Abbott Gleason: The hard road to fascism (history repeats?)

[T Roosevelt]

This article was sent to me by a friend in the Marines who voted for *, and has since come around (on his own I might add). It's from an Australian "think-tank" the Evatt Foundation ("Australia's most progressive and independent think-tank").


A turning point for the US?

By Abbott Gleason

Today's anti-liberal revolt looks a lot like 1920s Europe, argues Abbott Gleason.

The United States is at a turning point in its history. Some intellectuals and journalists have compared the destruction of Saddam Hussein with the fall of the Berlin Wall or even the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others - looking to the origins of the Cold War rather than its end - have compared the momentous political and economic changes now underway with the period between 1946 and 1948, when the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union broke down.

But current changes seem deeper, more far-reaching, and at the same time less conclusive than either of these analogies suggests. American power today dominates the world in quite a different way than it did even at the end of the Second World War, when the United States and its European allies faced a powerful and implacable enemy across an increasingly polarised Europe and elsewhere around the globe. At the same time, the American Leviathan is only at the beginning of its crusade - the word seems well chosen - to democratise the world and ensure its harmony with American interests.

A more apt (and troubling) comparison is with the 1920s, when an earlier liberal order collapsed and was replaced by imperial and mega-state regimes.

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[tom_paine]

1. Excellent article

How many different ways to describe the Totalitarian Cloud of Bushevik Darkness that has appeared on our horizon to thicken and darken...