hitler's T-4 program to kill the handicapped through health care reform. "President Obama has put in place a reform apparatus reviving the euthanasia of Hitler Germany in 1939, that began the genocide there," LaRouche staffer Anton Chaitkin charged. Soon, LaRouche's followers were on street corners around the country with posters depicting Obama with a Hitler moustache. At a town hall forum on health care reform hosted by Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, a LaRouche follower waved one of the Obama-as-Hitler posters and demanded, "Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy?"
Two months later, after Palin whispered the rumor on Facebook, prominent conservatives from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to ranking Senate Finance Committee member Charles Grassley parroted her claims before audiences of indignant Tea Partiers. Not to be outdone, Glenn Beck devoted an extended rant on his show to the reality of death panels. Echoing the LaRouche cultists, Beck accused Ezekiel Emanuel of "the devaluing of human life, putting a price on each individual." He thundered, "The death panel is not a firing squad. Rationing is inevitable and they know it!"
The death panel rumor served a variety of functions, all useful to the movement, but not necessarily to the Republican Party. Most importantly, the rumor resonated both with hard-core libertarians who resented the very existence of the federal government and Christian Right activists who viewed the legalization of abortion as a slippery slope to government-sponsored euthanasia. The hysteria it engendered helped repair the rift exposed by the Terri Schiavo charade in 2005, when the evangelical conservative James Dobson publicly clashed with Armey, the libertarian leader, over the right of the government to interfere in a private family matter of life and death.
The slurring of Obama as a sort of sleeper agent crypto-Muslim helped bring the neoconservatives back into the fray. The new neo-con generation was led by Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz, who founded an anti-Obama advocacy group, Keep America Safe, by leveraging donations from pro-Israel sources. Asked by CNN's Larry King about the Birther movement that was challenging Obama's status as an American citizen, Liz Cheney remarked, "One of the reasons you see people so concerned about this is people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas." With the libertarians, Christian Right, and the neo-cons seated around the same table, united in resentment of the alien president, the conservative movement was whole again.
The experiments in "Terror Management Theory" of Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College, Jeff Greenberg, professor of psychologist at the Unviersity of Arizona, and Tom Pyszczynski, professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, have demonstrated the connection between fear of death and intensification of conservative attitudes. The findings help explain the effectiveness of the death panel rumor and insinuations by conservative figures that Obama was not truly American and somehow sympathetic to Islamic terrorists. Indeed, these seemingly irrational smears were guided by tactical reasoning, calculated to agitate voters with constant reminders of their own mortality. Whether or not Independents responded, the rhetoric of death kept the Tea Party crowd in a persistent state of panic and rage, ensuring a standing army ready to fan out to rallies and town halls at the first sign of liberal malfeasance.
Obama's first year in office was marked by more than raucous protests; there were several disturbing murders committed by far-right extremists. In April 2009, a 22-year-old neo-Nazi wannabe named Richard Poplawsi mowed down a SWAT team of Pittsburgh cops, killing three. Poplawski's best friend told reporters the young killer "grew angry recently over fears Obama would outlaw guns." Later it was discovered that Poplawski had posted a video clip to a neo-Nazi Web site portraying Fox's Glenn Beck contemplating the existence of concentration camps. (After a characteristically thorough investigation, Beck conceded they were not real.) On another occasion, the killer posted a video promoting Tea Party rallies. A month after the Pittsburgh bloodbath, Scott Roeder, a supporter of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, shot Dr. George Tiller to death while he prayed at his church in Wichita, Kansas. Tiller was declared fair game by the anti-abortion movement because of his role as Kansas's only late-term abortion provider. During at least 28 episodes of Bill O'Reilly's "O'Reilly Factor," O'Reilly had referred to Tiller as "Tiller the baby killer," a criminal guilty of "Nazi stuff." "I wouldn't want to be [Tiller] if there is a Judgment Day," O'Reilly proclaimed.
In August 2009, a middle-aged professional named George Sodini walked into a health club in suburban Pittsburgh and gunned down three women. The mainstream press explained Sodini's motives away by homing in on passages in his online diaries describing his loneliness, inability to convince women to have sex with him, and descent into chronic masturbation. Nearly every major media outlet omitted or ignored a long deranged entry in which Sodini projected his sexual frustration onto Obama, whom he seemed to view as a symbol of black male virility and predation.
The day after Obama's election victory, Sodini wrote: "Good luck to Obama! He will be successful. The liberal media LOVES him. Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama's plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl … Kinda a reverse indentured servitude thing. Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be … real good. I saw it. 'Not my little girl', daddy says! (Yeah right!!) Black dudes have thier [sic] choice of best white?? [ellipses in original]."
In another posting to an anti-Clinton forum in 1994, during the height of the Republicans' Whitewater investigation, Sodini revealed that he had purchased a bumper sticker reading, "Stop Socialism, Impeach Clinton," from a National Review ad. A year later, Sodini ranted on an anti-government militia site, "I am convinced that more drastic action is required to bring the country back to the Constitutional order that it was 200 years ago. I don't think any group of political leaders will achieve this for us." Whether or not Sodini's murder spree was motivated by his political passions, he was pathologically death-driven and fixated on the phantasmagoria of right-wing imagery. In his final diary entry, Sodini proclaimed, "Death lives!"
More than any other media figure of the Obama era, Glenn Beck encouraged the campaign of racial demonization and conspiracy that consumed the Tea Party "Patriots." During a broadcast of "Fox and Friends," Beck opined that Obama "has exposed himself over and over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture." As evidence, Beck pointed to White House green-jobs czar Van Jones, an African American former community organizer who was eventually forced to resign as a direct result of Beck's crusade. From there, Beck targeted another black Obama adviser, Valerie Jarrett, highlighting her ties to ACORN while upholding her and Jones as evidence of Obama's "socialist" agenda. In another broadcast, Beck played an audio clip of unidentified African Americans referring to "Obama money" as they collected welfare checks in Detroit. Then he showed footage of members of a Kansas City-based youth group practicing a step show, a traditional African-American group dance apparently unfamiliar enough to Beck and his transfixed audience that he felt at liberty to claim the footage as evidence that "Obama's SS" was being trained across inner-city America.
In September 2009, Beck relentlessly targeted ACORN, the Right's new favorite hobgoblin, admitting that he intended to use the poor people's advocacy group to distract his viewers from the health care debate. "Trust me," Beck said, "Everybody now says they're going to be talking about health care. I don't think so." (His statement was reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh's scandal-mongering remark during the early Clinton administration: "Whitewater is about health care.") Beck promptly cued up a series of hidden camera videos shot by conservative youth activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles inside ACORN field offices. In the videos, O'Keefe baited African-American staffers into making statements explaining that Giles, who claimed she was a prostitute, could obtain low-income housing.
O'Keefe edited in images of himself clad in an outlandish pimp costume to create the impression that he was dressed that way during the meetings with ACORN; however, Giles later admitted her partner had lied about wearing his costume to further incriminate ACORN. In the end, ACORN was exonerated of all criminal wrongdoing while in a separate incident O'Keefe was arrested and charged with a federal crime after he and several conservative pals disguised themselves as telephone repairmen and attempted to wiretap phone lines in the office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Like Ryan Sorba, O'Keefe and his posse were movement cadres paid and directed by well-funded conservative outfits; O'Keefe had been trained by the Leadership Institute, the right-wing youth group that nurtured leading lights like Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and Jeff Gannon.
While O'Keefe and his buddies plea-bargained with prosecutors, Beck basked in his formula for success. His show earned the highest ratings at Fox News, topping network franchises like O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. In the process, Beck's opinions became firmly implanted in the nervous systems of Tea Party activists. "Glenn Beck has taught us everything we know," a demonstrator at the 9-12 rally told me. "He's opened our eyes to so much."
But unlike the right-wing radio warhorses who helped usher in Newt Gingrich's Republican counter-revolution of 1994, Beck was not an authentic product of the movement. When Rush Limbaugh first began dominating the AM airwaves, Beck was mired in the world of mid-level commercial radio, delivering corny yarns about lesbians and celebrity trash in hopes of becoming the next Howard Stern. By night, as he has tirelessly recounted, he medicated his anxiety with cocaine and alcohol, destroying his first marriage in the process. "We remember Glenn from the womanizing, the drinking, the drugs. Everybody who knew him at the time saw what a complete mess he was," a shock jock from Tampa, Florida, who called himself Bubba the Love Sponge remarked to me during a broadcast of his nationally syndicated show.
Like Dusty Rhodes, the pseudo-populist demagogue of Elia Kazan's 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd, Beck was a self-destructive drifter who might have been crumpled up with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in an alleyway or been locked away in a prison cell had fame not found him first. Beck was only able to stabilize his life when he made his escape from freedom, marrying a conservative Mormon, converting to her religion, and transmuting his urge to abuse drugs into conservative radio diatribes. When Beck first broke into television on CNN's Headline News Channel, he struggled to articulate a coherent political worldview.
If he distinguished himself from other big-time conservative hosts in any way, he did so through strained and often snide attempts at humor, remnants of his failed radio career. Nevertheless, with help from his liberal agent, Matthew Hiltzik, Beck snagged a primetime slot at Fox News in early 2009. Around this same time, Beck began promoting the work of an arcane Mormon conspiracy-peddler named W. Cleon Skousen, whom he described as his political lodestar. Suddenly, Beck had something more to offer than irritable mental gestures.
Thanks to Beck's designation of Skousen's pseudohistorical tract The 5000 Year Leap as "required reading" on the Web site of his 9-12 Project, and his promotion of the book on his show, the previously obscure Skousen became the Hidden Imam of the Tea Party movement. By the summer of 2009, Skousen's Leap was among the top 10 books on Amazon.com and a fixture on literature tables at Tea Party gatherings. It went from selling a puny couple of thousand copies in 2007 to selling over 200,000 copies in 2009.
Just why the book generated such an instant appeal is difficult to understand. It is little more than a slapdash of quotes from the Founding Fathers, often taken out of context and deliberately oversimplified, to explain why America is the greatest nation in history. In the process, Skousen claims that church and state separation is un-American, that "coercive taxation" is communist, and that marriage is the underpinning of a free society. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote at length on the merits of "amours" with "old women," and who famously solicited prostitutes and fathered a son of out of wedlock, was the ultimate authority Skousen quoted on the importance of marriage.
Though Skousen claims the Founders as the world's foremost source of eternal wisdom, he buttressed his points with fringe sources like the conspiracist Norman Dodd's screeds about the Illuminati. According to Skousen, Dodd claimed that "powerful influences congregating in the United States" like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds had forced the United States into World War I. Skousen published Dodd's manifestoes in his obscure journal Freemen's Digest, which he founded for the express purpose of propagating conspiracies.
Skousen's paranoid politics were an outgrowth of his participation in extreme anti-communist groups during the 1950s. He boasted of a close friendship with then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and said he provided him with research on communist plots, claims disputed by FBI historians. (During a recent interview, Skousen's son, Paul, told me that contrary to rumors of Hoover's cross-dressing and homosexual dalliances, he would set the top cop up on blind dates with live women.)
Skousen was fired from his job as Salt Lake City's police chief for, in the words of the city's conservative Mormon mayor, "conduct[ing] his office as chief of police in exactly the same manner in which the communists operate their government." From there, Skousen sailed off to the far shores of the Right-peddling conspiracy tracts like The Naked Communist, and earning condemnation from his beloved FBI, which accused him in an internal memo of "promoting [his] own anti-communism for obvious financial purposes."
Skousen's vocal support for the far-right John Birch Society's claim that communists controlled President Dwight Eisenhower cost him the support of the corporate backers who had paid for his Red-bashing lecture tours. He went off the radar for several years, returning during the late 1960s to accuse the Jewish Rothschild family of secretly bankrolling everyone from Ho Chi Minh to the civil rights movement. By the late 1970s, even the Church of Latter Day Saints distanced itself from Skousen and his conspiracy theories.
His work fell through the margins and might have disappeared entirely had Beck not revived it, turning The 5000 Year Leap into the bible of the Tea Party movement. Journalist Andrew Zaitchik observed in his authoritative profile of Skousen on Salon.com that Skousen's renewed influence through Beck and the Tea Party "suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place."
Besides influencing Beck, Skousen's teachings inspired one of the Tea Party movement's most visible grassroots celebrities, retired Sheriff Richard Mack. I met Mack in February at a far-right rally just outside of Montgomery, Alabama. On a makeshift stage towed into the middle of a rodeo arena by a pickup truck, Mack recalled with reverence his mentorship by Skousen, who he said taught him everything he needed to know about the Constitution. Mack urged his spellbound audience to stockpile ammo and store food. "If you control the food supply," Mack warned, "you control the people. And that's the first step to slavery."
Already a hero to conservatives for successfully suing the Clinton administration over the provision in the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act requiring law enforcement to conduct criminal background checks of gun purchasers, Mack reemerged in the Obama era as the archetypal local lawman who vowed to resist the tyrannical federal government. Along with a few dozen former and active military and law enforcement personnel, Mack helped form a self-styled Tea Party militia called the Oathkeepers.
Galvanized by their fear of creeping socialism, the Oathkeepers solemnly swore to refuse tyrannical federal orders such as cooperating with foreign troops and forcing Americans into concentration camps. Because the group's members trained for combat, the vow came with suggestion of armed resistance.
Besides Mack, the Oathkeepers attracted a coterie of militia movement retreads into its ranks. The most well-established figure was Mike Vanderboegh, a longtime militia fanatic who published a booklet in the mid-1990s entitled Strategy and Tactics for a Militia Civil War, calling for sniper attacks on "war criminals, secret policemen, rats." With Obama in office, Vandeboegh churned out anti-government screeds on right-wing blogs with renewed passion and supported his efforts by cashing in the $1,300 in federal disability compensation he received each month.
For all the energy the far right exerted in its campaign to strangle Obama's agenda, it was a Democrat who posed the greatest threat to the passage of health care reform. Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan had been in office since 1993, placing him among the senior leadership of the so-called centrist Blue Dog Democrats. When health care reform was introduced in Congress, Stupak became the leader of an informal caucus of anti-abortion Democrats, making him the de facto swing vote on the House version of the bill. By extension, Stupak was the point man in the campaign to ensure that the bill would not allow federal funding for abortion for low-income women.
But after close consultation with leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Stupak went a step further. He introduced a draconian amendment to block women from paying for abortions from even their own private insurance plans. The amendment, which passed the House but was shut down in the Senate, became a key sticking point in health care negotiations. "He's a big hero now in the pro-life community," former Bush Catholic issues adviser Deal Hudson told me in November 2009. "Thanks to him, this is the first time I can remember the pro-life Democrats having any power."
To the chagrin of the Republicans, Stupak entertained offers of compromise from the Democratic leadership. According to Hudson, the Catholic Bishops were keen to see health care reform pass, but only if the bill contained a clear provision forbidding patients from spending federal money on abortion. Finally, in March, after pressure from House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Obama agreed to sign an executive order forbidding the federal funding of abortion. Stupak had been mollified.
Now he and his anti-abortion caucus pledged to deliver the swing votes the Democrats needed to pass the bill. As soon as reports seeped out declaring the imminent passage of health care reform, major right-wing blogs like RedState.org churned out virulent denunciations of Stupak, calling him a traitor and sellout. The blog comment sections filled up with dozens of diatribes referring to Stupak in language previously reserved for Dr. George Tiller: "Bart the Baby-Killer."
On March 20, thousands of Tea Party activists surrounded the Capitol's Longworth Building in expectation of Obama's pep talk to the House Democrats and the health care vote. Democratic Representative John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement, and Representative Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress, passed through the crowd on their way inside the Capitol. "Nigger!" a demonstrator barked at Lewis. Another called Frank a "faggot," eliciting laughter and cheers from nearby protesters. Meanwhile, as another African-American Democrat, Representative Emanuel Cleaver, ascended the Capitol steps, a protester who had been screaming at Lewis and Frank spat on his face.
With the demonstration carried on into the night, cries of "Kill the bill!" drifted into calls for violence. "I would gladly stand with any of you men here and take these fascists down," a man in camouflage battle dress uniform proclaimed in front of an amateur videographer, pointing toward the Capitol. "You haven't heard the last of me!"
The next day, Republican members of Congress emerged from the Longworth Building to salute the Tea Partiers. The demonstrators cheered wildly for their proxies on the inside. Finally, after hours of impassioned speeches on the House floor, the bill passed. But the drama was hardly over.
Republican Representative Joe Pitts, an anti-abortion Catholic who co-authored Stupak's original amendment, demanded a motion to bring it back to the floor for a vote, a transparent exercise in grandstanding that was certain to fail. In response, Stupak rushed to the podium with a stinging rebuke to Pitts and the Republicans. "The motion to commit does not support life," Stupak declared. "It is the Democrats who have stood up…." Heckling from the Republican side interrupted his statement.
As Stupak looked around the House chamber, Rep. Randy Neugebauer, a right-wing Republican from Texas who openly supported the Birther movement, began shouting at him from the backbench, "Baby killer!" Other Republicans joined in, parroting base insults.
While the Republicans sank their heads in defeat, some more militant devotees of the Tea Party movement called for a right-wing Kristallnacht. "If you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party cannot fail to hear, break their windows," Vanderboegh of the Oathkeepers wrote on a far-right blog hours after the bill passed. "Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again." Within three days, windows and doors at Democratic Party headquarters in New York, Kansas and Arizona had been shattered.
Meanwhile, at least 10 Democratic members of Congress reported receiving death threats. Images of nooses were faxed to the offices of Stupak and James Clyburn, an African-American congressman from South Carolina. Representative Anthony Weiner, an especially vocal proponent of health care reform, received a menacing letter filled with white powder.
The brother of Representative Tom Perriello, another health care supporter, had his home gas line deliberately sabotaged after a local Tea Party organizer posted his address online (he had meant to post the congressman's) and encouraged activists to "drop by" to express their anger about Perriello's recent vote. In Tucson, Arizona, the windows of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords' office were shattered by shots from a pellet gun. And a brick was thrown through the window of Representative Louise Slaughter's office in New York as her voicemail filled with threats of impending sniper attacks.
After the passage of the health care bill, the Tea Party floated into a gray zone between authoritarianism and anarchy. Crusading to restore a holy social order, they promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives. Warning of death panels, they called in death threats. With the atmosphere of violence thickening, Palin took to her Twitter account to issue a battle cry: "Don't Retreat, Instead–RELOAD!" Thus concluded the first phase of the Obama era that was to usher in a peaceable kingdom of bipartisanship.
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Although Roger Griffin's definitive work brought the scholarly debate over a generic definition of fascism to a new level, the debate did not end there. It gained fresh life, in fact, and has produced some perhaps even more helpful insights.
One of these came from Robert O. Paxton, who is Mellon Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Columbia University. His essay "The Five Stages of Fascism," which appeared in the March 1998 edition of The Journal of Modern History, proposed an even more helpful model for understanding the phenomenon.
This was brought to my attention by Orcinus reader Christopher Skinner, who noted:
Paxton's approach allows a certain degree of reconciliation among thinkers, particularly between those who see fascism as an ideology and those who see it as a mélange of uneasy alliances. Paxton admits that he was, until very recently, a firm believer in the notion that fascism was not an ideology. But by suggesting a dynamic model that "begins at the beginning," Paxton reminds us that fascism is not unlike an elementary particle to which we must apply Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The more thoroughly we study a particular fascist movement at a given moment, the less likely we are to be able to judge the arc of its overall progress, and the more we study the ultimate impact of a movement, the less likely we are to examine its particulars. Many historians, for example, who study the "arc" of movements, have treated Nazi Germany as the touchstone for a "true" fascism. All other movements are seen as not fully "worked out," and therefore, not fully fascist.Griffin's insistence that fascism is an ideology -- "palingenetic ultranationalist populism" -- lets us zero in on the core of fascism through its various permutations, from nascent rural fascism to raging, mature fascism in full military regalia. Paxton's model essentially complements this, providing a framework for understanding that process of change (something Griffin himself has explored in recent works). History demonstrates that fascism itself, as Mr. Skinner suggests, has behaved more like a mutagen, shifting shapes constantly while maintaining certain core animating impulses. Paxton's essay is an important contribution to the literature, since it offers a very useful model for moving beyond the swamp of simply defining and identifying fascism toward a practical understanding of how it happens.
Paxton, as Mr. Skinner noted, offers a sort of middle pathway, identifying a central organizing principle -- "each national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy … not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity" -- that is closely akin to Griffin's "palingenetic ultranationalist populism," while at the same time constructing a five-step arc of motion for fascism that recognizes its essentially mutative nature.
Significantly, Paxton agrees with both Griffin and Pierre-André Taguieff in their suggestion that fascism is unlikely to return in an easily recognizable form:
[O]ne can not identify a fascist regime by its plumage. George Orwell understood at once that fascism is not defined by its clothing. If, some day, an authentic fascism were to succeed in England, Orwell wrote as early as 1936, it would be more soberly clad than in Germany. The exotic black shirts of Sir Oswald Mosley are one explanation for the failure of the principal fascist movement in England, the British Union of Fascists. What if they had worn bowler hats and carried well-furled umbrellas. The adolescent skinheads who flaunt the swastika today in parts of Europe seem so alien and marginal that they constitute a law-and-order problem (serious though that may be) rather than a recurrence of authentic mass-based fascism, astutely decked out in the patriotic emblems of their own countries. Focusing on external symbols, which are subject to superficial imitation, adds to confusion about what may legitimately be considered fascist....[E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons....The great "isms" of nineteenth-century Europe -- conservatism, liberalism, socialism -- were associated with notable rule, characterized by deference to educated leaders, learned debates, and (even in some forms of socialism) limited popular authority. Fascism is a political practice appropriate to the mass politics of the twentieth century. Moreover, it bears a different relationship to thought than do the nineteenth-century "isms." Unlike them, fascism does not rest on formal philosophical positions with claims to universal validity. There was no "Fascist Manifesto," no founding fascist thinker. Although one can deduce from fascist language implicit Social Darwinist assumptions about human nature, the need for community and authority in human society, and the destiny of nations in history, fascism does not base its claims to validity on their truth. Fascists despise thought and reason, abandon intellectual positions casually, and cast aside many intellectual fellow-travelers. They subordinate thought and reason not to faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest community. [Emphasis mine]10We've already seen that a whole panoply of fascist memes are at play in the current political environment, appearing throughout mainstream conservative rhetoric (Rush Limbaugh's particularly) and manifested in the Bush administration's agenda. The last two sentences of Paxton's description ring a particular bell in the current environment.
Nothing could better describe the Bush administration's approach to governance, particularly to waging war, than as one in which "thought and reason are subordinated to the promptings of the historic destiny of the group." And the Bush Doctrine, boiled down, ultimately bases its morality on a belief in the superiority of American values, and argues for waging war essentially as a "triumph of the strongest community."
This is not to argue that the Bush Doctrine is fascist per se -- but rather, that it has enough elements in it to appeal strongly to the right-wing extremists who are increasingly becoming part of the mainstream GOP fold. It plays out in such manifestations as its utter disregard -- indeed, clear contempt -- for the United Nations and multilateralism generally, a stance that resonates deeply with the John Bircher crowd. And an environment in which extremist memes are encouraged by mainstream conservatives suggests that an alliance is taking shape between the sectors.
Likewise, the Bush administration and its supporters, particularly those in the "transmitter" crowd -- Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, Fox News, the Free Republic -- have begun deploying the very same "mobilizing passions" in recent weeks in countering antiwar protesters that Paxton identifies as comprising the animating forces behind fascism. Again, these kinds of appeal clearly resonate with the proto-fascist Patriot element that have been increasingly finding common cause with the Bush regime. As Paxton describes it:
...Feelings propel fascism more than thought does. We might call them mobilizing passions, since they function in fascist movements to recruit followers in fascist movements to recruit followers and in fascist regimes to "weld" the fascist "tribe" to its leader. The following mobilizing passions are present in fascisms, though they may sometimes be articulated only implicitly:1. The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual.2. The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action against the group's enemies, internal as well as external.3. Dread of the group's decadence under the corrosive effect of individualistic and cosmopolitan liberalism.4. Closer integration of the community within a brotherhood (fascio) whose unity and purity are forged by common conviction, if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary.5. An enhanced sense of identity and belonging, in which the grandeur of the group reinforces individual self-esteem.6. Authority of natural leaders (always male) throughout society, culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny.7. The beauty of violence and of will, when they are devoted to the group's success in a Darwinian struggle.11Going down Paxton's list, it is fairly easy to identify these "passions" at play today, particularly in the debate over the Iraq war and the attacks on dissenters that occurred during it.
1. [Group primacy]: See, again, the Bush Doctrine. An extension of this sentiment is at play among those jingoes who argue that Americans may need to sacrifice some of their civil rights -- say, free speech -- during wartime.2. [Victim mentality]: This meme is clearly present in all the appeals to the victims of Sept. 11 as justifications for the war. It is present at nearly all levels of the debate: from the White House, from the media, even from the jingoist entertainment industry (see, e.g., the lyric of Darryl Worley's extraordinarily popular country-western hit, "Have You Forgotten?": "Some say this country's just out looking for a fight / Well after 9/11 man I'd have to say that's right.").3. [Dread of liberal decadence]: This meme has been stock in trade of the talk-radio crowd since at least 1994 -- at one time it focused primarily on the person of Bill Clinton -- and has reached ferocious levels during the runup to the war and after it, during which antiwar leftists have regularly and remorselessly been accused of treason.4. [Group integration] and 5. [Group identity as personal validation] are, of course, among the primary purposes of the campaign to demonize liberals -- to simultaneously build a cohesive brotherhood of like-minded "conservatives" who might not agree on the details but are united in their loathing of all things liberal. It plays out in such localized manifestations as the KVI Radio 570th On-Air Cavalry, which has made a habit of deliberately invading antiwar protests with the express purpose of disrupting them and breaking them up. Sometimes, as they did recently in Bellingham, this is done with caravans of big trucks blaring their horns; and they are also accompanied by threatening rhetoric and acts of physical intimidation. They haven't yet bonded in violence -- someone did phone in a threat to sniper-shoot protesters -- but they are rapidly headed in that direction.6. [Authority of leaders]: This needs hardly any further explanation, except to note that George W. Bush is actually surprisingly uncharismatic for someone who inspires as much rabid loyalty as he does. But then, that is part of the purpose of Bush's PR campaign stressing that he receives "divine guidance" -- it assures in his supporters' mind the notion that he is carrying out God's destiny for the nation, and for the conservative movement in particular.7. [An aesthetic of violence]: One again needs only turn to the voluminous jingoes of Fox News or the jubilant warbloggers to find abundant examples of celebrations of the virtues -- many of them evidently aesthetic -- of the evidently just-completed war.Again, the purpose of the above exercise is not to demonstrate that mainstream conservatism is necessarily becoming fascist (though that is a possibility), but rather to demonstrate how it is becoming hospitable to fascist motifs, especially as it resorts to strong-arm tactics from its footsoldiers to intimidate the political opposition. This underscores the real danger, which is the increasing empowerment of the extremist bloc, particularly as it has been blending, as we shall see, into the mainstream GOP. The increasing nastiness of the debate over Bush's war-making program seems to be fertile territory for this trend.
More than anything, the exercise underscores just to what extent fascism itself is made of things that are very familiar to us, and in themselves seem relatively innocuous, perhaps even benign. More to the point, this very familiarity is what makes it possible. When they coalesce in such a crucible as wartime or a civil crisis, they become something beyond that simple reckoning.
Can fascism still happen in America? Paxton leaves little doubt that the answer to this must be affirmative:
...Fascism can appear wherever democracy is sufficiently implanted to have aroused disillusion. That suggests its spatial and temporal limits: no authentic fascism before the emergence of a massively enfranchised and politically active citizenry. In order to give birth to fascism, a society must have known political liberty -- for better or for worse.12Indeed, Paxton identifies perhaps the origins of fascism as having arisen first in America itself:
...[I]t is further back in American history that one comes upon the earliest phenomenon that seems functionally related to fascism: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans by the Radical Reconstructionists in 1867, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders' eyes, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group's destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.13There is strong historical corroboration for Paxton's thesis here. Adolph Hitler reportedly was a great admirer of the Ku Klux Klan, particularly its post-1915 edition, which was obviously modeled on the original as well, in its treatment of the races and glorification of the white race. Indeed, Hitler would mock American critics of his program against the Jews by pointing to this nation's own history of lynching and Klan activities.
The latter Klan was even more pronouncedly fascist in its character than the original, particularly in its claim to represent the true national character: "100 percent Americanism" was the organization's chief catchphrase. Its origins -- its first members were the mob that lynched Leo Frank -- were openly violent. Though this manifestation of the Klan -- which spread to every state, counted membership of up to 4 million, and elected seven governors, three U.S. senators, half the 1924 Indiana state legislature, and at one point controlled the political levers in Oregon as well -- petered out by the early 1930s, its spirit remained alive in such clearly proto-fascist organizations of the 1930s as the Silver Shirts of William Dudley Pelley.14
It is this lineage, in fact, that helps us identify the Patriot/militia movement as proto-fascist in nature. Much of the political agenda, as well as the legal/political theories, espoused by the Patriots actually originated with the far-right Posse Comitatus, whose own originators themselves were former participants in both the 1920s Klan and Pelley's Silver Shirts. (The definitive text on this is Daniel Levitas' excellent The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right.)
It is worth remembering that before World War II, there were in fact active fascists openly at work in America, and they were not all German-American Bund members. Indeed, what's striking about groups like the Silver Shirts is just how ordinary-American their character seemed. (The similarities to the Patriot movement of the 1990s is also striking.) Pelley himself was a bit of an eccentric and slightly loopy, but the rank and file of his followers were often the same "100 percent Americanists" who had filled the ranks of the Klan a decade previously. Of course, Rush Limbaugh's predecessor, Father Coughlin, was also a major figure in fascist America as well.
But fascism has always previously failed in America, and Paxton's analysis points with some precision to exactly why. Much of this has to do with the fact that fascism is an essentially mutative impulse for the acquisition of power -- it abandons positions as fresh opportunities for power present themselves. This is particularly true as it moves from its ideological roots into the halls of government. In the end, the resulting political power is often, as Griffin puts it, a "travesty" of its original ideology. Paxton describes it thus:
In power, what seems to count is less the faithful application of the party's initial ideology than the integrating function that espousing one official ideology performs, to the exclusion of any ideas deemed alien or divisive.Paxton identifies five stages in fascism's arc of flight:
- The initial creation of fascist movements
- Their rooting as parties in a political system
- The acquisition of power
- The exercise of power
- Radicalization or entropy
In the United States, as in France and elsewhere, fascism typically failed in the second stage, because it failed to become a cohesive political entity, one capable of acquiring power (though as I just noted, there was even some danger of this in the 1920s as the Klan in fact obtained some short-lived political power):
The second stage -- rooting, in which a fascist movement becomes a party capable of acting decisively on the political scene -- happens relatively rarely. At this stage, comparison becomes rewarding: one can contrast successes with failures. Success depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of the liberal state, whose inadequacies seem to condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner. Some fascist leaders, in their turn, are willing to reposition their movements in alliances with these frightened conservatives, a step that pays handsomely in political power, at the cost of disaffection among some of the early antibourgeois militants.16In the 1930s, the ascendant liberalism of FDR effectively squeezed the life out of the nascent fascist elements in the U.S. This was particularly true because FDR openly shared power with the Right, appointing noted Republicans to his Cabinet and maintaining a firm coalition with arch-conservative Southern Democrats. The mainstream right thus had no incentive to form a power-sharing coalition with fascism. At the same time, liberalism gained a significant power base in rural America through the many programs of the New Deal aimed at bolstering the agricultural sector. This too may have been a critical factor in fascism's failure.
Significantly, Paxton points out that fascism in Europe took root in a neglected agricultural sector -- something that did not happen in the United States in the 1930s. Indeed, it gained its second-stage power in the crucible of organized thuggery against liberals:
...[I]t was in the countryside that German Nazism and Italian Fascism first succeeded in becoming the representatives of an important social and economic interest. The comparison between the success of rural fascism in German and Italy and its relative failure in France seems to me a fruitful one....All three of these countries experience massive strikes of agricultural workers: east-Elbian Germany during the postwar crisis in 1919-23; the Po Valley and Apulia in Italy in 1920-21; and the big farms of northern France and the Paris Basin during the two summers of the Popular Front; in 1936 and 1937. The German strikes were broken by vigilantes, armed and abetted by the local army authorities, in cases in which the regular authorities were too conciliatory to suit the landowners. The Italian ones were broken by Mussolini's famous blackshirted squadristi, whose vigilantism filled the void left by the apparent inability of the liberal Italian state to enforce order. It was precisely in this direct action against farm-worker unions that second-stage fascism was born in Italy, and even launched on the path to power, to the dismay of the first Fascists, intellectual dissidents from national syndicalism.17Paxton compares this to France, where fascism likewise failed:
...It was the gendarmerie, even with Leon Blum in power, who put down the agricultural strikes in France. The French landowners did not need the chemises vertes. The authority of the state and the power of the conservative farmers' organizations left hardly any space in the French countryside for the rooting of fascist power.18Fascism as a political force suffered from the same sort of bad timing in the United States when it arose in the 1920s -- conservatives were in power and had no need of an alliance with fascism, and there was no great social crisis. When it re-arose in the 1930s, the ascendance of power-sharing liberalism that was as popular in rural areas as in urban, again left fascism little breathing room.
And in the 1990s, when proto-fascism re-emerged as popular movement in the form of the Patriots, conservatives once again enjoyed a considerable power base, having control of the Congress, and little incentive to share power. Moreover, the economy was booming -- except in rural America.
Unsurprisingly, that is where the Patriots built their popular base. Importantly, much of that base-building revolved around a motif that created a significant area of common interest with mainstream conservatives: hatred of Bill Clinton. And it was there that the alliance between right-wing extremists and mainstream conservatives first took root and flowered.
Next: V: Proto-Fascism in America
It's clear by now, I hope, that fascism isn't something peculiar to Europe, but in fact grew out of an impulse that appears throughout history in many different cultures. This impulse is, as Roger Griffin puts it, "ultra-nationalism that aspires to bring about the renewal of a nation's entire political culture."
We needn't look far to find this impulse at play in the American landscape -- social, religious and political renewal all appear as constant (though perhaps not yet dominant) themes of Republican propaganda now. But it is especially prevalent on the extremist right; indeed, it's probably a definitive trait.
Griffin argues that current-day fascism is "groupuscular" in nature -- that is, it forms out of smallish but virulent, potentially lethal and certainly problematic "organisms":
After the war the dank conditions for revolutionary nationalism "dried out" to a point where it could no longer form into a single-minded slime mould. Since party-political space was largely closed to it, even in its diminutive versions, it moved increasingly into disparate niches within civic and uncivic space, often assuming a "metapolitical" mode in which it focussed on changing the "cultural hegemony" of the dominant liberal capitalist system. … Where revolutionary nationalism pursued violent tactics they were no longer institutionalised and movement-based, but of a sporadic, anarchic, and terroristic nature. To the uninitiated observer it seemed that where once planets great and small of ultra-nationalist energies had dominated the skies, there now circled an asteroid belt of fragments, mostly invisible to the naked eye.19
When we consider some of the other historical traits of fascism, including those it shares with other forms of totalitarianism, then it becomes much easier to identify the political factions that are most clearly proto-fascist -- that is, potentially fascist, if not explicitly so. (As Paxton argues, its latent expression will not necessarily represent its mature form.) Surveying the American scene, it is clear that just such a movement already exists. And in fact, it had already inspired, before 9/11, the most horrendous terrorist attack ever on American soil. It calls itself the "Patriot" movement.
You may have heard that this movement is dead. It isn't, quite yet. And its potential danger to the American way of life is still very much with us.
Those who have read In God's Country know that I conclude, in the Afterword, that the Patriot movement represents a genuine proto-fascist element: "a uniquely American kind of fascism." Let's explore this point in a little more detail.
As Griffin suggests, the "groupuscular" form that postwar fascism has taken seems to pose little threat, but it remains latent in the woodwork:
But the danger of the groupuscular right is not only at the level of the challenge to "cultural hegemony". Its existence as a permanent, practically unsuppressible ingredient of civil and uncivil society also ensures the continued "production" of racists and fanatics. On occasion these are able to subvert democratic, pacifist opposition to globalisation, as has been seen when they have infiltrated the "No Logo" movement with a revolutionary, violent dynamic all too easily exploited by governments to tar all protesters with the same brush. Others choose instead to pursue the path of entryism by joining mainstream reformist parties, thus ensuring that both mainstream conservative parties and neo-populist parties contain a fringe of ideologically "prepared" hard-core extremists. Moreover, while the semi-clandestine groupuscular form now adopted by hard-core activist and metapolitical fascism cannot spawn the uniformed paramilitary cadres of the 1930s, it is ideally suited to breeding lone wolf terrorists and self-styled "political soldiers" in trainers and bomber-jackets dedicated to a tactic of subversion known in Italian as "spontaneism". [Emphasis mine] By reading the rationalised hate that they find on their screens as a revelation they transform their brooding malaise into a sense of mission and turn the servers of their book-marked web groupuscules into their masters.
Griffin identifies this manifestation of fascism not only in Europe but in the United States:
One of the earliest such acts of terrorism on record harks back to halcyon pre-PC days. When Kohler Gundolf committed the Oktoberfest bombing in 1980 it was initially attributed to a "nutter" working independently of the organised right. Yet it later transpired that he had been a member of the West German groupuscule, Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann. It also emerged at the trial of the "Oklahoma bomber", Timothy McVeigh, that he had been deeply influenced by the USA's thriving groupuscular right subculture. His disaffection with the contemporary state of the nation had been politicised by his exposure to the shadowy revolutionary subculture created by the patriotic militias, rifle clubs and survivalists. In particular, his belief that he had been personally called to do something to break ZOG's (the so-called Zionist Occupation Government) stranglehold on America had crystallised into a plan on reading The Turner Diaries by William Pierce, head of the National Alliance.20
Conservatives have successfully re-airbrushed the Oklahoma City bombing as the act of a single maniac (or two) rather than the piece of right-wing terrorism it was, derived wholly from an ideological stew of venomous hate that has simultaneously been seeping into mainstream conservatism throughout the 1990s and since.
The Patriot movement that inspired Tim McVeigh and his cohorts -- as well as a string of other would-be right-wing terrorists who were involved in some 40-odd other cases in the five years following April 15, 1995 -- indeed is descended almost directly from overtly fascist elements in American politics. Much of its political and "legal" philosophy is derived from the "Posse Comitatus" movement of the 1970s and '80s, which itself originated (in the 1960s) from the teachings of renowned anti-Semite William Potter Gale, and further propagated by Mike Beach, a former "Silver Shirt" follower of neo-Nazi ideologue William Dudley Pelley.21
Though the Patriot movement is fairly multifaceted, most Americans have a view of it mostly through the media images related to a single facet -- the often pathetic collection of bunglers and fantasists known as the militia movement. Moreover, they've been told that the militia movement is dead.
It is, more or less. (And the whys of that, as we will see, are crucial here.) But the Patriot movement -- oh, it's alive and reasonably well. Let's put it this way: It isn't going away anytime soon.
The militia "movement" was only one strategy in the broad coalition of right-wing extremists who call themselves the "Patriot" movement. What this movement really represents is the attempt of old nationalist, white-supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies to mainstream themselves by stripping away the arguments about race and ethnicity, and focusing almost single-mindedly on their underlying political and legal philosophies -- which all come wrapped up, of course, in the neat little Manichean package of conspiracy theories. In the process, most of their spokesmen carefully eschew race talk or Jew-baiting, but refer instead to "welfare queens" and "international bankers" and the "New World Order".
Forming militias was a strategy mainly aimed at recruiting from the mainstream, particularly among gun owners. It eventually fell prey to disrepute and entropy, for reasons we'll explore in a bit. However, there are other Patriot strategies that have proved to have greater endurance, particularly "common law courts" and their various permutations, all of which revolve around the idea of "sovereign citizenship," which makes every white Christian male American, essentially, a king unto himself. The movement is, as always, mutable. It includes a number of "constitutionalist" tax-protest movements, as well as certain "home schooling" factions and anti-abortion extremists
As I explained it in the Afterword of In God's Country:
...[T]he Patriots are not Nazis, nor even neo-Nazis. Rather, they are at least the seedbed, if not the realization, of a uniquely American kind of fascism. This is an overused term, its potency diluted by overuse and overstatement. However, there can be little mistaking the nature of the Patriot movement as essentially fascist in the purest sense of the word. The beliefs it embodies fit, with startling clarity, the definition of fascism as it has come to be understood by historians and sociologists: a political movement based in populist ultranationalism and focused on an a core mythic ideal of phoenix-like societal rebirth, attained through a return to "traditional values." As with previous forms of fascism, its affective power is based on irrational drives and mythical assumptions; its followers find in it an outlet for idealism and self-sacrifice; yet on close inspection, much of its support actually derives from an array of personal material and psychological motivations. It is not merely an accident, either, that the movement and its belief systems are directly descended from earlier manifestations of overt fascism in the Northwest -- notably the Ku Klux Klan, Silver Shirts, the Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nations. Like all these uniquely American fascist groups, the Patriots share a commingling of fundamentalist Christianity with their ethnic and political agenda, driven by a desire to shape America into a "Christian nation."22
Griffin, in The Nature of Fascism, appears almost to be describing the Patriot movement two years before it arose, particularly in his description (pp. 36-37) of populist ultra-nationalism , which he says "repudiates both 'traditional' and 'legal/rational' forms of politics in favour of prevalently 'charismatic' ones in which the cohesion and dynamics of movements depends almost exclusively on the capacity of their leaders to inspire loyalty and action ... It tends to be associated with a concept of the nation as a 'higher' racial, historical, spiritual or organic reality which embraces all the members of its ethical community who belong to it."
But by remaining in this "groupuscular" state, the Patriot movement cannot be properly described as full-fledged fascism. Certainly it does not resemble mature fascism in the least. My friend Mark Pitcavage explains:
..."[T]hough it definitely has nationalistic and volkische elements," the Patriot movement does not meet "the key standard: a corporatist-statist authoritarianism. Indeed, it often seems antithetically opposed to such arrangements (and often believes that this is the arrangement the U.S. government has)."
What this view, while accurate, misses is Paxton's point: Fascism, by nature, is essentially mutative. Italian, German and Spanish fascism all lacked any corporatist-statist leanings in their developmental stages as well -- and indeed could have been described as antithetically opposed to authoritarianism. The wheat bundle which is the central image underlying the word fascismo, after all, suggested a national unity in which all parts had a voice and a role. In the end, this image was a travesty.
A second missing characteristic might be more telling: leadership under a central, authoritarian figure. The lack of such a personage is what leads Chip Berlet to define the Patriot movement as "proto-fascist." Berlet, an analyst at the Cambridge, Mass., think tank Political Research Associates, says: "This is a kind of right-wing populism, which historically has been the seedbed for fascist movements. In other words, if you see fascism as a particularly virulent form of right-wing populism, it makes a lot more sense. It's missing a couple of things that are necessary for a fascist movement. One is a strong leader. It doesn't mean they couldn't get one. But until they get one it isn't fascism."
Berlet takes little comfort in the difference in terms: "This is one trigger event away from being a fascist movement," he says. "There's no guarantee it'll go that way. You would need a very charismatic leader to step forward. But it could happen at any time."
The Patriot movement certainly is in a down cycle, and has been since the end of the 1990s. Its recruitment numbers are way down. Its visibility and level of activity are in stasis, if not decline. But right-wing extremism has always gone in cycles. It never goes away -- it only becomes latent, and resurrects itself when the conditions are right.
And during these down periods, the remaining True Believers tend to become even more radicalized. There is already a spiral of violent behavior associated with Patriot beliefs, particularly among the younger and more paranoid adherents. As Griffin suggests, we can probably expect to see an increase in these "lone wolf" kind of attacks in coming years.
But there is a more significant aspect to the apparent decline of the Patriot movement: Its believers, its thousands of footsoldiers, and its agenda, never went away. These folks didn't stop believing that Clinton was the anti-Christ or that he intended to enslave us all under the New World Order. They didn't stop believing it was appropriate to pre-emptively murder "baby killers" or that Jews secretly conspire to control the world.
No, they're still with us, but they're not active much in militias anymore. They've been absorbed by the Republican Party.
They haven't changed. But they are changing the party.
Next: VI: Crossing the Lines
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June 22, 2010 | nakedcapitalism.com
By Gonzalo Lira, a novelist and filmmaker (and economist) currently living in Chile and writing at Gonzalo Lira
I lived in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship-I can spot a fascist police-state when I see one.
The United States is a fascist police-state.
Harsh words-incendiary, even. And none too clever of me, to use such language: Time was, the crazies and reactionaries wearing tin-foil hats who flung around such a characterization of the United States were disqualified by sensible people as being hysterical nutters-rightfully so.
But with yesterday's Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project decision (No. 08-1498, also 09-89) of the Supreme Court, coupled with last week's Arar v. Ashcroft denial of certiorari (No. 09-923), the case for claiming that the U.S. is a fascist police-state just got a whole lot stronger.
First of all, what is a "fascist police-state"?
A police-state uses the law as a mechanism to control any challenges to its power by the citizenry, rather than as a mechanism to insure a civil society among the individuals. The state decides the laws, is the sole arbiter of the law, and can selectively (and capriciously) decide to enforce the law to the benefit or detriment of one individual or group or another.
In a police-state, the citizens are "free" only so long as their actions remain within the confines of the law as dictated by the state. If the individual's claims of rights or freedoms conflict with the state, or if the individual acts in ways deemed detrimental to the state, then the state will repress the citizenry, by force if necessary. (And in the end, it's always necessary.)
What's key to the definition of a police-state is the lack of redress: If there is no justice system which can compel the state to cede to the citizenry, then there is a police-state. If there exists a pro forma justice system, but which in practice is unavailable to the ordinary citizen because of systemic obstacles (for instance, cost or bureaucratic hindrance), or which against all logic or reason consistently finds in favor of the state-even in the most egregious and obviously contradictory cases-then that pro forma judiciary system is nothing but a sham: A tool of the state's repression against its citizens. Consider the Soviet court system the classic example.
A police-state is not necessarily a dictatorship. On the contrary, it can even take the form of a representative democracy. A police-state is not defined by its leadership structure, but rather, by its self-protection against the individual.
A definition of "fascism" is tougher to come by-it's almost as tough to come up with as a definition of "pornography". The sloppy definition is simply totalitarianism of the Right, "communism" being the sloppy definition of totalitarianism of the Left. But that doesn't help much.
For our purposes, I think we should use the syndicalist-corporatist definition as practiced by Mussolini: Society as a collection of corporate and union interests, where the state is one more competing interest among many, albeit the most powerful of them all, and thus as a virtue of its size and power, taking precedence over all other factions. In other words, society is a "street-gang" model that I discussed before. The individual has power only as derived from his belonging to a particular faction or group-individuals do not have inherent worth, value or standing.
Now then! Having gotten that out of the way, where were we?
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project: The Humanitarian Law Project was advising groups deemed "terrorists" on how to negotiate non-violently with various political agencies, including the UN. In this 6-3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court ruled that that speech constituted "aiding and abetting" a terrorist organization, as the Court determined that speech was "material support". Therefore, the Executive and/or Congress had the right to prohibit anyone from speaking to any terrorist organization if that speech embodied "material support" to the terrorist organization.
The decision is being noted by the New York Times as a Freedom of Speech issue; other commentators seem to be viewing it in those terms as well.
My own take is, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project is not about limiting free speech-it's about the state expanding it power to repress. The decision limits free speech in passing, because what it is really doing is expanding the state's power to repress whomever it unilaterally determines is a terrorist.
In the decision, the Court explicitly ruled that "Congress and the Executive are uniquely positioned to make principled distinctions between activities that will further terrorist conduct and undermine United States foreign policy, and those that will not." In other words, the Court makes it clear that Congress and/or the Executive can solely and unilaterally determine who is a "terrorist threat", and who is not-without recourse to judicial review of this decision. And if the Executive and/or Congress determines that this group here or that group there is a "terrorist organization", then their free speech is curtailed-as is the free speech of anyone associating with them, no matter how demonstrably peaceful that speech or interaction is.
For example, if the Executive-in the form of the Secretary of State-decides that, say, WikiLeaks or Amnesty International is a terrorist organization, well then by golly, it is a terrorist organization. It no longer has any right to free speech-nor can anyone else speak to them or associate with them, for risk of being charged with providing "material support" to this heinous terrorist organization known as Amnesty International.
But furthermore, as per Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, anyone associating with WikiLeaks-including, presumably, those who read it, and most certainly those who give it information about government abuses-would be guilty of aiding and abetting terrorism. In other words, giving WikiLeaks "material support" by providing primary evidence of government abuse would render one a terrorist.
This form of repression does seem to fit the above definition of a police-state. The state determines-unilaterally-who is detrimental to its interests. The state then represses that person or group.
By a 6-3 majority, the Supreme Court has explicitly stated that Congress and/or the Executive is "uniquely positioned" to determine who is a terrorist and who is not-and therefore has the right to silence not just the terrorist organization, but anyone trying to speak to them, or hear them.
And let's just say that, after jumping through years of judicial hoops, one finally manages to prove that one wasn't then and isn't now a terrorist, the Arar denial of certiorari makes it irrelevant. Even if it turns out that a person is definitely and unequivocally not a terrorist, he cannot get legal redress for this mistake by the state.
So! To sum up: The U.S. government can decide unilaterally who is a terrorist organization and who is not. Anyone speaking to such a designated terrorist group is "providing material support" to the terrorists-and is therefore subject to prosecution at the discretion of the U.S. government. And if, in the end, it turns out that one definitely was not involved in terrorist activities, there is no way to receive redress by the state.
Sounds like a fascist police-state to me.
Selected Comments
on the ball patriot:June 22, 2010 at 7:18 pmMikhail Sergeyevich: June 22, 2010 at 7:54 pmGreat post!
The answer is YES!
The Holder decision, historically pivotal, is the deceptive fascists taking freedom and democracy off of their sleeves and boldly coming out of the closet.
The rule of law in scamerica is a bought and paid for selectively enforced scam from top to bottom.
Election boycotts are in order as a 'vote of no confidence' in this over the top crooked government.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet
i on the ball patriot: June 22, 2010 at 10:31 pmTERRORIST!!! (kidding)
jumpjet: June 22, 2010 at 7:30 pmGot the joke, regarding the real terrorists …
The common denominator of all terrorist groups world wide is that they have ALL been severely fucked over by global corporate imperialism (the real terrorism) and the corporate imperialists either want their resources or their cheap labor and so they naturally resist the imperialist tyranny. Wouldn't you want to protect you and yours if foreigners invaded and pillaged your country? Like in Sri Lanka - home of the 'designated terrorists', the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) - where hundreds of thousands of women toil in fear in sweat shop conditions to make clothing for the logo lemming (Gap, Banana Republic, etc.) scamerican public at TWENTY EIGHT CENTS A FUCKING HOUR, with no benefits and NO representation!
The real terrorists are the wealthy elite and their corporate butt sucking sell out pols in Washington.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Gonzalo Lira: June 22, 2010 at 8:57 pmVery good- you've successfully labeled the problem.
Now what do you intend to do about it?
jumpjet: June 22, 2010 at 10:01 pmIdentifying the problem is often half-way to the solution.
Toby: June 23, 2010 at 12:47 amTrue enough! Well said. Thank you, very much, for your insights. Observation and classification should always be the first steps.
albrt: June 22, 2010 at 7:41 pmThis is a rapidly accelerating problem worldwide. What are we going to do about it?
Boycott the vote. Turn off our TVs. Tell our politicians we're not playing along any more. In short, turn our backs on this system. It's going to be messy, but we have to go through it if we want a renewal of human culture and civilization, and if we want these things to last more than another century.
If not you, then who? (And that applies to all of us.)
doc holiday: June 22, 2010 at 7:50 pm>what do you intend to do about it?
He doesn't have to do anything about it – he lives in Chile. The question is what are the rest of us going to do about it?
My answer is that I didn't have children, and I went to law school so I would have a good chance of being among the last ones with a measure of civil freedom. As it turns out leaving the country after the 2004 elections probably would have been a better choice, but that's hindsight.
john: June 22, 2010 at 7:52 pmYes, yes, yes!
Also see: The Rubin Influence Runs Deep in the Obama Administration
http://desperadosoutpost.com/2010/02/09/the-rubin-influence-runs-deep-in-the-obama-administration/1. Cantwell says that Congress and the Obama administration are just watching it happen. The Washington state Democrat is among the most outspoken members of the Senate when it comes to calling for tough new regulations to rein in Wall Street."
2. And as head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Obama named Peter Orszag, who served as the first director of Rubin's Hamilton Project."
…to serve alongside Furman at the NEC [Obama hired] management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003… blah, blah, blah…
Svend: June 22, 2010 at 7:53 pm> As it turns out leaving the country after the 2004 elections probably would have been a better choice, but that's hindsight.
Sigh. I remember that feeling. I remember the opposite feeling in 2008 and now I will remember feeling duped. Alas, too late to marry a Canadian.
jumpjet: June 22, 2010 at 8:34 pmThe dollar standard covered up what is really a decaying, degenerate political system.
So, what am I going to do about it? Leave. Good bye. God bless my Irish mother for having the foresight to extend citizenship to me.
aet: June 22, 2010 at 10:17 pmFilthy quitter. Good riddance.
Svend: June 22, 2010 at 10:25 pmEasy come, easy go?
DownSouth: June 22, 2010 at 7:57 pmMost, I'll miss the charm of my countrymen. We're a lovable, warm bunch.
aet: June 22, 2010 at 8:13 pmThe ironical part is that, just as in Chile, it is the libertarians, with all their flowery rhetoric about liberty and freedom, who are the überchampions of the police state.
Frederich von Hayek and Milton Friedman were unwavering in their praise of Pinochet, Chile's brutal military dictator.
Tao Jonesing: June 22, 2010 at 10:31 pmSo-called "libertarians".
Whose arguments gain most of their force from the bayonets of the State militia.Toby: June 23, 2010 at 1:11 amIt always amazes me that libertarians are incapable of recognizing that Hayek's and Friedman's authoritarian actions fully repudiate their stated libertarian beliefs. When you combine that fact with the fact that the libertarian free market ideal is based on an obvious fiction (that individuals are the primary economic actors, not corporations), libertarianism is revealed as the hoax that it is. Libertarianism is nothing more than an Edward Bernays style propaganda campaign to dupe classical liberals into supporting corporate feudalism (aka, neo-liberalism). And it has worked brilliantly.
bob goodwin: June 23, 2010 at 1:04 amGood points, but the fiction is deeper than that. There can never be, nor has there ever been a 'free' market. There is no such thing as a rational individual, and certainly none that are perfectly informed about all past, present and future events. We are not machines. Our decision making, if we can call it that, is rooted in emotion. I mean even the core idea that accumulating material possessions and being richer than the other guy is a rational behaviour, is a biased assumption. It never motivated me, and I am not alone in that.
The only real 'truths' are emergent and therefore dependent on resident forces and other phenomena, are the consequences of relationships between systems. It is in relationships that we understand, to at best a limited extent, how the world 'works.' The way we struggle to control nature now is the consequence of ignorance, an ignorance we must correct.
"As in economics, biology posits discreet individual actos, i.e. Genes, behaving to maximize their self-interest, the means to survive and reproduce. Our very understanding of biology, i.e. of life, and in particular of progress in biology, i.e. of evolution, rests on a foundation of competition for survival. [snip]
The view of life as a struggle for survival is woven into our worldview on a much deeper level than Darwinism. In fact, our guiding scientific paradigms can admit no alternative. Competition is implicit in our culture's very conception of the self as an independent entity, distinct and separate from the environment and from other beings. [snip]
Other societies, fast disappearing under the deluge of Western Culture, were remarkably free from the ambient anxiety we know today. It is no coincidence that their social systems were based on cooperation and that their self-definition were not atomistic like ours are, but relativistic: defined in relationship to a greater whole such as family, village, forest, nature." Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity (my emphasis).
I am most certainly not for a world government, but we are one species on a planet we must share with millions of others if we are to survive much longer. Nature does not care about our childish and partisan bickering.
Toby: June 23, 2010 at 1:32 amFreedom stops when you are offering practical support to a stated enemy of the state. This is not a new concept to the 1st ammendment argument. We cannot wish away enemies who have stated their desire to harm our society.
patterson: June 23, 2010 at 1:35 amWhat do you do when the State is the enemy of The People? Or of nature?
(No doubt you'll think my question hyperbole.)
Francois T:Not to deprive Bob of his ability to answer, but I believe that the argument must be that in a democracy, the state can never be the enemy of the people.
Nature is always and forever an externality and therefore is irrelevant, except to the extent that the democratically elected government makes it relevant.
As you can see, it is a position rooted in theory and untainted by reality.
ip:"Freedom stops when you are offering practical support to a stated enemy of the state."
What if the "practical support" in question is about making the enemy realize they should drop the weapons and join the legitimate forms of government?
How do you think the Good Friday accords started? It started when a few courageous people from both sides talked to each other over a long period of time. A certain comprehension emerged, tentative, very fragile, but where there was only pure hatred and desire to kill, something new took hold. Slowly, with leaps and bounds, retreats and defeats, came the realization that talking was better than shooting.
These courageous people also talked to their own. It took time, but at last, people sat at the same table. After long and protracted efforts, History was made.
Nothing of the sort could have happened if the SCOTUS decision had been the law of their land.
How many people would still be dying for lack of "practical support"…for peace?
This edition of the Suppine Court of Amerika® is a national disgrace, period!
No doubt Pinochet was brutal. Not as brutal as most communist dictators, but brutal. Yet, he pursued relatively reasonable economic policy, ultimately stepped down, and Chile is now Latin America's star performer. I have no doubt that, if Allende with his policy trajectory stayed in power, Chile's fate would have been much worse.
DownSouth:
aet:The ironical part is that, just as in Chile, it is the libertarians, with all their flowery rhetoric about liberty and freedom, who are the überchampions of the police state.
Frederich von Hayek and Milton Friedman were unwavering in their praise of Pinochet, Chile's brutal military dictator.
ip:So-called "libertarians". Whose arguments gain most of their force from the bayonets of the State militia.
Yves Smith:No doubt Pinochet was brutal. Not as brutal as most communist dictators, but brutal. Yet, he pursued relatively reasonable economic policy, ultimately stepped down, and Chile is now Latin America's star performer. I have no doubt that, if Allende with his policy trajectory stayed in power, Chile's fate would have been much worse.
Jack Parsons:You have that SO wrong its isn't even funny. I happen to debunk the myth of Chile's performance in ECONNED.
Short version: When Pinochet implemented his "reforms", the result was a plutocratic land grab and a debt stoked bubble that resulted in a near-depression when the bubble burst. Pinochet backtracked massively and implemented Keynesian policies.
And the success of Chile (such that it is) is hardly a tribute to Pinochet. Its biggest export industry is copper, 70% owned by the government. As I note in ECONNED:
The finance minister from the first post-Pinochet government, Alejandro Foxley, claims:
"If you compare the performance of the economy in the best Pinochet years with the performance of the economy [during] democracy, I challenge you to find one single economic or social indicator in which democracy hasn't performed much better."
Even so, the picture for Chile is far less rosy than reported in the United States. Chile has one of the most unequal income distributions in the world, with the top 10% getting over 50% of output. Wages for average workers have fallen since the 1970s despite minimum wage increases. Chile's exports depend heavily on copper (still controlled by the government) and natural resources (wood, fisheries) that are being exploited in excess of sustainable rates. By contrast, manufacturing has dropped from 30% of GDP in the 1970s to 18%.
psh:And, and, and… Chile's economy was very deliberately sabotaged during the 1970-1973 democratic period.
D. Warbucks:Exactly. Economic policy's just pointless noise compared to this.
aet:This is why people have to go to law school to become judges and interpret the law.
Freedom of association doesn't mean what you think. It means freedom for government officials to regard people as guilty by association.
For example, if a lawyer defends a criminal, that makes him a criminal by association. Same idea with a lawyer or doctor for a terrorist.
psh:I do not think that the Court has yet held whether or not the Executive or the Congress may by decree deprive criminal defendants – terrorist or otherwise -of all legal counsel.
Has such a law been proposed?patterson:Ah, yes, of course, my apologies, I will have to say a hundred pledges of allegiance as penance and quake in fear of being disappeared, how foolish I was to doubt my country.
I actually think that an important element in that case was the fact that the defendant promoted access to a forum that is out of the police state's control, namely Geneva. Later this year, a bunch of very competent foreign experts will tear the United States a new one. We can all watch on webcast as US officials eat shit or bluster and get ripped to shreds for breaking their solemn commitments. The much milder Human Rights Committee made fools of the Bush administration. This is going to be much worse.
http://www.un.org/webcast/unhrc/index.asp
Look how the administration is trying to control this process, interposing itself between NGOs and the the UNHCR, choking off press attention. They are running scared.
aet:(war on defense lawyers)
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/27/democrats/index.html
psh:A pity then that you were not there to raise those arguments, or that the counsel arguing the case had not the benefit of your profound legal learning and knowledge.
Or are you refrerring to Breyer's dissent?D. Warbucks:You're not gonna that clerkship kissing government ass here, get busy and take out some judge's dry cleaning or something. Lemme guess: third-tier no-hoper, fated for some white-shoe's cellar job shop.
psh:I'd say with an attitude like aet's, (s)he's destined for a federal judgeship, if not attorney general, and then Supreme Court judgeship.
DownSouth:He has a future as a Gonzales-style mediocrity with nothing to offer but slavish devotion. The Bush dynasty favors omega males like that. They make them do the family's dirty work.
D. Warbucks:I suppose that's all honky dory as long as some elected official doesn't brand aet a "terrorist."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but once some elected official has designated aet a "terrorist," can't they then incarcerate aet and hold aet without due process? No habeas corpus for aet. No right to bail for aet. No right to a trial by jury for aet.
And now, anyone who even speaks to aet can be imprisoned for consorting with a "terrorist."
Fear and terror are what a police state is all about. And how better to inculcate fear and terror in a population than to capriciously and arbitrarily deprive people of their liberty? From there it's just a short step to the "disappearances" and the death squads.
D. Warbucks:No it's even better than that!
If they tell aet to stop killing people, then they are guilty. Why? Because telling that to him legitimizes him since the "taint of [his] violent activities is so great."
aet:I hope that made sense to you…it sure did to me. They shouldn't be called "the Supreme Court" they should be called "the Supreme Geniuses."
bob goodwin:Stop terrorizing me! Gee! Just because I linked to the actual factual ruling in the case.
I'm gonna booglarize you all for this! Booglarize without mercy!
OK let them have it, Doc, both barrels:
bob goodwin:"Correct me if I'm wrong"
you are wrong. If you are caught on a battlefield overseas, then you can be held. If you are in the US you can only be held for a limited time unless there is probable cause or reason to believe that you are an immediate danger to yourself or others.
Tao Jonesing:Please point to a case where a terrorist has been captured within the US and held without due process (I know the Japanese were interned, and I think the courts have ruled that was illegal).
D. Warbucks:If one cannot advise somebody who is labelled a "terrorist" without becoming a criminal for doing so, then what lawyer can represent an accused terrorist without subjecting himself or herself to criminal prosecution? When the "terrorist" is an American citizen, doesn't this mean that the "terrorist's" rights to Due Process have been infringed (this is the Constitutional basis for the right to an attorney, not the Miranda decision)?
aet:First, this is an age of terrorism, which means all the usual legal rules are suspended indefinitely…perhaps forever. Probably forever.
Secondly, are you questioning the motives and sincerity of government officials? No matter–soon that will be a crime. http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/06/16/obama-admin-dont-question-torturers-sincerity/ …if it already isn't
Lastly, the economy is transitioning from a service oriented economy to an economy where the U.S. goes around the world and holds up other countries at gunpoint for the things it needs. In order to run that business efficiently, there needs to be certain rules. Capiche?
TC:This is not an unusual ruling, and roberts does not seem to me to be one to stretch a precedent.
Why not read what they wrote for yourself?
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-1498.ZS.html
I recommend that you read a few of the opinions, as each Justice has their own style. I shall keep my opinions as to their style – or lack thereof – to myself.
I especially recommend the opinions which are unanimous, and there are still some of those. (Well, whatdo you know!)
Doug Terpstra:Wow this sure feels like McCarthyism all over again. Instead of calling your neighbor a communists it's not in vogue to yell terrorist.
D. Warbucks:So now we know where our AWOL DOJ has been under Eric Holder. In addition to keeping GITMO, extraordinary rendition, citizen assassinations, and covert wars running smoothly, it's been tightening Israel and Wall Street's noose on the American people.
This is reminiscent of the weasel definition of "enemy combatant" used to dehumanize people and violate the Geneva Convention at GITMO, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib. So soon after ruling for the Orwellian named 'Citizens United', giving corporations free license to electioneer our "democracy", the Supine Court has now lost all legitimacy. Soon it may rubber-stamp Liebermen's "internet kill switch" and his proposal to arbitrarily strip Americans of their citizenship (at AIPAC's behest?)
Coupled with Arizona's 'show me your papers' law, targeting brown people like carpintero Jesus for now, the provisions are surely in place for illegal violent repression-Blackwater not only in the Gulf, but throughout the homeland. Although relatively benign at present, it could get ugly with the impending collapse of the so-called recovery.
Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio:I wouldn't worry about concentration camps though.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7763
The U.S. doesn't have the train infrastructure to ship people to them.
Rex:It doesn't need one! The great majority of Americans are convinced that they are free. There is little need for overt repression.
In such a setting, the entire country is an ideological concentration camp because the "cultural" forces – MSM, entertainment, religion, nationalism, sport, etc – in civil society – all promulgate the same message: You are Free!
To label such a developemnt FASCISM is inaccurate because 1) the latter was state-driven from the top down; 2) the role of unions is so lacking as not to warrant additional comment. I have coined the term 'MARKET TOTALITARIANISM' to make it explicit on whose behalf and the direction from whence it sprang. The state is merely the hammer, but civil society is the anvil on which its hegemony is based.
anon:"Blackwater not only in the Gulf, but throughout the homeland."
Hmmm. Maybe Blackwater was prescient when they changed their name to Xe. They suspected that in the near future the name Blackwater could have negative associations.
sgt_doom:Be careful what you protest:
Video shows FBI visit to the home of a Palestine solidarity activist
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/06/video-shows-fbi-visit-to-the-home-of-a-palestine-solidarity-activist.htmlscharfy:Well, technically you'd want to refer to America as a Corporate Fascist State, China as a Totalitarian Capitalist State.
Mexico and Pakistan could either be referred to also as corporate fascist states or closely-held oligarchies.
China and the USA have similarly structured ownership model, with the Chinese military owning the majority of the factories there, while the Pentagon actively controls the purse strings of the largest concentrated chunk of capital and is the largest landowner of record.
anon:The wolf makes the rules.
Always been that way. Always will be be.
But we are making progress as a species. The fact that Arar gets heard by the supreme court (yes he lost) and quasi-terrorsist groups (whatever that is) get a day in court to discuss first amendment rights, might be viewed as a positive through a historical lens.
Before you flame me for defending the big bad wolf, understand the history of humankind. It's littered with mans inhumanity to man.
America falls short of ideal routinely, but the underlying construct of America is/was personal liberty.
Someone old and white once said "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
Stay vigilant.
Gonzalo Lira:"The fact that Arar gets heard by the supreme court (yes he lost) and quasi-terrorsist groups (whatever that is) get a day in court to discuss first amendment rights, might be viewed as a positive through a historical lens."
But he did not get his day. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/14/AR2010061402277.htmlscharfy:First of all, Arar did not get his day in court-he was denied a hearing by SCOTUS, and the Second Circuit Appeals decision to dismiss his case was allowed to stand.
Second, the whole point of America was the defense of individual's rights against the encroachment by the state-but that ideal has been eroded with this ridiculous "Global War on Terror".
America used to be a better nation-a shining beacon of true liberty.
The terrible sadness is, it has devolved.
psychohistorian:Thanx for the .
Point taken. He wasn't allowed to sue Ashcroft. But some form of due process was given, however shorthanded. The top of our legal system weighed in.
I'm just trying to place America's behavior into some sort of historical context, as well as against the international civil rights situation.
While the tone of your post seems to imply that America is bad and getting worse, the internment camps of WWII, as well as other nation's current civil rights behavior forces me to evaluate America against the backdrop of reality, not against her ideological underpinnings.
I'm unabashedly pro-American, but certainly think posts like these are merit worthy.
However, gotta be realistic – I certainly wouldn't be able to sue Heads of State in any other countries for punitive damages if they locked me up for a year – would I?
Evaluating America a ideological vacuum is a tough standard to meet.
Gonzalo Lira:As one who has continually referred to America as fascist I suggest you measure current America against the following:
14 POINTS OF FASCISM
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights
The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people's attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice-relentless propaganda and disinformation-were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite "spontaneous" acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and "terrorists." Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism
Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.
6. A controlled mass media
Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes' excesses.
7. Obsession with national security
Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting "national security," and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together
Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite's behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the "godless." A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.
9. Power of corporations protected
Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of "have-not" citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment
Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. "Normal" and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or "traitors" was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.
14. Fraudulent elections
Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.
NOTE: The above 14 Points was written in 2004 by Dr. Laurence Britt, a political scientist. Dr. Britt studied the fascist regimes of: Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile).
scharfy:psychohistorian,
I'm sorry, but I cannot take this list seriously.
Your points 1, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 12 are properly the expression of demagoguery, not fascism.
Your points 2, 4, 6, 12, and 14 are elements of a police-state, be it of the Left or the Right. Your points 7 and 11 would also fit the police-state mold, doing double-duty with demagoguery, as it were.
Your point 8 is a trait of a theocracy, not of a fascist OR communist regime.
Your point 13 would describe more of an oligarchy, elements of which can be found in all regimes, be they democratic, fascist, theocratic, etc.-even communist.
Your point 9 is the only one which is properly fascist.
Your point 10, however, is definitely NOT fascist, as true Mussolini-style fascism treats labor unions as corporatist elements of society. All fascist regimes have been friends of labor unions-its the oligarchies and the aristocracies who have had adversarial relationships with trade unions.
Note, too, that I make a distinction between control of the citizenry (the police-state), and the organizing principle of the citizenry under this repression (fascism). Many of these points confuse the two issues, turning the traits into blunt instruments rather than sharply distinctive characteristics.
Bottom line, this list strikes me more as a Leftist wish-list of things hated, rather than as a serious definition of fascism.
Thank you for your comment, but sorry to shoot down your points.
GL.
Jack Parsons:I'll bite and tell you what I think regarding your points..
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
Not so much recently, on the whole. Pro-American sentiment, regarding the citizenry, seems low relative to the previous regimes. Rally round the stars and stripes in the deep south maybe. Not so much in blue states.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights
Again, kind of split. Child labor laws, working conditions, disabled persons laws, civil rights equality (legally anyway), all are on paper and the US does ok on these fronts.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
Score one for you. War on Terror. Nuf said
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
Score another one for you.
5. Rampant sexism
Compared to middle east, asia, or south america – the US is second only to Europe. Womens suffrage and women's lib is American to the core. Our women are more educated and liberated than most
6. A controlled mass media
Yes and no. the big boys yup – but the internet means free speech has never been more free. There's no Pravda here. Our journalists aren't TOTALLY bought off.
7. Obsession with national security
Yes
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together
You'll probably disagree, but I'll say no way. Our ruling elite pray to the altar of money. Religiously diverse nation from my view. I'd bet you disagree.
9. Power of corporations protected
Oh yea.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
Me thinks labor and unions have pretty good pull here. Minimum wage, though low, exists. Unemployment, welfare. We aren't a nation of sweatshops or 18 hour work days, comparatively
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
No sir. We prize our brainiacs. Are we france with regards to the Arts? no. But plenty of authors, movies, opera, plays etc..
12. Obsession with crime and punishment
Hmmmmm… could go either way. America loves giving a second chance – but we incarcerated an entire generation of black males in the 80's and 90's.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
Ok. We are bad. The worst. No. But we need some improvement here.
14. Fraudulent elections
I'm sure you'll site the 2000 election ipso fact, but I submit that our country has the most open election system in the World. I think we score high here.
Thanks for the input. That's my take
psychohistorian:"Rampant Sexism": in a different way. The conflation of sex and violence seems to be a hallmark of the Dominator Cultures: US, Rome, Japan, Germany (think Weimar), not so much Britain (except for the caning bit).
patterson:Since the hierarchy of comments does not allow me to respond to Gonzalo Lira and scharfy I will do it here.
GL, I sure wish you would have read down to the bottom of the list to the note about where the list came from. Let me repeat it:
NOTE: The above 14 Points was written in 2004 by Dr. Laurence Britt, a political scientist. Dr. Britt studied the fascist regimes of: Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile).I posted it to expand on the discussion of the fascistic aspects (IMO) of our current government or socio-political whatever that brings us continual war, un-prosecuted financial rape and now some form of ecological disaster totally rolled out by the private sector with sovereign nations on the sidelines (IMO). I think our current malaise is best described succinctly as theocratic fascism personally.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
scharfy says that #1 does not apply currently and I think our two wars and ongoing Manifest Destiny delusions didn't go away when Obama came to office.2. Disdain for the importance of human rights
scharfy says view of # 2 is split but doesn't say what with. and I say the trend is fairly negative.3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
sharfy says we got examples and I would agree.4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
sharfy says this is true and I ask why is there never any question of our imperialistic militarism?5. Rampant sexism
sharfy says we are better than others and I agree but to say that patriarchy is threatened in the US is laughable.6. A controlled mass media
sharfy says the situation is mixed with still a "free" internet. sharfy says that we have no Pravda here and I LOL and wonder how history will characterize Fox.7. Obsession with national security
Everyone agrees but we aren't even doing the basics to secure our ports….all kabuki, all the time.8. Religion and ruling elite tied together
sharfy is right in that I disagree that he thinks that the Gawd of money and religion are different. Both are faith based and while there are well meaning religious folk, too many lemming followers drink the associated fascist koolaid.9. Power of corporations protected
Oh yea says sharfy and I would say that they continue to increase.10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
sharfy says we are comparatively ok but ignores the freight train effect of globalism that is just starting to be felt in America.11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
While this does not seem to be the case I would add a new bullet point to whatever history calls what we have now that speaks to the hypocritical treatment of science.12. Obsession with crime and punishment
While sharfy says it might not be obsession I think the obsession is really about control. I would like for there to be more obsession with the punishment of crimes that are not currently being focused on.13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
My position on this is that since control of the world stems from us we must be at the top of the fetid heap (so to speak)14. Fraudulent elections
Sharfy says we have the most open elections in the world. S/he didn't say honest however and that is where it is obvious that criminality is afoot…..why isn't there an open source voting machine?Whatever we have folks is sucky and getting worse. Call it what you will but duck when the SHTF.
Toby:Comparison of Canada and the U.S. on rights:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/14/arar/index.html
Cindy6:That's actually not true. Have a look at, for example, "Hierarchy in the Forest" by Christopher Boehm, or "The Ascent of Humanity" by Charles Eisenstein (even better). There are reams of examples all attesting to the fact that in hunter-gatherer societies and even in smaller sedentary tribal groupings, the 'sheep' make the rules, and the would-be alphas were 'ruled.' Boehm calls it 'inverse hierarchy.'
Our beloved system, the system we think of as nature itself, as a veritable embodiment of 'The Law of the Jungle,' is, in terms of homo sapien's life on this planet, actually an aberration. And it's killing us, and many ecosystems, too.
don:Great post!
I always believe that the endgame for America is either an authoritarian state or being broken down into several smaller republics.
aet:Cuba is labeled a state sponsor of terrorism. A few months ago I was in Havana and had a discussion with a US citizen. He told me that he was on his 6th visit to Cuba, where in his work with a religious group he was providing aid to citizens of Cuba. Would this be considered aiding terrorism? Probably not. But since Cuba is considered a totalitarian state by the US State Dept., then one must also consider all citizens of Cuba to be agents of the state, since in totalitarian states no one is outside the state. So in this respect maybe it could be considered to be aiding the state and thus aiding terrorism.
As an aside. The individual I spoke with advised me not to go out on the streets at night. It wasn't safe, he said. Of course I knew that was rubbish. Good I did, since the night life in Havana was quite enjoyable.
Skippy:"Terrorists" , "freedom-fighters", a rose by any other name would still smell the same.
This Law may stand, but the question of what exactly the Law captures in its net of words is a question for the Courts hearing the "Charges of the Future".
I still don't see a problem with this Law.
But I cannot see that it will do any great amount of good either, other than stir up some bees in some bonnets.ABC:Not to worry, religion is just the psych-ops branch.
Skippy…Try that same trick with out ideological cover.
D. Warbucks:What's new here? The Supreme Court has already upheld civil commitment, sex offender registries, prisoner abuse, immigrant gulags etc. Etc. The US already has more people in jail per capita and in absolute numbers than any othe country in the world. We already abolished habeas corpus for non-citizens. Police state? Old news….
aet:Exactly. Although, one minor correction. The government can do all of that to U.S. citizens too. In any part of the world. And torture. And kill them with drones.
DownSouth:Every State is a police state, as every state is a creature of the Laws. So what else is new?
But do not look to the laws to establish morality, Laws cannot establish morality: they can only maintain what's there already, in the hearts of the citizenry.
Morality is in the control of each individual.
Not in the command of the King, simply because it is such.And don't be confusing Law with morality: for the Law is a matter of State, and the State is an inhuman dragon, covered with glittering scales, hard scales, scales which are actually people.
aet:Whoa!
That is a gross over-simplification, a half-truth at best.
The whole concept of the state's use of violence seems to be totally lost on you.
aet:The concept may have been but the tear gas batons and cuffs felt real enough, all right, i understood the cklank of the cell door….so what?
i on the ball patriot:ABC, why should the Court not uphold lawsaws passed by democratically-elected Legislatures?
Please remember where the Court found this power to strike down such so-called "unconstitutional laws"…(hint: it is not in the Constitution)!
Personally, if the Law is bad, you should complain to the people who wrote the law directly,not go crying to a Judge to throw out the results of the last election….
aet:aet says; "ABC, why should the Court not uphold lawsaws passed by democratically-elected Legislatures?"
ROFL Funny comment, you are either drunk on the Kool Aid or you are selling it.
at says further; "Personally, if the Law is bad, you should complain to the people who wrote the law directly,not go crying to a Judge to throw out the results of the last election…."
Errr … the electoral process is as big a non responsive to the will of the people scam as the rule of law. Those who vote, and those who constantly tender remedial plans to the corrupt system, and complain to it, only serve to legitimize, validate, and keep in power that corrupt system. You only aid, abet, and assist in your own exploitation and the death of your own spirit.
I repeat: you are either drunk on the Kool Aid or you are selling it.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
i on the ball patriot:It seems that you have more confidence in your vision of what the "popular will" may desire, than I do in mine.
My girl Prudence often keeps me from going out where the evidence and atmosphere gets too thin to support me….
When things get dicey, me mates and i,putit up for a vote as to what we oughts to do.
Got a better system, have you?
Then out with it.Toby:Yes, stop drinking the Kool Aid, dump your system instilled girl Prudence (she's a phony, wearying, worrying slut), and stop banging your head against the wall of TSTS - Too Sleazy Too Save - and then engage in election boycotts as a 'vote of no confidence' in this over the top crooked government and a constitutional rewrite outside the system.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Peripheral Visionary:The most pernicious argument is that there is no alternative to the current way. Of course all status quos will argue this, they are hardly going to press for their own downfall! And in that education and the vast majority of the media are organs of that status quo, there are many who truly believe there is no alternative, an overwhelming majority in fact. And yet an old status quo once had it that the world was flat, and most believed it. A cliche I know, but an important one none the less. Less well know is that it took almost 5 years for the mainstream to accept that manned flight was possible, after the Wright brothers had proved it so.
If there were no alternatives, that would mean there will never again be any meaningful change. To think that is to think history has peaked, that we've worked it all out, etc. That is transparently absurd.
There are indeed alternatives, and we would be wise to consider them deeply. We need desperately to reform our money system, embrace all technologies that are good for sustainability (regardless of their effect on 'profit'), revolutionize education, and much else besides.
In the end human social systems tend to petrify. R. H. Tawney said of this that "Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrification." To my eyes that is happening right now, and very quickly. Of course, in the bullet-quick media of 24 hour nooz and rapid turnover it must feel like a snail's pace to most, but historically this is break-neck stuff.
D. Warbucks:If you can go on television (or in this case, on a public blog), and say "We are living in a police state", you're not living in a police state.
Skippy:Of course it's not a police state! Police states would be tapping your internet phone lines.
Rex:Intel is more important, than body's before a court.
Skippy…fuzzy freedom lets them decide the out comes from a distance.
Skippy:Skippy, feel free to just ignore this, but some of your posts are just a bit too cryptic for me to decipher.
"Intel is more important, than body's before a court."
Intel the company or the short form of intelligence?
I can't find a reason for the comma.
Body's would mean belonging to the body.On the net grammatical or spelling mistakes are usually ignored, but after juggling the various possibilities, it still doesn't make sense to me.
… and the end tags almost always seem like semi-random computer-generated word strings.
It could just be something I'm missing.
Gonzalo Lira:Ex-Military both DOD and private. Intelligence and yes we belong to the body political via the judicial system (Rule based/herding mechanism) or intelligence gathering has priority over prosecution, hence the fuzzy freedom, not unlike enigma was utilized during WWII.
Skippy…
Sundog:First of all, I don't live in the U.S., and don't intend to even though I could.
Second, if people like Joe Lieberman get their way, I will still be able to say the things I wrote in this post-but you who live in the U.S. will not be able to read it.
aet:Bruce Ackerman, "An increasingly politicized military"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ackerman-mcchrystal-20100623,0,7659730.storyMac McClellan, "Louisiana Police Pull Over Activist at Behest of BP"
http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/06/BP-louisiana-police-stop-activistRodney Balko, "Another Marylander Arrested for Recording the Police"
http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/21/another-marlyander-arrested-foBalko is consistently good on domestic security issues such as the militarization of police and abuses in the criminal justice system.
http://www.theagitator.com/
http://reason.com/people/radley-balko/articlesAndrew Bissell:RE:Politicization of the US Officer Corps.
A greater threat to the Republic, I think, than this restriction upon whom you may speak to..
D. Warbucks:Balko is a libertarian, clearly his articles are clever lies meant to disguise his pro-police-state sympathies.
Marco Antonio Moreno:Here's a little red meat for all you blood-thirsty lovers of torturing innocent Canadians:
(from Maher Arar's account of his torture: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1027-23.htm )
"The beating started the following day. Without no warning…(long pause as he fights tears) without no warning the interrogator came in with a cable. He asked me to open my right hand. I did open it. And he hit me strongly on my palm. It was so painful to the point that I forgot every moment I enjoyed in my life. "
" Syrians released me and they clearly stated through the ambassador in Washington that they did not find any links to terrorism. I was not charged in any country including Canada, United States, Jordan and Syria. Since my release I have been suffering from anxiety, constant fear, and depression. My life will never be the same again. "
Hugh:Great post!
The neoliberal economic model is a dictatorship
Benefits the Rich: Only 0,1% of people winGlobal wealth held by millionaires rose by 19 percent to $39 trillion. The number of millionaire households, or those with at least $1 million in investable assets, excluding primary residences, expanded to 10 million from 8.6 million a year earlier. The 0.15% of world population!
However, poverty is a reality in America, just as it is for millions of other human beings on the planet. According to the US Census Bureau, 35.9 million people live below the poverty line in America, including 12.9 million children.
It's the dictatorship of Economic's Model
Dear Gonzalo, I write from Chile
aet:"And if the Executive and/or Congress determines that this group here or that group there is a "terrorist organization", then their free speech is curtailed-as is the free speech of anyone associating with them, no matter how demonstrably peaceful that speech or interaction is."
I agree with the overall tenor of your post. We have a surveillance state, and the blurring and blending of government and corporations is the very essence of the Mussolini definition of fascism. I would add in corporatist kleptocracy but that's just me. I bring up the citation above because it isn't quite right. Roberts distinguishes between association which is covered by the 1st Amendment and support and coordination which is not.
"The Court of Appeals correctly rejected this claim because the statute does not penalize mere association with a foreign terrorist organization. As the Ninth Circuit put it: "The statute does not prohibit being a member of one of the designated groups or vigorously promoting and supporting the political goals of the group. . . . What [§2339B] prohibits is the act of giving material support" (pp.40-41 of the pdf)
Personally, I think this is a distinction without a difference. There is no metric to say where association leaves off and coordination or aid begins. This creates a chilling effect on any contact with a group that makes it on to the State Department's terrorist list. In something I wrote on this, I also noted that many groups that were once terrorist according somebody's definition made the transition to mainstream status. The problem is that in restricting expert information on non-violent alternatives this transition can be greatly impeded, increasing the duration and severity of violent action. This is the very opposite of general defense Roberts invokes.
aet:I disagree…I think that the distinction does indeed make a difference.
I note that being a member, and standing up in public an arguing for the group's cause, is also not prohibitied.
It may be that some are misreading the ratherlimited and defined scope of "material assistance"as set out in the statute.
It would be different if it were otherwise, though., that is, if membership or advocacy (without advice) were also prohibited – at least,that is the Court'simplication, is it not?.Gonzalo Lira:And the hypothetical benefits of such postulated peace-mongering apparently was not enough to persuade the Court to overturn a piece of Legislation deabted and passed by Congress and signed by the President.
I just do not find it all that shocking.
I suppose I'll suspend judgment until I see what kind of prosecutions, if any, are brought under the statute.i on the ball patriot:Hugh, thank you for reading my post with such care.
Your comment high-lighted certain distinctions which I chose to ignore so as not to lose sight of the main point-but you are right on all of them.
Your bit about corporate kleptocracy? On the money.
Your point that Roberts distinguished between association on the one hand and "material assistance" on the other? Right again.
However, your further point-that Roberts was drawing a distinction (between association and "material assistance") without a difference-is precisely why I didn't flesh out the issue. From my point of view, Roberts' distinction was like saying, "It's okay to have six eggs, but you're not allowed to have a half-dozen eggs"-nonsensical.
Finally, your point that this creates a chilling effect on speech is the one issue I would disagree: I would argue that this decision doesn't create a chilling effect on speech, but rather, it outright criminalizes speech. After all, how can anyone distinguish between "association" and "speech"? Between "speech" and "material assistance"? Someone here in the comment section pointed out that giving directions to the nearest subway station-clearly speech-could be interpreted as "material assistance"-too true.
But who determines if this innocent speech is crosses into the realm of the criminal "material assistance"? The state, without even the possibility of redress.
Hence my view that this decision is a big one on the road to a fascist police-state in America.
Sorry for going on. Hope this clarifies my position. GL.
patterson:Hugh, you have it right!
It is an intentionally vague ruling meant to be chilling and intimidating of Free Speech and selectively enforced as needed to effect that intimidation.
It is also meant to be intentionally divisive in furthering the perpetual conflict scheme, as it will now cause all of the butt sucking system twits to come out of the woodwork and say divisive bullshit things like;
"I note that being a member, and standing up in public an arguing for the group's cause, is also not prohibitied."
I"t may be that some are misreading the ratherlimited and defined scope of "material assistance"as set out in the statute."
"It would be different if it were otherwise, though., that is, if membership or advocacy (without advice) were also prohibited – at least,that is the Court'simplication, is it not?."
All disingenuous crap designed of course to suck you in and dissipate your energies which might otherwise be better spent in revealing the class warfare of the rich decimating the middle class and the masses and exposing the fascist scum bags that are their lackeys.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Gonzalo Lira:You should be sure though that when you advocate, you don't provide anything that could possibly be construed as assistance, or that the advocacy itself couldn't be construed as assistance.
Also, advocating for such a group openly is like painting a bullseye on your back.
Ottawan:too true, unfortunately.
jp in tahoe:One of the salient bits of "fascism" is the power of paramilitary forces. Are scary paramilitaries pervasive in the USA? Do security guards count? The tea party guys?
"Corporatism" and/or "pluralism" are sufficient to describe This part of history. On secod thought, "pluralism" is kinda Orwellian.
Charles:Um, almost sounds a little snarky but, "The Terrorists Have Won"?
doc holiday:If by terrorist you mean Israel, then yes. Their 9/11 operation was quite successful. The United States is about to attack Iran, after successfully removing Saddam and introducing chaos to Iraq.
Yes, the terrorists won. Completely.
aet:Richard Nixon: "I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue."
Alexander Haig: "That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude. Also, a tactical misrepresentation."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
BP CEO Tony Hayward on Sunday (many weeks ago) disputed claims by scientists that large undersea plumes have been set adrift by the Gulf Oil Spill and said the cleanup fight has narrowed to surface slicks rolling into Louisiana's coastal marshes.
Toby:Friedrich Nietzsche: "The poets lie too much."
Transor Z:Are you actually saying that poets are less honest than politicians, or that humans lie? If it's the first then that's a bizarre claim. If it's the second, well duh!
Ronald:Your piece is very weak in treating the syndicalist piece of fascism, Gonzalo. For reference, Noam Chomsky is a syndicalist.
Asserting the existence of the regimentation and discipline ethos that is a hallmark of fascist regimes is an absolute joke in light of America's deteriorating work ethic and pathological levels of narcissistic individualism.
The "police-state" doesn't have the manpower, will power, or political mandate to act on domestic espionage in anything like a systematic fashion. More than that, the hackers and young people are many steps ahead in technological sophistication.
There will always be abuses and yes, creepy incursions into personal freedoms by law enforcement and government. It's good to be on guard against that but… perspective please.
But I'll let Bogie do my talking for me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46pQwwF8uww&feature=relatedMatt:"The United States is a fascist police-state." or military state but either or it has been this way for a very long time.
The list is long but I will only mention a few beginning with our treatment of Japanese Americans during the War not only putting them in camps but taking their homes and land and the Supreme Court upheld the right of the government to imprison Americans based on race, the Anti-Communist 50's,60's,70's was a world wide campaign against humanity finally generating the Vietnam experience with over 50K Americans and 500K wounded and now the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest.
Thanks for your point of view but its old news but I am always glad that someone is reaching out trying to educate and make a difference.
Gonzalo Lira:I read the first decision, and it says on the first page:
The authority to designate an entity a "foreign terrorist organization" rests with the Secretary of State, and is subject to judicial review.
And it also makes references to a case where an organization appealed its designation as a foreign terrorist organization (i.e. got judicial review) but the designation was upheld.
Not saying I agree with the direction of the fed govt on "terrorists" but it does seem like you do have judicial review… am I missing something?
Transor Z:Matt,
You're missing the Arar denial of cert., which is why it's key.
There's the illusion of judicial review-but in an unequivocal case (such as the Arar case), there is in fact no review or redress.
GL
EmilianoZ:Gonzalo, review by the U.S. Supreme Court is extremely rare. They deny cert something like 99% of the time (no exaggeration). Arar got his case reviewed by the 2nd Circuit. The 2nd Cir.'s not exactly chopped liver in the U.S. federal judicial system.
i on the ball patriot:There's some truth in that post.
Noam Chomsky says: "propaganda is to democracies what the bludgeon is to dictatorships" .
I think we're entering an era where propaganda is starting to fail. That necessarily means: they must go back to the bludgeon. The supreme court is paving the way for that.
addicted:Very astute comment!
Yes, freedom and democracy, which the closet fascist bullies (that's all they really are - bullies who label their victims terrorists!) have been disingenuously wearing on their sleeves, now comes off, and the fascists come out of the closet of secrecy and into the open.
The internet has exposed them like shining a light on cockroaches and they now scurry and try to bludgeon anything in their path.
It will have the reverse effect, it will awaken people to the propaganda illusion that they are living in.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Sanford Calef:Another interesting aspect that struck me when reading the NYTimes editorial. This same supreme court has identified money as "speech" (hence preventing corporations, a fictitious "person", from donating during elections is breaking their first amendment rights). So would that make the US crackdown on monetary donations to terrorist organizations illegal? According to this same Supreme Court, wouldn't that be the government breaking real "persons" First Amendment Rights?
Whats up with the Supreme Court prostituting themselves to the Executive?
Bernard:I'm dismayed that Citizen Obama has let torture, Gitmo, and all the rest of Bush era policies stand. I'm disappointed Cheney isn't in the Hague defending his crimes against humanity.
But we're not a fascist state yet.
That will happen when Ms Palin or whatever crazy Teabagger takes over in a few years. Everything is in place for an American Dear Leader to run roughshod over the rest of us.
Liberals are such wusses. Should be an easy coup.
Paul Tioxon:the denial of reality doesn't change reality. no matter what some say, there are enough of reality based thinkers to dispute and call "a spade a spade." that's the part i find most fascinating about the "oh, it's not what you think!" bs. the constant dismissal, denial and denigration of a fact based "reality" is so consistent and astounding. this constant denial to any other concept that might dare questions some's right to fantasy/faith based thinking at the expense of fact based reality. a form of anti intellectualism, thinking is too dangerous to be left to fact based reality. lol
that old "faith based" concept of "truthiness" highlighted by Stephen Colbert is just one part of larger concept of never admitting errors. however adamant the "faith based theorists" are, the reality of facts can't be questioned for every without having the consequences we see today. the constant questioning is so much the point. any tolerance of the "inexactitudes" of the faith based "reality" reinforces the whole farce.
never forget how irate Alan Simpson became when Bill Maher asked him if he really believed some "inanity" that was clearly impossible. the indignation of being questioned on his "beliefs" was the most fascinating aspect of Simpson's . such audacity to question your beliefs. such self importance, such pomposity. i understand the kind of people who held such "truthiness" as unreachable and remote to the reality most of us live in.
just the conversation itself legitimizes such an argument. i don't expect these faith based believers ever to admit much less acknowledge any version of "truth" but their own.such. the fact based truth is like the surf endlessly pounding the sandcastles of this fantasy based "truthiness."
those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither and usually lose both.
for 30 years or more, America has been under the influence of such pomposity and "unquestioned" inanity. the loss of freedom of speech is just but one of the many "gifts" of such "faith based truthiness."
Francois T:The central argument of fungibility of resources, the freeing up of cash and or materials due to the aiding and abetting of the terrorist organization, even if you consult with them to bring them into the family of civilized nations, so to speak, is a false one, previously used against the mafia. Criminal defense attorneys have pointed this to the absurdity that it pursues. Namely, if you see any contribution to an illegal organization as contribution to its capacity to operate illegally, you are aiding and abetting. The defense was, in the case of the Philadelphia Mafia figures, do they shop for food, do they call one another on the phone, send letters through the mail, drive Cadillacs, or Lincolns, buy Esso gas for the cars? Then, they are being aided and abetted by the Acme, Ma Bell, The US Postal Service and General Motors and Ford and Standard Oil of NJ.
They are taking their presumed blood money and spending it and those that accept it are deriving the benefit of the illegal activities just as if they participated. They provide communication, transportation and oh yes, where do they deposit their cash? PSFS? Needless to say, trying to pressure one point of contact of a terrorist organization, begs the question, of who else do they transact with, no matter how mundane. It would seem to the benefit of any sovereign state, that a non profit peace maker, consulting with the Tamil Tigers or The IRA or Hamas, in order to get them to stand down from their violence would be a rational activity to be supported. Apparently not, indicted are the peace makers, for theirs is kingdom of special rendition in the bowels of corporate Global America.
Vladimira Lenina:Awesome post Don Gonzalo!
Contrary to the cloud-shovelers of pissy-mamby pseudo-theories, your definitions are OPERATIONAL and easy to observe for confirmation or ejection.
To me, the key resides in this pearl:
What's key to the definition of a police-state is the lack of redressPure brilliance!
Great post! Switzerland works that way as well.
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22 June 1995
Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15. Excerpted in Utne Reader, November-December 1995, pp. 57-59.
The following version follows the text and formatting of the Utne Reader article, and in addition, makes the first sentence of each numbered point a statement in bold type. Italics are in the original.
For the full article, consult the New York Review of Books, purchase the full article online; or purchase Eco's new collection of essays: Five Moral Pieces.
In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.* * * 1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.
That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.
This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.
Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.
11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.
In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.
In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
* * * Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances - every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.
Umberto Eco (c) 1995
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Some time ago, The Herald newspaper, Glasgow, Scotland, published a letter in which I criticised the war in Iraq and suggested that the neo-cons in the US were a ruling neofascist elite. A trail of letters followed with one correspondent stating that I was making a serious error labeling them neofascist. He called them "tragically over-zealous apostles of liberal democracy." Following the lively Herald debate, I was invited by The Surface to contribute this article.
Jim Macgregor
My interest in America began on the day after my 16th birthday; November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was driven along Deeley Plaza to his death. Within days I watched Lee Harvey Oswald being led out to his execution before the assembled media, and I was completely hooked on American politics. Four decades, thousands of books, and a million conspiracy theories later, we still don't know the truth about those astonishing events in Dallas. Like the all-too-many assassinations played out in front of the rolling cameras, American politics can be difficult to comprehend.
My own comprehension of American politics was helped enormously by a profound little essay, Escaping the Matrix, written by American, Richard K. Moore. [1] Moore, parallels the political situation in America with the Wachowski brothers' film, The Matrix: "The defining dramatic moment in the film occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises 'the truth and nothing more.' Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality - something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected.
What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In the Matrix world, true reality and perceived reality exist on entirely different planes." In Moore's Matrix metaphor, doses of 'red pill' allow us to comprehend the true reality of what is happening as opposed to an illusion deliberately created by the wealthy, ruling elite. As Morph tells Neo, "The Matrix is the world that was pulled down over your eyes to hide you from the truth… As long as the Matrix exists, humanity cannot be free."
Television and radio stations, news channels and most newspapers are owned by the ruling, wealthy elite who control the matrix. They dispense "blue pills" in the form of matrix propaganda, deliberately formulated to conceal the truth. While there are honourable journalistic exceptions, generally we have to look elsewhere for the 'red pill'. Thankfully, it is becoming more readily available and less difficult to find. In this article I will quote from, and refer to, numerous 'red pill' articles and books.
It has personally taken many years of slow awakening from the matrix narcolepsy for me to find an inverted reality where what I thought was the truth was a dream, and what I have awakened to is the reality of a true nightmare. Too many people believe fascism is only about goose-stepping, jack-booted Nazis. Too many people believe that American democracy is so strong that fascists could never take control of America. If you are sympathetic to those views, I invite you to consider the possibility that you are mistaken - invite you to sample a small dose of 'red pill'.
My first dose of 'red pill' came in the early 1970s when I returned from voluntary service in Central Africa. I had worked alongside American Peace Corps volunteers and would sit with them under the beautiful African night sky, discussing that devastated continent and the reasons for the starvation and death that surrounded us there. On my returned from Malawi, I discovered that a number of those supposedly dedicated Peace Corp volunteers were US intelligence agency personnel. What they were doing in Africa was not, in actual reality, delivering American aid or goodwill, but fermenting huge trouble with their clandestine activities. I later read the 'red pill' book, Killing Hope, [2] about US Military and CIA Interventions since WWII and realised it was describing American activities which exhibited the very worst elements of fascism.
Perhaps the only one way to understand fascism in America today is to trace its historical development there over the last century. "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived. But if we rise up to meet it head-on, then history need not be re-lived. When we as a people fail, or worse yet, refuse to stand up to the injustice of historical past, then that injustice becomes an ever-present constant in our daily lives." - Cia Bannar, film maker and human rights activist.
According to the matrix, powerful men of wealth who controlled America in colonial days, were replaced after the revolution by genuinely democratic representatives of the people. Every American school-child is taught that the fifty five "Founding Fathers" prepared a solid foundation of democracy upon which the Great Republic was built, and that Abraham Lincoln's stirring Gettysburg address on "government of the people, by the people, for the people" meant what it said.
'Red pill' reality is very different, however as Richard K. Moore writes [3]: "The legislatures, unfortunately, mostly appointed their delegates [Founding Fathers] from among their local wealthy elite. The delegates then ensconced themselves in secret session and proceeded to betray the charter under which they had been assembled. They discarded the Articles, and began debating and drafting a wholly new document, one that transferred sovereignty to a relatively strong central government. The delegates reneged on the States that had sent them, and took it upon themselves to speak directly for "We the People". Thus begins the preamble to their Constitution. In effect they accomplished a coup d'etat. They managed to design a system that would enable existing elites to continue to run the affairs of the new nation, as they had before under the Crown, under a Constitution that for all the world seems to embody sound democratic principles. The system was consciously designed to facilitate elite rule and that is how it has functioned ever since."
It was not until 1850 that most white adult males could vote; a time when the ideal of the "poor boy made good" was coming to be seen as the American dream. One such dreamer was John D. Rockefeller, born in the US in 1839, the son of a quack conman who sold expensive "miracle cures" (Seneca oil) to people with cancer. Rockefeller inherited his father's business ethics and became a war profiteer during the Civil War. While hundreds of thousands were dying for their cause, he amassed wealth by selling liquor at vast profit to Federal troops. With the proceeds Rockefeller bought into small oil concerns and by 1870, had enough money to set up the Standard Oil Company.
Over the next thirty years, Rockefeller also bought up railroads and banks and acquired a near monopoly of the US petroleum industry. By the turn of the century, he was counted among the richest men in the world. He financed numerous fine churches and institutions, including the University of Chicago. Matrix perception was of an extremely generous, Christian benefactor and philanthropist, but actual 'red pill' reality was very different. Journalist Ida Tarbell wrote that Rockefeller was involved in many illegal activities and in her book, The History of The Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, [4] exposed how big corporations were controlling the press and government. "Its power [Standard Oil] in state and federal government, in the press, in the college, in the pulpit, is generally recognized."
In the early 20th century, President George W. Bush's great grandfather, Samuel Bush, owned a steel factory producing rail-car parts. His son, Prescot Bush, attended the prestigious Yale University where in his final year in 1917, he was inducted into the secret society known as "The Order of Skull and Bones". To this day a mere fifteen young men of "good birth" are pre-selected each year to Skull and Bones from the entire 11, 250 student population of Yale. Rockefellers were also members of Skull and Bones.
Skull and Bones has its roots in the teachings of German philosopher, George Hegel.
Prescot Bush was a member of Skull and Bones with his friend, Roland "Bunny" Harriman, son of the massively wealthy Harriman family. This Harriman - Bush connection is discussed in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, [5] "The Harrimans would become the sponsors of the Bushes, to lift them onto the stage of world history."
Several years after leaving Yale, Prescot Bush was made director of Harriman's bank; Brown Brothers Harriman. It was the largest private investment bank in the world (the bank's website today boasts reserves of almost $3 billion).
In the early 20th century, John D. Rockefeller and his friends, including Harriman, had taken control of American politics and politicians. Using their wealth from banking, oil, railroads and weapons manufacture, Rockefeller and Harriman had politicians in their pocket. They placed individuals such as Samuel Bush in senior government positions, enabling the siphoning off of huge amounts of federal funds.
With World War 1 raging in Europe, large profits were there for the taking. Sam Bush, the rail-car parts manufacturer, with no relevant experience whatsoever in weapons procurement, was made chief of ordnance for the War Industries Board. Bush was handed government control of small arms and ammunition purchasing and liaised with big armaments firms to supply the war effort. Rockefeller owned the Remington Arms Company and received huge government orders from Bush. Remington supplied over half of the ammunition and 69% of the rifles used by the US in World War 1. Tarpley and Chaitkan [5]write: "The US and British arms companies owned by these international financiers, poured out weapons abroad in deals not subject to the scrutiny of any electorate back home. The same gentlemen later supplied weapons and money to Hitler's Nazis."
In 1921, the elite founded the American branch of the Council on Foreign Relations - CFR - an organisation which, to this day, controls the world economy and most of its politics. According to its website, CFR is "A non-partisan center dedicated to a better understanding of the world and the foreign policy choices facing the US and other governments." In 'red pill' reality it is a front for the elite to use their wealth to subvert nation states. In the 1930s they invested in German corporations which began building Hitler's war machine. Walter Lipmann, a young man on President Woodrow Wilson's team was charged with running the CFR. Lipmann, a man of extreme views, spoke of "the rascal multitude" of the people as "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a herd which has to be controlled by an intellectual specialist class."
President Wilson also appointed John Edgar Hoover as Assistant Attorney General. Hoover was another man with extreme views and instigated the war on the "red scare" where espionage and sedition acts were used to launch a campaign against radicals and any left wing organizations. Thousands of innocent citizens were arrested and many forcibly shipped to Russia. J. Edgar Hoover was later appointed Director of the national police organization the FBI, and served as such from 1924 until his death in 1972. The US newspaper industry was controlled by the elite and Hoover ensured that the newly emerging radio stations would voice no opinion critical of the government - Hoover controlled the issue of broadcasting licences.
In 1926, Prescot Bush was made vice president of Harriman's Union Banking Corporation of New York. It was becoming a Bush family affair - President of the bank was Bert Walker (George W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather). Union Banking had been set up by Harriman in partnership with the immensely wealthy Thyssen family of Germany. Funds were transferred back and forth to Germany through a Thyssen subsidiary bank in Holland. Fritz Thyssen was the prime sponsor of Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement.
"Hitler… who promised a "New World Order"… had the backing of banks, industrialists, and transnational corporations, including those controlled or directed by America's leading families, and the father of George H. W. Bush." R. Joseph, America Betrayed [6].
Tapley and Chaitkan write [5], "In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the USA. The Harriman International Co was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States. This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises."
John Foster Dulles and his brother, Alen Dulles, were the lawyers looking after Bush family fortunes and investments in Nazi Germany. John Dulles would later become the US Secretary of State and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Allen Dulles would become head of the CIA.
Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co. built large oil refineries in Germany for the Nazis and continued to supply them during the Second World War. In October 1942 the Bush banking operations in New York were investigated by the US government under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The capital trading stock of the Union banking Corporation, owned by Prescot Bush, Bunny Harriman and three German Nazi executives, was seized.
A number of prominent and wealthy Americans, including the Bush and Rockefeller families, helped support and build the fascist regimes of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, with nearly 70 percent of the money that flooded into Germany during the 1930s coming from investors in the US. Henry Ford was building cars and trucks in his German factories for Hitler's war effort, while simultaneously making huge fortunes at home in America. Hitler awarded Ford the German Grand Cross for his efforts. IBM was similarly involved.
In the inter-war years the Kennedy clan, another of America's rich elite families, was making huge fortunes on the stock market and through bootlegging. Joseph Kennedy, multi-millionaire father of president to be, John F. Kennedy, was a friend of President Roosevelt and made large contributions to his election funds. Roosevelt appointed Kennedy Ambassador to Britain in early 1938 and while there, he befriended Viscountess Nancy Astor, the Nazi supporter. As fiercely anti-communist as they were anti-Semitic, Astor and Kennedy, like so many of their contemporaries, looked upon Hitler as a possible solution to both these "world problems."
A small cabal of immensely wealthy families, friends and golf acquaintances who had either financed and armed Hitler or otherwise supported his rise to power, would go on to dictate almost every facet of American politics and global economics in the second half of the 20th century.
In 1951, Prescot Bush reclaimed Union Bank from the US Alien Property Custodian and went off to the Senate as the Republican for Connecticut. (He was re-elected in 1956 and again in 1963.) In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower, yet another old friend and favourite golf partner of Prescot Bush, became President and filled his government with Rockefeller men. His first Secretary of State was John Foster Dulles, the Bush family lawyer from the Nazi days. Brother, Allen Dulles, who had legally represented the Nazi Thyssen bank in Holland, was appointed US Intelligence chief in post war Germany. Back in 1937, Dulles had been hired by Prescot Bush to "cloak" his Union Bank accounts. Effectively, any information in post-war Germany regarding Bush and American complicity with the Nazis was now silenced.
Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, was groomed for Presidency from early days by the elite. In 1950 Nixon chaired the House Un-American activities committee investigating "The Communist threat" in America and with great relish re-commenced the "red scare" witch hunt of earlier years. This witch hunt, where thousands of decent, honest citizens were hounded unmercifully, was enthusiastically continued by Senator Joe McCarthy.
In the election following Eisenhower's two terms, Joe Kennedy's son, John F. Kennedy, defeated Richard Nixon. Kennedy immediately drafted Rockefeller men in to his administration. Dean Rusk, head of the Rockefeller Foundation, was installed as Secretary of State. His vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover.
Kennedy seriously upset plans the elite had to "neutralize" President Castro of Cuba. The elite blamed Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs disaster and told him to "muster his courage" for both a second attempt at invading Cuba, and an escalation in Vietnam. Kennedy appeared reluctant on both counts and fired Allen Dulles director of the CIA and his CIA deputy, Charles Cabell. Cabell's brother, coincidentally, was mayor of Dallas in 1963 when Kennedy was shot. One commentator wrote, "Kennedy was beginning to act like a man who thought he was President of the United States." Lyndon Johnson was sworn in immediately after Kennedy's assassination and, incredible as it now seems, drafted the sacked Allen Dulles onto the controversial Warren Commission to "investigate" Kennedy's assassination.
Johnson served as President until 1969, when Richard Nixon was installed. (JFK's brother, Bobby Kennedy, who had a good chance of taking the Presidency in '69, was also assassinated.)
Five years later, in 1974, Richard Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign following trumped up charges allegedly organised by Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller, Governor of New York. (Rockefeller had been "elected" Governor in 1958 and re-elected in '62, '66 and '70. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican Presidential nomination in 1960, '64 and '68.) Nelson Rockefeller's ego was straining the elite's most precious asset of anonymity to its limit. He believed the Presidency should be his and, despite being constantly advised otherwise, made every attempt to get it. Nixon, under pressure to nominate him as his Vice President, refused and chose Gerry Ford instead.
Prescot Bush's son, George W. H. Bush, a Yale Skull and Bones member like his father, was an insider and member of the Nixon administration. Bush, who had his own off-shore oil company in the Gulf of Mexico, was made director of the CIA.
Nixon resigned the Presidency after the Watergate affair blew up. (Numerous commentators now suggest that he had no involvement with the break in at Democratic Party offices and believe that Watergate was nothing more than a contrivance designed by the elite (Rockefeller) to be found and to point the blame at Nixon and bring him down.) Gerald Ford was installed as President of the United States without ever having faced the electorate. He chose Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. Two unelected individuals were now running the country with Rockefeller now a mere heartbeat away from the position he so coveted. During his time as President, Ford survived two assassination attempts.
Throughout the Nixon and Ford presidencies, Henry Kissinger, a Rockefeller man and influential council member of Rockefeller's Council on Foreign Relations, was in charge of US foreign policy. Kissinger had been on the private payroll of Rockefeller as his personal "foreign policy adviser" for many years.
Jimmy Carter (Democrat) followed Gerald Ford from 1977-81, then Ronald Reagan (Republican) from 1981-89. Prescot Bush's son, George W. H. Bush, a Yale Skull and Bones man, followed Reagan from 1989 until '93.
Bill Clinton, Democrat, followed Bush from 1993 to 2001 and he too filled his cabinet with the elite's place-men. Clinton was taught in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, by his favourite historian, Professor Carroll Quigley. In 1966, Quigley had written a book [7] on the elite's control of world affairs which had caused them a considerable degree of anxiety. While Quigley's book was entirely sympathetic to their aims of world domination, the elite were extremely upset that it allowed ordinary people a forbidden glimpse of the workings of the matrix:
"The powers of financial capitalism have another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. The system is controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert… and by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. I know of the operations of the network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life been close to it and many of its instruments… My chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
The elite reacted quickly when the book was published, ensuring it was pulled from the bookshelves nationwide and "recalled faster than exploding Easter bunny" Although it was never published again, second hand copies are available from Amazon.com.
Following two-term Clinton, came the grandson of Prescott Bush (and son of President George H. W. Bush); Skull and Bones member George Walker Bush. Four years later, Bush became a second term president when he defeated Democrat Senator John F. Kerry. Kerry, almost unbelievably, is yet another member of Skull and Bones.
In the US Presidential elections it matters little to the elite if the successful candidate is Democrat or Republican; indeed it is all part of their absurd deception and pretence of democracy since they control both. The deception does not come cheap; during the most recent presidential primary season, $360 million of elite money went to George W. Bush, and $318 million elite money to John Kerry. (Each received a further $74.6 million from the public purse.) A candidate independent of the elite has no chance whatsoever of reaching the White House. Ralph Nader in 2004, for example, had the relatively paltry sum of $4 million dollars to launch and conduct his campaign.
Interesting though the background of each of the individual millionaire US Presidents might be, the real power in America lies with the Rockefeller dynasty and the three organisations it controls: The Council on Foreign Relations, which helped build the Nazi war machine in the 1930s - Chairman emeritus; David Rockefeller. The Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller. The Bilderberg club formed in 1954 - most active member, David Rockefeller.
These three organisations are interlinked and, in 'red pill' reality, work in tandem to achieve world domination by the elite. Members of each have been listed by Robert Gaylon Ross in his book, Who's Who of the Elite [8]. He writes: "They occupy key positions in government, the mass media, financial institutions, multinational corporations, the military, and the national security apparatus." The two families who are really in charge are the Rockefellers and, in the UK and Western Europe, the House of Rothschild. In 1998 Rockefeller was reputedly worth $11.5 trillion and Rothschild over $100 trillion.
The Bilderberg club (named after the hotel in which its first meeting was held) is the high chamber of the high priests of capitalism. Every member pledges absolute secrecy on what has been discussed at annual meetings. The online Asia Times, 2003, provides a very rare glimpse into the Bilderberg club in a column headed "The Masters of the Universe" [9]: "Expert strategists attend to polish and reinforce a virtual consensus; an illusion that globalization, defined under their terms - that what's good for banking and big business is good for everybody else - is inevitable and for the greater good of humankind. Bill Clinton in 1991 and Tony Blair in 1993 were invited to attend and duly 'approved' by the club before they took office.
"The club mingles central bankers, defence experts, press barons, government ministers, prime ministers, royalty and international financiers. Guests this year, along with Rumsfeld and Perle (US Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is also a member) included David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Queen Beatrix, Queen Sofia and King Juan Carlos of Spain. The Bilderberg does not invite - or accept - Asians, Middle Easterners, Latin Americans, or Africans." (Prime Minister Tony Blair attended when Shadow Home Secretary and his close friend, adviser and confidant, Peter Mandelson now attends the Bilderberg club. Mandelson, now Britain's man in Europe, is also a member of Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission.)
David Rockefeller and his long time right hand man, Henry Kissinger, are the major players in this cabal. It has been said of Kissinger that "only the ignoramus and sycophant can glorify this man whose heartlessness and guile wrought terrible agony and human loss in the third world." A small, but typical example of Kissinger's contempt for humanity came when he was Secretary of State in the Ford administration in 1976; a time when the slaughter of so-called Marxists in Argentina, and the erasure of much of Argentina's left, was at its height. Trade union organisers, student activists and their families and sympathisers were systematically tortured and by the end of the dictatorship, about 30,000 people had been disappeared. The US gave both money and high-level political endorsement to the generals in their murderous campaign. Kissinger congratulated the Junta on their "very good results": "Our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old fashioned view that friends ought to be supported… The quicker you succeed the better."
In his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchins [10] has pieced together some of the most odious of Kissinger's actions which "merit the basis of prosecution for crimes against humanity, war crimes and offences against International Law."
This then, is the man who has had such incredible power and influence in America, indeed the entire world, for the best part of forty years. Perhaps the fact that President George W. Bush appointed him chairman of the commission instructed to investigate the September 11 attacks, tells us something. (Kissinger quickly resigned when he learned it would require giving details of his business connections.)
Today, Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission web pages present the following mission statement on its website [11]: "The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Europe, Japan and North America to help think through the common challenges and leadership responsibility of the democratic industrialised area in the wider world."
Apart from this matrix lie, the website provides some interesting reading and unwittingly gives us a small dose of 'red pill' reality: on the 25th Anniversary meeting on December 1, 1998, tributes and toasts to David Rockefeller were the order of the day. I have edited the worst excesses, but they can be read on the website, if so desired, in their full, sycophantic glory.
George Berthoin, former European Chairman of The Trilateral Commission: "We know, for sure now, that the future will involve more than the three corners of our triangle [North America, Western Europe, Japan]. Technology has abolished time and space as the traditional basis of governance. A new form has to emerge and with more actors. The qualities of innovation we demonstrated for the last twenty-five years are challenged again. The moment is coming when it will be clear to all, in particular to us - friends and members of the Trilateral Commission - that the best, maybe the only way, to defend the interests, traditions, and hopes we cherish will be to place them resolutely within the context offered by the disciplines and opportunities of a genuine world order, genuine because created and recognised by all as fair and legitimate. The first global history of mankind is about to start. A new window is opening. The challenge is clear."
Henry Kissinger: "David [Rockefeller], he is now over 80, has done great things in his life, but he is a little bit naïve. He believes that any good idea can be implemented. And, by God, you have to be a little bit innocent to do great things. Cynics don't build cathedrals. David's function in our society is to recognize great tasks, to overcome the obstacles, to help find and inspire the people to carry them out, and to do it with remarkable delicacy… David, I respect you and admire you for what you have done with the Trilateral Commission. You and your family have represented what goes for an aristocracy in our country - a sense of obligation not only to make it materially possible, but to participate yourself in what you have made possible and to infuse it with the enthusiasm, the innocence, and the faith that I identify with you and, if I may say so, with your family. And so I would like to propose a toast that this be preserved to us for a long time."
On a separate occasion, David Rockefeller stated: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost 40 years… It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards world government. The super national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
Perhaps the best description of how the elite operate comes from the late Senator Barry Goldwater, Presidential candidate of the Republican Party back in 1964. Senator Goldwater, a close friend of both JFK and Joe McCarthy, was considered a saber rattling, extreme right wing conservative. Following his death, the Washington Post wrote: "Unlike nearly every other politician who ever lived, anywhere in the world, Barry Goldwater always said exactly what was on his mind. He spared his listeners nothing." This eulogy appears to be confirmed in one of Goldwater's books, With no Apologies, [12] in which he presents an astonishingly frank exposé of the unfettered power and aspirations of the elite:
"The Council on Foreign Relations has placed its members in policy-making with the State Department and other federal agencies. Every secretary of State since 1944, with the exception of James F Byrnes, has been a member of the council. Almost without exception, its members are united by a congeniality of birth, economic status and educational background. … I believe that the Council on Foreign relations and its ancillary elitist groups are indifferent to communism. They have no ideological anchors. In their pursuit of a New World Order, they are prepared to deal without prejudice with a communist state, a socialist state, a democratic state, a monarchy, an oligarchy - it's all the same to them.
"When we change presidents, it is understood to mean that the voters are ordering a change in national policy. Since 1945, three different Republicans have occupied the White House for 16 years, and four democrats have held this most powerful post for 17 years. With the exception of the first seven years of the Eisenhower administration, there has been no appreciable change in foreign or domestic policy. There has been a great turnover in personnel, but no change in policy. Example: during the Nixon years, Henry Kissinger, a council member and Nelson Rockefeller protégé, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a council member and David Rockefeller protégé.
"Whereas the Council on Foreign Relations is distinctly national, representation is allocated equally to Western Europe, Japan and the United States. It is intended to act as the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States.
"Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller screened and selected every individual who was invited to participate in shaping and administering the proposed New World Order… The Trilateral organization created by David Rockefeller was a surrogate - its members selected by Rockefeller, its purpose defined by Rockefeller, its funding supplied by Rockefeller… Examination of the membership roster establishes beyond question that all those invited to join were members of the power elite, enlisted with great skill and singleness of purpose from the banking, commercial, political and communications sectors… In my view, the Trilateral Commission represents a skilful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical.
"The Trilateral Commission even selects and elevates its candidates to positions of political power. David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski found Jimmy Carter to be an ideal candidate, for example. They helped him to win the Democratic nomination and the Presidency [1977]. To accomplish their purpose, they mobilized the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community - which is subservient to the wealthy of the great tax-free foundations - and the media controllers represented in the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. It was no accident that Brzezinski and Rockefeller invited Carter to join the commission in 1973. But they weren't ready to bet all their chips on Carter. They made him a founding member of the commission but to keep their options open they also brought in Walter Mondale and Elliot Richardson, a highly visible Republican member of the Nixon administration, and they looked at other potential nominees."
Goldwater's testimony is all the more astonishing coming from a man with considerable knowledge of the core of the matrix and who was no radical of the left. Goldwater was the only Republican Presidential candidate not to be the CFR choice for the presidential nomination in the last 50 years.
The elite inner-circle members of the Bilderberg club, Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, conspire to politically, and economically, dominate the entire world under their New World Order, or Globalisation as they now prefer to name it.
Since the Second World War, Rockefeller's Council on Foreign Relations has filled key positions in virtually every administration. Since Eisenhower, every man who has won the nomination for either party (except Goldwater in 1964) has been directly sponsored by Rockefeller's CFR.
Before defining the characteristics of fascism, we should look at the neo-conservatives who run the US government on behalf of the elite. In her book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, [13] Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Calgary, Canada, names current politicians, political advisers, administration and Supreme Court officials, who were followers of the teachings of the fascist Leo Strauss.
Leo Strauss (1899- 1973) was a philosopher at the University of Chicago (built by Rockefeller money) where he taught many of those currently involved in the US administration. Strauss left Nazi Germany in 1934 having been given a Rockefeller Foundation bursary and is considered to be the "fascist godfather" of today's neo-cons.
According to Jeffery Steinberg in Executive Intelligence review [14]: "A review of Leo Strauss' career reveals why the label 'Straussian' carries some very filthy implications. Although nominally a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany (he actually left for a better position abroad, on the warm recommendation of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt), Strauss was an unabashed proponent of the three most notorious shapers of the Nazi philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. Recent biographies have revealed the depth of Heidegger's enthusiasm for Hitler and Nazism.
"The hallmark of Strauss's approach to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run by 'philosophers' who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish 'populist' mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude."
Professor Shadia Drury [15] provides a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of the neocons "Leo Strauss was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics. Public support for the Iraq war rested on lies about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United States - the business about weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious alliance between al-Qaeda and the Iraq regime. Now that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz [Straussian] and others in the war party are denying that these were the real reasons for the war.
"The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss's disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it. The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine… A second fundamental of Strauss's ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons - to spare the people's feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals. The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave… and the wise few over the vulgar many.
"I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny."
Shadia Drury is by no means alone in her desperate concern. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois law school writes [16]: "I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago's Political Science Department by Strauss's foremost protégé, co-author, and literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago… I concur completely with Professor Drury's devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process by Chicago's Straussian cabal.
"Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago became the 'brains' behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his 'lawyers' at the Department of Injustice [sic] are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka 'Feddies'), which originated in part at the University of Chicago.
"According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration… Just recently the University of Chicago officially celebrated its Bush Jr. Straussian cabal. … Only the University of Chicago would have the Orwellian gall to publicly claim that Strauss and Bloom [a Strauss protégé] cared one whit about democracy let alone comprehend the 'ideals of democracy'.
"Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or totalitarians like Ashcroft! The neo-con cabal, currently ruling America and in charge of pursuing the New World Order agenda is, according to Professors Drury and Boyle, "a tyranny of warmongers and unscrupulous elites from an intellectual and moral cesspool."
What are the implications of this "New World Order", or "Globalization" as it is now called? Richard K. Moore [17] writes: "The course of world events, for the first time in history, is now largely controlled by a centralised global regime. This regime has been consolidating power ever since World War II and is now formalising that power into a collection of centralised institutions and a new system of international 'order'. Top western political leaders are participants in this global regime, and the strong Western nation state is rapidly being dismantled and destabilised. The global regime serves elite corporate interests exclusively. It has no particular regard for human rights, democracy, human welfare, or the health of the environment. The only god of this regime is the god of wealth accumulation.
"In two centuries the Western world has come full circle from tyranny to tyranny. The tyranny of monarchs was overthrown in the Enlightenment and semi-democratic republics were established. Two centuries later those republics are being destabilised and a new tyranny is assuming power - a global tyranny of anonymous corporate elites. This anonymous regime has no qualms about creating poverty, destroying nations, and engaging in genocide.
"Humanity can do better than this - much better - and there is reason to hope that the time is ripe for humanity to bring about fundamental changes… We can oust the elites from power and reorganise our economies so that they serve the needs of the people instead of the needs of endless wealth accumulation. This is our Revolutionary Imperative. Not an imperative to violent revolution, but an imperative to do something even more revolutionary - to set humanity on a sane course using peaceful, democratic means."
Bottom line, are the neo-cons driving this agenda neofascist? Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, published research on fascism [18] in which he examined the fascist regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and several Latin American regimes.
Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each fascist State:
Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarceration of prisoners, etc.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists; terrorists, etc.
Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military are glamorized.
Rampant sexism - The government of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
Obsession with National security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
Religion and Government are intertwined - Government in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation are often the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated, or are severely restricted.
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassinations of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
Benito Mussolini - who knew something about fascism - had a more straightforward definition: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Abraham Lincoln stated, "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed."
The small, but ruthless, group of men, the "money power" described by Lincoln, has stolen democracy from the American people. An ever-growing number of informed Americans, however, are fighting a brave, but desperate rear-guard action to retrieve that democracy. Will we give them our total support now, or simply sit back and watch as the entire planet is taken back to the dark ages? "The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing."
Jim Macgregor is a 57 year old retired doctor. For many years he was a family practitioner and visiting Medical Officer to Glenochil Prison, one of Scotland's high security prisons. Through his prison work, he developed a special interest in miscarriages of justice and is a member of the Miscarriage of Justice Organisation. MOJO (Scotland). You can contact Jim at [email protected]
This article was first published at www.surfaceonline.org
References
- Richard K. Moore, Escaping the Matrix, www.cyberjournal.org
- William Blum, Killing Hope, US Military & CIA Interventions since World War II, Zed Books, London. www.zedbooks.demon.co.uk
- Richard K. Moore, Escaping the Matrix - Global Transformation: Why we need it and how we can get it, www.cyberjournal.org
- Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, 1904, McClure, Phillips and Co., (out of print). Converted to electronic format by Nalinda Sapukotana, University of Rochester. www.history.rochester.edu/fuel/tarbell/main.htm
- Webster G. Tarpely & Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorised Biography, (currently in reprint). Electronic format: www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm
- R Joseph, PhD. America Betrayed: Bush, Bin Laden, and 9/11. University Press.
- Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. Macmillan company 1966. Out of print.
- Robert Gaylon Ross, Who's who of the Elite: Members of the Bilderbergs, Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, Ross International Enterprises.
- Pepe Escobar, The Roving Eye, Asia Times online, May 22nd 2003 www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EE22Ak03.html
- Christopher Hitchins, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Verso press, 2001.
- Trilateral Commission website, www.trilateral.org
- Barry Goldwater, The Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater, New York: Morrow, 1979.
- Shadia Drury, Professor of Politics, University of Calgary, Leo Strauss and the American Right, May 1999 Isbn; 0333772296.
- Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive Intelligence Review, March 21, 2003. www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3011profile_strauss.html
- Shadia Drury, May 2003 interview transcript: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.htm
- Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois. 2003 interview, CounterPunch.com, August 2, 2003.
- Richard K. Moore, www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles.html
- Dr. Lawrence Britt article in Free Inquiry journal of secular humanist thought http://www.secularhumanism.org
© 2004.Jim Macgregor All rights reserved.
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March 17, 2009 | Prometheus Unbound
Umberto Eco suggests that there are fourteen signs that a contemporary social movement is veering in the direction of "Ur Fascism." Here are his first four (Glenn Beck, are you listening?):
1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages - in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge - that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ( "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
See the rest of Eco's list here.
Written by santitafarella
March 17, 2009 at 3:17 pm
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"Fascism: Any program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition." --Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Early on during the first term of the Bush presidency many progressives characterized Bush's statements and actions as "fascist" and, for dramatic effect, compared him with Adolph Hitler. While they were reacting to Bush policy, they also recalled that the U.S. government found that Bush's grandfather had illegally aided the Nazis during the 30's. Conservatives responded that the comparison was exaggerated, since Bush had not done the things that Hitler had done, like imprisoning and murdering European jews. Nevertheless, it's clear that it was Bush's fascist leanings that progressives were focusing upon. In comparison with what had came before, a trend toward fascism was seen in the early days of the Bush presidency, and became more pronounced after 9/11.
In 2002, Laurence W. Britt's Fascism Anyone? analyzed seven fascist regimes in order to find the common threads that mark them as fascist: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia. He found 14 common characteristics (reprinted below, with 6 additions by Umberto Eco) and concluded:
"Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not."
We think "maybe not." It's just a matter of degree. Reading the daily news, we come across numerous critics of the Bush Administration who document, point to, or warn about each of the characteristics used to identify a fascist regime. We're presently constructing a Bush Fascist Index, which will consist of 20 characteristics, each multiplied by a "grade" of 1 through 5. Your input is invited. Further analysis of the past as well as future events will likely change the total index score, once it is computed. --Politex, 03.03.05
20 Characteristics Of A Fascist Political Party
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people's attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choicerelentless propaganda and disinformationwere usually effective. Often the regimes would incite 'spontaneous' acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and 'terrorists.' Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.
6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes excesses.
7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting 'national security,' and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elites behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the godless. A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.
9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of have-not citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. 'Normal' and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or 'traitors' was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.
14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.
Here are six more characteristics found in Umberto Eco's "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt," from New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15.15. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
16. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show. [When fascism is employed in a society with democratic tradions, one strand of Newspeak is to use the traditional words, like "freedom," but to give them new meaning. This strategy is also employed when new programs are initiated. --Politex]
17. [As opposed to Ur-Fascism,] the critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
18. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
19. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
20. [The Ur-Fascist leader presents himself as the heroic representative of the characterists of fascism. As such, his image is ubiqutous in the media, and is often photographed in costume in conjunction with images or people that represent the fascist characteristics noted above. --Politex] Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
Feel-Good Dictator
"A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a 'feel good dictator,' a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.
"To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people....As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side.
"Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says....
"...Hitler continued on the easy path of self deception, spurring the war greedily forward. And the German people -- fat with bounty -- kept quiet about where all the wealth originated, he says. Was it a deplorable weakness of human nature or insatiable German avarice? It's hard to say, but imagine if today's beleaguered government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could offer jobs and higher benefits to the masses. 'No one would ask where the money came from and they would directly win the next election.'
Aly says....'It is still important to ask the most fundamental questions, namely how all this happened. What were the most important elements that allowed this criminal regime to thrive? So much came out of the German middle class. That is the most troubling aspect of the history.'
"Aly insists it is always 'much easier to say it was the fault of a small group of elites, the power-crazed SS commanders, or even big businesses' than to point to your own greed." --Spiegel, 03.22.05
Bush Watch is a daily political internet magazine based in Austin, Texas, paid for and edited by Politex, a non-affiliated U.S. citizen. Contents, including "Bush Watch" and "Politex," (c) 1998-2005 Politex. The views expressed herein and the views in stories that you are linked to are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bush Watch. Permission of author required for reprinting original material, and only requests for reprinting a specific item are considered. The duration of the working links is not under our control. Bush Watch has not reviewed all of the sites linked to our site and is not responsible for the content of any off-site pages or any other sites linked to our site. Your linking to any other off-site pages or other sites from our site is at your own risk. Send all e-mail to Politex.
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Oct 4, 2007 | New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
Published: October 4, 2007A few years back, at the height of the jingoistic post-9/11 wave, the dirtiest word in the American political lexicon was "liberal." Everyone from President Bush to Ann Coulter was using it to denote wimplike, Volvo-driving softies too spineless for dangerous times and too given to speaking French.
Liberals were going to hand the country's defense to the United Nations, turn the war on terror into police work and cave to bin Laden's Islamofascism.
As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California declared in 2004: "If you believe you must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism - then you are a Republican."
No matter that none of the above was true. No matter that 20th-century liberal thought, like Isaiah Berlin's, stood in consistent opposition to totalitarianism in fascist or communist form. The nuance-free message served to get the commander in chief re-elected.
In time, the fever ebbed. Iraq imploded, Bush fizzled and the Democrats took Congress. A retooled Schwarzenegger began sounding like a closet Democrat.
Not least, as America bumped down to earth, "liberal" lost the mantle of political insult most foul. Its place was taken by the pervasive, glib "neocon."
What's a neocon? A liberal "mugged by reality," Irving Kristol said. The reality in question, back then, was communism-as-evil, the centrality of military force, the indispensability of the American idea and much else. But that's ancient history. The neocons are the guys who gave us the Iraq war.
They're the guys who, in the words of leftist commentator and blogger Matthew Yglesias, "believe that America should coercively dominate the world through military force" and "believe in a dogmatic form of American exceptionalism" and "favor the creation of a U.S.-dominated 'universal empire.' "
But the term, in these Walt-Mearsheimered days, often denotes more than that. Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy, whatever that may be, although probably involving some combination of plans to exploit Iraqi oil, bomb Iran and apply U.S. power to Israel's benefit.
Beyond that, neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States "on the right side of history."
In short, neoconitis, a condition as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back, has left scant room for liberal hawks. "Neocon is an insult used to obliterate the existence of this liberal position," says Paul Berman, a writer often so insulted.
Liberal interventionists, if you recall, were people like myself for whom the sight in the 1990s of hundreds of thousands of European Muslims processed through Serbian concentration camps, or killed in them, left little doubt of the merits, indeed the necessity, of U.S. military action in the name of the human dignity that only open societies afford.
Without such action in Bosnia and Kosovo, Europe would not be at peace today.
One reluctant liberal interventionist signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that said: "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein." His name was Bill Clinton. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the left has allowed.
For this left, anyone who supported the Iraq invasion, or sees merits to it despite the catastrophic Bush-Rumsfeld bungling, is a neocon. That makes Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and Kanan Makiya and Bernard Kouchner neocons, among others who don't think like Norman Podhoretz but have more firsthand knowledge of totalitarian hell than countless slick purveyors of the neocon insult.
But who cares about such distinctions? Democrats have learned from their nuance-free bludgeoning by Republicans in the 2004 election, and they're reciprocating. I'll see your "liberal" with a "neocon" - and truth be damned.
But distinctions matter. The neocon taste for American empire is not the liberal hawk's belief in the bond between American power and freedom's progress. As for social questions, the gulf is large.
Has Iraq deep-sixed liberal interventionism? Kouchner, a socialist, is now French foreign minister - hardly a sign the credo's dead. He, in turn, is close to Richard Holbrooke, who brought peace to Bosnia and may be secretary of state in a Hillary Clinton administration.
When John Kerry was vilified as a flip-flopping liberal by those armchair warriors, Bush and Cheney, I knew where I stood. When Michnik and Kouchner are neocons and MoveOn.org is the Petraeus-insulting face of never-set-foot-in-a-war-zone liberalism, I'm with the Polish-French brigade against the right-thinking American left.
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In a recent NYT piece, Maureen Dowd summarized reports of a well-funded Bush-backing ad campaign to smear AARP, the senior lobby group, because it's opposing Bush's Social Security plan. Reports in the Washington Monthly and the New York Tiomes piece together the story of drug companies slushing millions into a conservative lobby group that has hired key members of the Bush-backing Swift Boat Vets to spend up to $10 million for ads to bring AARP down. The first such ad recently appeared on the American Spectator web site, saying that AARP was anti-troops and pro-gay. Now, an anonymous e-mailer assures us that someone favoring the AARP position has joined the ad war, sending us a transcript of an upcoming, kinder, gentler (and more relevant) pro-AARP video ad. --Jerry Politex
SCENE: A typical American kitchen in a suburban home. John and Marsha, an attractive couple in their 30's, are reading the morning newspapers while seated at the kitchen table next to an open window.
JOHN: (reading) It says here that President Bush is going to do something about the Social Security problem.
MARSHA: (continuing to read) That's good news. Frankly, I've been worried.
JOHN: But he wants to privatize part of Social Security, which has nothing to do with meeting the predicted shortfall in 2042. Wish there were some way we could tell Bush what we think.
SCENE: While John has been speaking, a large duck has landed on the window sill and is staring at the couple, who continue to read.
DUCK: (looking frustrated) Aarp! Aarp!
MARSHA: I agree. If only we could let Bush know his promise that we could pass our stock savings on to our heirs is factually incorrect.
DUCK: (louder, even more frustrated) AARP! AARP!
JOHN: Oh, Well. I guess we could write a letter to the editor.
DUCK: (shouting and waving his wings) AARP! AARP!
SCENE: While John and Marsha continue to read, a man who looks like Bush in an Uncle Sam costume appears outside, grabs the duck around the neck, and they both exit.
DUCK: AAWK!
VOICE OVER: Don't let this happen to you. Join the good folks at AARP.com to make sure Bush hears you loud and clear!
END
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After Bush was selected to be President by the Supreme Court in 2000, as he made ready to leave Texas for the White House, a reporter asked him how he felt about leaving Texas holding the deficit bag after his six years as Governor. Bush said that was the next guy's problem, not his. By 2008 the U.S. will be left holding the largest deficit bag in history, which promises to be over $3 trillion, $5 trillion if the Bush social security "reform" is passed. According to the Dems, the Bush deficit, created since 2000, places a "birth tax" of $30,000 on each newborn baby.
What Bush did in Texas is nearly the same as what he is doing on the national scale, today; he has added the arms industry to the corporate trough: you begin by providing tax cuts to the weaalthy and weakening consumer and envirnomental protections for the benefit of corporations, calling such actions "tort reform." Then you declare a budget deficit and demand that governmental aid for health care, education, welfare, and housing be cut to make up for lost revenue.
Such policies place tremendous pressure on the poor, so you imply that governmental social policies are really handouts and you appeal to the poor to stand on their own two feet, because that's the American way, because that's "freedom." Then you give government funding to religious organizations to take care of the poor in a much-diminished fashion, and some of those organizations, which you call "faith-based" to muddy the church-state waters, use some of the money given to convert the poor to their particular brand of religion or to create bureaucracies that are not required to follow civil rights governmental guidelines, further diminishing the already diminished governmental money going to the poor, but rewarding those religious orgainzations that helped get you elected.
On the national level, Bush is able to go one step further than he had gone in Texas. Since the U.S. poor can demand its rights as contributing citizens to the wealth and life style of the world's richest democracy, his never-satisfied corporate backers must look elsewhere for its greatest profit from the workers it employs. So, Bush looks the other way as corporations outsource, and he attempts to weaken the immigration laws to allow illegal non-citizens to work for less without the customary workers' protections, hence his State of The Union plan, which he recently discussed over the phone with Mexico's Fox:
"America's immigration system is...outdated, unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country. We should not be content with laws that punish hardworking people who want only to provide for their families, and deny businesses willing workers, and invite chaos at our border. It is time for an immigration policy that permits temporary guest workers to fill jobs Americans will not take."
Apart from screwing the nation's poor citizens, Bush is contributing to the future failure of our country, if Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond is to be believed in his new book, COLLAPSE. He uses Southern California as a microcosm of the U.S.:
"Environmental and population problems have been undermining the economy and the quality of life in Southern California. They are in large measure ultimately responsible for our water shortages, power shortages, garbage accumulation, school crowding, housing shortages and price rises, and traffic congestion. In most of these respects except for our especially bad traffic jams and air quality, we are no worse off than many other areas of the United States." (Ch. 16)
Although Bush cannot be held responsible for all that has gone wrong with our country, his presidency is obviously the most blatant and the most egregious example of selfish, wrong-headed, short-sighted policies that are literally destroying our country. But when he leaves the presidency in 2008, Bush likely will tell a reporter, "That's the next guy's problem." --Politex, 02.04.05
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by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter,
on PBS News HourIf the speech was to be taken literally, then clearly it would imply commitment to some sort of a global crusade vis-a-vis a variety of states with many of whom we have all sorts of mutual concerns, even if we don't like their practical policies. I mean, take a few examples.
Take China; we have a major state instability with China, but China is hardly a democracy. What about the Tibetans?
Take Russia; we have a common stake with regards to terrorism, but what about the Chechens? They're being treated in a tyrannical fashion.
Take an even more complex issue: what about Israel, which is a friend of ours, and its security against Palestinian terrorists? But what about the oppression of the Palestinians and their desire for freedom?
(more) --posted 01.21.05, text of Bush speech
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(text) --posted 01.17.05
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The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2.
Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the "Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles" on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism's principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The clichщ that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.
We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist1 regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.
Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.
For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.
Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people's attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice -- relentless propaganda and disinformation -- were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite "spontaneous" acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and "terrorists." Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.
6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes' excesses.
7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting "national security," and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite's behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the "godless." A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.
9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of "have-not" citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. "Normal" and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or "traitors" was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.
14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.
Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.
Note
1. Defined as a "political movement or regime tending toward or imitating Fascism" -- Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
References
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Cornwell, John. Hitler as Pope. New York: Viking, 1999.
de Figuerio, Antonio. Portugal -- Fifty Years of Dictatorship. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976.
Eatwell, Roger. Fascism, A History. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon, 1970.
Gallo, Max. Mussolini's Italy. New York: MacMillan, 1973.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler (two volumes). New York: Norton, 1999.
Laqueur, Walter. Fascism, Past, Present, and Future. New York: Oxford, 1996.
Papandreau, Andreas. Democracy at Gunpoint. New York: Penguin Books, 1971.
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Verdugo, Patricia. Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death. Coral Gables, Florida: North-South Center Press, 2001.
Yglesias, Jose. The Franco Years. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977.
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