Fascism.com

[politick]

This month's Harpers has a great essay by Lewis Lapham, in which he talks about how ahead of the program we are with fascism in the US, as compared with the fascist gov'ts of the early 20th C., when it was all the rage (including among certain business elements here in the US) as we haven't yet suffered the economic crashes that generally came before the full implementation of fascism.

So Lapham quotes a Umberto Eco essay from 1995 in which he finds several common axioms of fascist govts. They (chillingly) follow:

- The truth is revealed once and only once.
- Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.
- Doctrine outpoints reason, abnd science is always suspect.
- Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.
- The national identity is defined by the nation's enemies.
- Argument is tantamount to treason.
- Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear.
- Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of "the people" in the grand opera that is the state.

Um... Have you seen a more concise description of then and now?

[Neocondriac]

1. It is the playbook......

Of course controlling the vote takes this thing to a whole new level.

[politick]

2. Right

and Lapham goes on to talk about how easy it will be to implement, once the A) next big terror attack or b) economic crash or c) both happen, since we won't have to silence the press, supress the intelligencia, dissuade the bourguoisie from rebelling, quell the arts., etc. His thesis is that fascism already won out in the US, we just don't realize it. That plan to overthrow the Govt worked, without a coup. Pretty fucking scary.

[Angry Girl]

3. Very nice post! Here's also the 14 Characteristics of Fascism

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.

See more here:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=britt_23_2

[thecodewarrior]

5. Yep,

Thats Amerika right now.

[kenny blankenship]

4. Now that it's mentionable in polite society

can we get past the horrified denials heard, even here at DU, when some allusion is made to the jackbooted elephant stomping and dunging in our living room? Bush isn't Hitler, but he is the apex of a Fascist movement, not just the leader of a party or an appointed President (who we hope will be mentioned in history books with a footnote explaining the dubious legitimacy of his administration).
We have a functioning, living, breathing and by all signs a growing Fascist movement within the United States, specifically within the Republican Party which it has taken over in the name of the nexus of corporate and military power. (und tomorrow, zee whole world) It's here, it hates queers, get used to it. One election cycle, supposing even that there are still elections being held "for real" in this country, will not be sufficient to see this movement off to the family plot where German Fascism or Italian Fascism are waiting for it.

[newswolf56]

6. We have been motoring toward fascism since the beginning...

of the anti-Communist witch hunts, which started not in the 1950s (as so many people who are in denial like to self-protectively imagine), but began almost the day World War Two ended. The election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy temporarily put the brakes on this drive toward tyranny, but we all know what happened to JFK. Then Lyndon Johnson -- domestically the most radical president in U.S. history -- defiantly tried to continue the Franklin Delano Roosevelt/JFK program but was sabotaged by the oligarchy, which sandbagged LBJ's radicalism with the Vietnam War. At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement had begun to acknowledge economic equality (and thus class struggle) as a vital part of the quest for racial equality. But in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, even as Robert Kennedy -- the one true heir to the FDR/JFK/LBJ New Deal/Great Society tradition -- was murdered two months later in Los Angeles. Since then fascism has reigned ever more obviously supreme, with the people allowed just enough freedom to perpetuate the myth of American democracy (but never enough freedom to stop the ever-worsening drift toward unabashed oppression). Hence New Orleans: the oligarchy is now merely taking off its "compassionate conservative" gloves to reveal the iron fist of fascism beneath; hence too the paralysis that prevents the Democratic Party from making a proper response.


Edit: date.

[politick]

7. It's like waking up

when I read that. I've understood that these NeoCons and this post 911 govt has been operating as a fascist state, but to realize that it's just a more uniform/ pure form of the fascism we already have in this country, coupled with Corporate-Military superiority.

They won. The fascists of Europe lost the war, but the ones at home won big time. Chilling.