Reply #34: It IS important for people to be cognizant of what is going on [View All]

[RainDog]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Friendly_Fascism_BGross.html


The emerging militarism of friendly fascism is somewhat different. lt is global in scope. It involves weapons of doomsday proportions, something that Hitler could dream of but never achieve. It is based on an integration between industry, science, and the military that the old-fashioned fascists could never even barely approximate. It points toward equally close integration among military, paramilitary, and civilian elements. Many of the civilian leaders-such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Paul Nitze-tend to be much more bloodthirsty than any top brass. In turn, the new-style military professionals tend to become corporate-style entrepreneurs who tend to operate-as Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Savage have disclosed-in accordance with the ethics of the marketplace. The old buzzwords of duty, honor, and patriotism are mainly used to justify officer subservience to the interests of transnational corporations and the continuing presentation of threats to some corporate investments as threats to the interest of the American people as a whole. Above all, in sharp contrast with classic fascism's glorification of violence, the friendly fascist orientation is to sanitize, even hide, the greater violence of modern warfare behind such "value-free" terms as "nuclear exchange," "counterforce" and "flexible response," behind the huge geographical distances between the senders and receivers of destruction through missiles or even on the "automated battlefield," and the even greater psychological distances between the First World elites and the ordinary people who might be consigned to quick or slow death.

What will daily life be like under friendly fascism?

In answering this question I think immediately of Robert Theobald's frog: "Frogs will permit themselves to be boiled to death. If the temperature of the water in which the frog is sitting is slowly raised, the frog does not become aware of its danger until it is too late to do anything about it."

Although I am not sure it can ever be too late to fight oppression, the moral of the frog story is clear: as friendly fascism emerges, the conditions of daily life for most people move from bad to worse-and for many people all the way to Irving Kristol's "worst."

To Fusfeld's trio of more unemployment, taxes, and inflation, however, we must also add a decline in social services and a rise in shortages, waste and pollution, nuclear poison and junk. These are the consequences of corporate America's huge investment in the ideology of popular sacrifice and in the ``hard times" policies that have US "pull in the belts" to help THEM in efforts to expand power, privilege, and wealth.