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by Luther Blissett » Sun Jul 28, 2013 3:48 pm
by American Dream » Sun Jul 28, 2013 9:26 pm
Introduction: new model fascism by American Dream » Tue Jul 30, 2013 6:13 pm
by American Dream » Fri Aug 23, 2013 11:09 am
Luther Blissett » Sun Jul 28, 2013 2:48 pm wrote:I loved this 11-page discussion. I found it fruitful and have cited some of the discoveries in the time between then and now. The primary goal was to define the contemporary United States system. Perhaps these threads could even be combined.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35352
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 23, 2013 11:45 am
There's a New Fascism on the Rise, and the NSA Leaks Show Us What It Looks Like
The power of truth-tellers like Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media.
June 21, 2013 |
In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
The American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term "public relations" as a euphemism for state propaganda. He warned that an enduring threat to the invisible government was the truth-teller and an enlightened public.
In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known as The Pentagon Papers, revealing that the invasion of Vietnam was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church conducted sensational hearings in the US Senate: one of the last flickers of American democracy. These laid bare the full extent of the invisible government: the domestic spying and subversion and warmongering by intelligence and "security" agencies and the backing they received from big business and the media, both conservative and liberal.
Speaking about the National Security Agency (NSA), Senator Church said: "I know that the capacity that there is to make tyranny in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law … so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
On 11 June, following the revelations in the Guardian by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg wrote that the US had now "that abyss".
Snowden’s revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone, is further evidence of modern form of fascism – that is the "abyss". Having nurtured old-fashioned fascists around the world – from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia – the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology.
Fred Branfman, who exposed the "secret" destruction of tiny Laos by the US Air Force in the 1960s and 70s, provides an answer to those who still wonder how a liberal African-American president, a professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness. "Under Mr. Obama," he wrote for AlterNet, "no president has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police state." Why? Because Obama, like George W Bush, understands that his role is not to indulge those who voted for him but to expand "the most powerful institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962."
In the new American cyber-power, only the revolving doors have changed. The director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was adviser to Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state in the Bush administration who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US with nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have co-authored a book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the former CIA director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the Prism spying program, revealed by Edward Snowden, that provides the NSA access to all of us who use Google.
Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of this. These are exercised by political, economic and military designs, of which mass surveillance is an essential part, but also by insinuating propaganda in the public consciousness. This was Edward Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns were convincing Americans they should go to war in 1917 and persuading women to smoke in public; cigarettes were "torches of freedom" that would hasten women’s liberation.
It is in popular culture that the fraudulent "ideal" of America as morally superior, a "leader of the free world", has been most effective. Yet, even during Hollywood’s most jingoistic periods there were exceptional films, like those of the exile Stanley Kubrick, and adventurous European films would have US distributors. These days, there is no Kubrick, no Strangelove, and the US market is almost closed to foreign films.
When I showed my own film, The War on Democracy, to a major, liberally-minded US distributor, I was handed a laundry list of changes required, to "ensure the movie is acceptable". His memorable sop to me was: "OK, maybe we could drop in Sean Penn as narrator. Would that satisfy you?" Lately, Katherine Bigelow’s torture-apologizing Zero Dark Thirtyand Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, a cinematic hatchet job on Julian Assange, were made with generous backing by Universal Studios, whose parent company until recently was General Electric. GE manufactures weapons, components for fighter aircraft and advance surveillance technology. The company also has lucrative interests in "liberated" Iraq.
The power of truth-tellers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media. WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because it provides truth-tellers with a means to get the truth out. This was achieved by Collateral Damage, the cockpit video of an US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and Assange for state vengeance. Here were US airmen murdering journalists and maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly enjoying it, and describing their atrocity as "nice". Yet, in one vital sense, they did not get away with it; we are witnesses now, and the rest is up to us.
by American Dream » Fri Aug 23, 2013 2:29 pm
...I offer the following draft definition: "Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist control of the state while defending class exploitation...
In this definition, revolutionary means an effort to bring about a fundamental, structural transformation of the political, cultural, economic, or social order. Fascism seeks, first of all, to overthrow established political elites and abolish established forms of political rule, whether liberal-pluralist or authoritarian. Second, fascists also attack "bourgeois" cultural patterns such as individualism and consumerism and aim to systematically reshape all cultural spheres -- encompassing education, family life, religion, the media, arts, sports and leisure, as well as the culture of business and the workplace -- to reflect one unified ideology. Third, some (not all) forms of fascism promote a socioeconomic revolution that transforms but does not abolish class society -- as when German Nazism restructured the industrial heart of Europe with a system of exploitation based largely on plunder, slave labor, and genocidally working people to death.
By right-wing I mean a political orientation that reinforces or intensifies social oppression as part of a backlash against movements for greater equality, freedom, or inclusiveness. Populism means a form of politics that uses mass mobilization to rally "the people" around some form of anti-elitism. (This definition, borrowed from Margaret Canovan, differs slightly from Griffin's use of the term populism.) Combining these two concepts, right-wing populism mobilizes a mass movement around a twisted anti-elitism (often based on conspiracy theories) at the same time that it intensifies oppression. In place of leftist conceptions of class struggle, fascists often draw a phony distinction between "producers" (including "productive" capitalists, workers, and middle classes) and "parasites" (defined variously as financiers, bureaucrats, foreign corporations, Jews, immigrants, welfare mothers, etc.) Right-wing populism appeals largely to middle groups in the social hierarchy, who have historically formed an important part of fascism's mass base.[60]
The phrase totalitarian vision of collective rebirth draws on Griffin's work but broadens his category of ultra-nationalism to encompass certain religious-based and other non-nationalist movements. The fascist vision is totalitarian in that it (a) celebrates one group -- national, ethnic, religious, or racial -- as an organic community to which all other loyalties must be subordinated, (b) uses mass organizations and rituals to create a sense of participation and direct identification with that community, (c) advocates coordinated top-down control over all institutions, and (d) rejects in principle the concepts of individual rights, pluralism, equality, and democratic decision-making. The collective rebirth aspect of the vision declares that the community must be rescued from a profound inner crisis, largely by purging "alien" ideologies and groups of people that are considered threats to the community's unity and vitality. This vision often draws on romanticized images of the past but points toward a radically new cultural and political order.
Fascist regimes challenge capitalist control of the state by taking political dominance away from the representatives of big business and subordinating capitalist interests to their own ideological agenda. But as a force that is committed to social hierarchy and rejects working-class socialism, fascism defends class exploitation. Historically, fascists have colluded with capitalists and bolstered the economic power of big business. Although fascists have often targeted specific capitalist features and even specific sectors of the business class, no fascist movement has substantively attacked capitalism's underlying structures, such as private property and the market economy. At most, a fascist revolution might radically reshape economic exploitation but would not abolish it.
By combining insights from the two approaches I have explored, the proposed definition -- with its twin focus on ideology and class rule -- offers a fuller, more rounded model of fascism. In the process, it gives us a more powerful tool to map divisions, relationships, and changes in right-wing politics, and to understand how these dynamics relate to changes in capitalism.
The past thirty years have seen an upsurge of right-wing movements in many parts of the world. Many of these movements promote some form of authoritarian populism, either nationalist or religious in focus, that incorporates themes of anti-elitism and collective regeneration out of crisis. In this context, some commentators treat explicit racism or antisemitism as the decisive markers of fascism, but racism and antisemitism can be found among non-fascists as well, and not all fascists today fit the classic profile for ethnic bigotry. A more critical dividing line is between "reformists" who are content to work within existing channels and "revolutionaries" (including but not limited to fascists) who advocate a radical break with the established order. This division often cuts across movements rather than between them. The United States has seen two major examples of this in recent years: the Patriot movement and the Christian right.[61]
The Patriot movement, which included armed "citizens militias" and peaked in the mid/late 1990s, represented the United States' first large-scale coalition of committed nazis and non-fascist activists since World War II. The Patriot movement promoted the apocalyptic specter of an elite conspiracy to destroy U.S. sovereignty and impose a tyrannical collectivist system run by the United Nations. The movement's program centered on forming armed "militias" to defend against the expected crackdown, but more extreme proposals circulated widely, such as bogus "constitutional" theories that would relegalize slavery, abolish women's right to vote, and give people of color an inferior citizenship status. A loose-knit and unstable network mainly based among rural, working-class whites, the Patriot movement attracted millions of supporters at its height. It fed not only on fears of government repression but also reactions to economic hardship connected with globalization (such as the farm crisis of the 1980s), the erosion of traditional white male privilege, the decline of U.S. global dominance, and disillusionment with mainstream political options. (Many of the same impulses fueled grassroots support for Pat Buchanan's 1992 and 1996 Republican presidential campaigns. Buchanan blended attacks on immigrants, homosexuals, and feminists with a critique of corporate globalization and an anti-interventionist foreign policy, but did not challenge the established political framework.)
The Christian right has promoted a program of cultural traditionalism in response to perceived social breakdown and a supposed elite secular humanist conspiracy to destroy American freedom. The movement's agenda centers on reasserting traditional gender roles and heterosexual male dominance, but also includes strong subthemes of cultural racism. The Christian right is based mainly among middle-class Sunbelt suburbanites and has fostered a dense network of local, regional, and national organizations that actively engage millions of people. The movement includes a small fascist wing, spearheaded by advocates of Christian Reconstructionism. Reconstructionists, who have played a key role in the most terroristic branch of the anti-abortion rights movement, reject pluralist institutions in favor of a full-scale theocracy based on their interpretation of biblical law. However, the bulk of the Christian right has (so far) advocated more limited forms of Christian control and has worked to gain power within the existing political system, not overthrow it.
In many other parts of the world, too, fascism operates as a tendency or a distinct faction within a larger movement. In western and central Europe, many right-wing nationalist movements encompass small hardcore neofascist groups alongside mass parties such as the National Front (France), the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), and the National Alliance (Italy).[62] All three of these parties were built largely by (ex?)fascists and promote political themes (especially anti-immigrant racism) that are widely identified as the opening wedge for a fascist agenda. Note that both the FPO and the National Alliance have participated in coalition governments at the national level. This may be part of a longterm strategy to "fascisticize" the political climate and institutions from within, but it also suggests the possibility that fascists -- like socialists -- can be coopted into a liberal capitalist political system.
The Islamic right encompasses a great diversity of organizations, political philosophies, strategies, and constituencies across the Muslim world.[63] Although some branches (notably Saudi Arabia's religious power structure) are conservative or reactionary, others represent a kind of right-wing populism that aims not to reject modernity but reshape it. These branches use modern forms of political mobilization to rally Muslims against western imperialism, Zionism, global capitalist culture, and/or local elites. They envision a collective religious and national (or international) rebirth through re-Islamizing society or throwing off foreign domination.
Within this framework, Afghanistan's Taliban and Lebanon's Hezbollah represent opposite poles. The Taliban have promoted a totalitarian form of Islamic rule that combines virulent misogyny, Pashtun ethnic chauvinism, and warlord capitalism -- politics that fully deserve the fascist label. Hezbollah, in contrast, offsets its call for a theocracy modeled on Iran with an everyday practice that respects religious, ethnic, and political diversity, does not impose special strictures on women, and focuses its populist critique mainly on the realities of Israeli aggression and the hardships faced by Lebanon's Shi'i majority.[64] (Iran's Islamic Republic falls somewhere between these two poles. Although authoritarian, it preserves too much openness and pluralism to be labeled fascist, which highlights the fact that right-wing revolutionary anti-imperialism does not necessarily equal fascism.)
India's massive Hindu nationalist movement advocates Hindu unity and supremacy as the key to revitalizing India as a nation. The movement promotes hatred of -- and mass violence against -- Muslims and claims that India's political leaders have long pursued anti-Hindu policies and favoritism toward Muslims and other minorities. Hindu nationalism, or "Hindutva," has disproportionately appealed to upper-caste, middle-class Hindus from northern and west-central India. The movement centers on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Association of National Volunteers, or RSS), an all-male cadre organization that promotes a paramilitary ethos and a radical vision to reshape Indian culture along authoritarian corporatist lines. The RSS's political spinoff, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, or BJP), has often favored a more pragmatic electoral strategy that blends a toned-down version of Hindu chauvinism with populist economic appeals. (The BJP headed India's coalition government from 1998 to 2004 and now leads the parliamentary opposition.) There are also tensions within the movement between advocates of free trade and economic nationalists who warn of the dangers posed by foreign investment. In contrast to many fascists and other right-wing nationalists, Hindutva forces have sought close strategic ties with both the United States and Israel, especially since George W. Bush proclaimed the War on Terror.[65]
This array of movements looks different from classical fascism, in large part, because the capitalist world has changed. Classical fascism took shape in an era of European industrialization and nation-building, competing colonial empires, and an international Communist movement inspired by the recent Bolshevik Revolution. Now both old-style colonialism and state socialism have almost vanished, while corporate globalization is shifting industries across the world and reshaping nation-states. Far-right movements are responding to these changes in various ways. They promote nostalgia for old empires but also right-wing anti-imperialism, old-style nationalisms but also internationalist and decentralized versions of authoritarian politics. They feed off of a backlash against the left but also grow where the left's weakness has opened space for other kinds of insurgent movements. And they promote different versions of anti-elitism, often targeting U.S. or multinational capital but sometimes focusing more on local elites.
Many commentators have argued that fascist movements today represent a right-wing backlash against capitalist globalization. Martin A. Lee argues, for example, that in Europe "the waning power of the nation-state has triggered a harsh ultranationalist reaction." Here far rightists have exploited a range of popular issues associated with international economic restructuring -- not only scapegoating immigrants but also criticising the European Union, the introduction of a single European curency, and the rise of a globalized culture. "Global commerce acts as the great homogenizer, blurring indigenous differences and smothering contrasting ethnic traits. Consequently, many Europeans are fearful of losing not only their jobs, but their cultural and national identities."[66]
In Europe and elsewhere, far-right politics is indeed largely a response to capitalist globalization, but this response is more complex than a simple backlash. For example, the Patriot/militia movement in the United States denounced "global elites," the "new world order," the United Nations, international bankers, etc. But their attack on government regulation, as People Against Racist Terror has pointed out, dovetailed with "the actual globalist strategy of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to end all environmental and labor codes that restrict untrammeled exploitation."[67] In India, Hindu nationalists have denounced multinational capital and globalized culture, but the movement's dominant approach has been to seek a stronger role for India within the context of global capitalism. The BJP-led coalition government of 1998-2004 promoted privatization, deregulation, foreign investment, consumer credit growth, and expansion of the information technology sector. These policies are tailored to India's rising upper and middle classes, eager to participate more effectively in the global economy -- not historical "losers" trying to gain back their old status by attacking the forces of change.[68]
The gender politics of the Christian and Islamic right, too, are sometimes seen as a reaction against capitalist globalization -- a drive to force women out of the wage labor force and back into full domestic submission, depriving multinational capital of a crucial source of labor. There is truth to this, but here again the dynamic is more complex than a simple backlash. To begin with, many Christian rightists and Islamic rightists consider it acceptable for women to work outside the home, as long as they do it in a way that is "modest" and doesn't challenge male authority. And even the religious traditionalist claim that women's place is in the home can make it easier for employers to exploit women economically. As Maria Mies argues in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, defing homemaking as women's natural, proper role trivializes women's paid work as a source of "supplementary" income (which justifies paying women much less than men) and isolates women workers from each other and from male workers (which hinders collective labor activism).[69] This means that there is potential for both conflict and accommodation on gender politics between religious rightists and global (or local) capital.
* * *
This essay is intended to challenge the conventional leftist view that fascism equals a tool of capitalist repression -- because that view not only distorts history but also hides major political threats in today's world. Fascism is better understood as an autonomous right-wing force that has a contradictory relationship with capital and that draws mass support largely by advocating a revolution against established values and institutions. Several Marxists have helped to develop this counter-model of fascism, but their work is limited by an unsystematic analysis of fascist ideology. Roger Griffin's ideology-centered analysis of fascism helps fill the gap. Combining the two approaches gives us a stronger model of fascism than either approach can offer on its own.
This essay does not offer a comprehensive theory of fascism. Many important aspects of fascism merit a fuller treatment than I have been able to give them here, and the writers I have discussed are only a sampling of those who have written insightfully about fascism. I hope that this discussion will encourage further efforts at synthesis.
The concept of fascism as a right-wing revolutionary force has spawned the idea that we are facing a "three-way fight" between fascism, conventional global capitalism, and (at least potentially) leftist revolution. This approach is a great improvement over widespread dualistic models that try to divide all political players between the "forces of oppression" and the "forces of liberation." As some radical anti-fascists have pointed out for years, "my enemy's enemy" is not necessarily my friend. At the same time, like any theoretical model, the three-way fight itself only approximates reality. There are more than three sides in the struggle, and to understand the different forces and their interrelationships, we have a lot of work to do.
by American Dream » Fri Aug 23, 2013 3:46 pm
by American Dream » Fri Aug 23, 2013 6:45 pm
by vanlose kid » Sun Aug 25, 2013 4:12 am
DrEvil » Wed Jul 24, 2013 6:52 pm wrote:...
This is a very good point. Classical fascism was seen as a "perfect union" between state and corporations by people like Mussolini, who called it corporatism (I think. Someone called it that anyway).
I think the difference today is that the balance of the "union" has shifted decisively to the corporations. The state has become little more than their PR department and cannon fodder to satiate the masses (Don't like these fuckers? Then VOTE, and everything will be OK, and never mind that 90% of the time whoever has the most money wins). Everything is privatized and outsourced. The NSA alone has something like 500 sub-contractors.
In many cases today where we're looking for state actors in the shadows, I think we're looking in the wrong place. Many of the major corporations are perfectly capable of pulling off a false flag or a psy-op on their own. No need to involve the government with all those pesky Inspector generals and FOIA's and stupid senators. That's just courting disaster. But they make good fall guys.
by coffin_dodger » Sun Aug 25, 2013 9:41 am
Are Israel and the U.S. Becoming Fascist States?
by Philip Giraldi, January 10, 2013
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/201 ... st-states/
Recently the words "fascism" and "fascist" have been used almost casually in political discourse, most notably in the form of the fusion word "Islamofascism" which seeks to conflate Islam with fascist ideology. The use of "fascism" to describe a political phenomenon is one of those convenient conversation stoppers, intended to evoke memories of the Second World War, of dictatorships and police states in Italy and Germany, and of racial laws and death camps as well as other atrocities.
Fascism is generally linked to ultra-right wing politics or attitudes even though 1930s fascists themselves believed that they did not fit into the traditional right-left political spectrum. The word Nazi is, in fact, an acronym for "national socialist," adroitly combining nationalism with socialism. It is generally accepted that a fascist is a totalitarian who supports an all-powerful and centralized state buttressed by the legal argument promulgated by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt that government can do no wrong precisely because it is the government. Fascism differs from communism in that it accepts a robust private sector economy regulated by the state and it eschews class struggle, believing instead in a national popular consensus that unites behind what has been referred to as the "vanguard" fascist movement. Both Communism and Fascism believe in the destruction of parliamentary democracy, which they regard as decadent and subject to dominance by the bourgeois class. In the 1930s, the concept that the fascist party was the only legitimate representation of the national will enabled leaders like Hitler and Mussolini to ignore constitutional restraints and create one party dictatorships.
One can easily see how linking fascism to Islam is a non-starter unless one accepts the argument made by those who believe that at least some radical Muslims are trying to recreate the Caliphate, a political entity which would be totalitarian in nature. Other than that, Muslim militants do not have any interest in class struggle either pro or con, do not have an economic or foreign policy, and do not operate within and through the mechanism of a nation state. Call al-Qaeda what you will, but it is definitely not a fascist organization.
Defining fascism beyond that point is not easy as it has political, social, and economic elements and it varies considerably in its different forms based on national idiosyncrasies. The fascist parties also contained factions that disagreed on many economic and social policies, but there are common themes that generally surface when one speaks of fascist style states, like Peron’s Argentina and also the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq. All fascist regimes have an identifiable leader and an assertive ultra-nationalism that frequently feeds off a sense of victimhood, i.e. that Germany was eviscerated by the treaty of Versailles while Italy, a victor in the war, was not rewarded commensurate with how much it had suffered. This need to assert a frequently mythical notion of national power and greatness, often through war or imperial expansion, generally produces a militarization of society as well as a rewriting of history to support the new agenda. Since fascist governments frequently use emergency decrees to eliminate or restrict parliamentary democracy, they frequently evolve into police states to suppress dissent and maintain the regime. Their economies are generally heavily regulated by the state and the government is often directly involved through state industries and favorable treatment meted out to businesses with links to the bureaucracy. Contemporary fascist regimes are, in summary, authoritarian, nationalist, single-party police states strongly promoting racial or ethnic identities and having economies heavily regulated or even dominated by the government.
Israel obviously has, increasingly, many attributes of fascism, but the melding of policies that have created what amounts to a national security state in both Washington and Tel Aviv has been an obvious consequence of the so-called war on terror, which seeks to establish security through total military dominance. Indeed, Israeli policies and security doctrines have been adopted wholesale by Washington, suggesting that the tiny client has asymmetrically influenced its larger patron. Concurrently, since the 1990s Israel’s government has been steadily moving in a rightward direction and the upcoming elections will reportedly continue that trend with the politicians seeking to outflank each other by moving harder and harder to the right.
So to what extent are both Israel and the United States trending towards a fascist model? In some areas the affinity is clear. Both Israel and the United States claim victimhood from terrorism and have used that as an excuse to maintain aggressive foreign policies that emphasize the use of force as a first option. Both spend far more proportionately on "defense" than other developed countries and both are actively engaged in proxy and shooting wars around the world. Israel exploits its alleged victimhood to occupy Palestinian land while the United States does the same to justify its continued presence in Afghanistan and its threats against both Iran and Syria.
The victimhood also feeds resentment that reinforces ultra-nationalism which in turn glorifies militarism. It is not surprising to note that both Israel and the United States have established military courts and tribunals to deal with perceived external threats, lessening the role of the independent civilian judiciary. This has in turn led to "antiterrorist" legislation that has infringed on what most western nations would consider to be fundamental liberties. The Israeli Shin Beth internal security services operates with a relatively free hand against regime critics and potential threats as does the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States under the auspices of the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, leading many critics to observe that both countries are evolving into national security police states where official accountability is minimal as the respective governments are able to cite state security as a reason to avoid any exposure of illegal activities.
And the ultra-nationalism also leads to the creation of national myths. Israel and the U.S. have at times encouraged the belief that Palestine and North America were empty lands waiting to be developed, a contention that is untrue in both cases. Israeli state sponsored archeology has worked assiduously to document Jewish presence east of the Jordan River while at the same time ignoring or even destroying historic sites demonstrating the persistence of non-Jews in the area.
And then there is the fascist economy, in which state enterprises and favored businesses are nurtured alongside a heavily regulated private sector. Israel is much farther advanced in that respect than is the U.S. and is notable for the manner in which its defense and security sectors feature government and industry working hand-in-hand. Indeed, government officials and senior military officers move freely between the public and private sectors helping Israel to become the eighth largest exporter of weapons in the world. In the United States, the military industrial complex plays a similar role though with far less direct government involvement and direction. Many would describe the whole system of Pentagon contracting for weapons systems that are not needed a form of government welfare for the arms producers who in turn support the politicians voting for the largesse.
And finally there is racism. Overt expressions of racism have gone out of fashion in the United States, though the assertion of "American exceptionalism" certainly contains racial overtones in its presumption that Washington can intervene in the affairs of others overseas. Israelis, many of whom see themselves as God’s chosen people with a divine right to all of Palestine, inevitably attribute that right to their racial and cultural superiority, a theme that was played on recently by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. A recent opinion poll reveals that two thirds of Israelis believe that Palestinians should be denied the right to vote if the West Bank were to be annexed while three quarters of Israelis support segregated Jewish-use-only roads. When an Israeli soldier kills a Palestinian he is rarely punished. Justin Raimondo notes how racism has become the leading issue in the upcoming elections. Many Israelis, including recently departed Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, have long held extreme racist views regarding Arabs and Muslims in general, but in recent months the reaction to African asylum seekers has demonstrated that there is an uglier racism lurking that is being as openly asserted in the political campaign as much as Jim Crow was in the American south in the 1950s and 1960s.
Naftali Bennett, head of Israel’s political party Jewish Home, rejects any kind of Palestinian statehood and has called for the immediate expulsion of all Africans to maintain the country’s "racial purity," surely an ominous phrase when coming out of the mouth of an Israeli politician. Such demands might well be regarded as eccentric, but Jewish Home is likely to emerge from upcoming elections as the nation’s third largest party and is strongly supported by young Israelis. Israel’s insistence that it be recognized as a Jewish State and proposed legislation demanding loyalty oaths from Arab citizens should also be seen as part and parcel of a racist agenda, reflecting the all too frequent demands by some politicians to expel all Arabs and occupy the entire West Bank.
The only area in which Israel and the United States are demonstrably not fascist is their avoidance of dictatorship, though even that is not as clear cut as it might be. The United States has, to be sure, two major parties that alternate in power, but both are wedded to a similar statist agenda, which is particularly evident in the area of foreign policy, where there is a national consensus in support of aggressive militarism. The concept of the unitary executive, embraced by both Democrats and Republicans, is intrinsically dictatorial in nature and there are legitimate concerns that another major terrorist attack inside the United States could well tip the balance to presidential rule by fiat with a complaisant congress, media, and supreme court following along behind. Israel likewise has a number of viable political parties, but the movement politically speaking has been to the right and one might argue that the national consensus is clearly hard right wing with Likud dominant. The only question decided in elections is just who the other players might be in the government coalition and lately they have been even more extreme than Likud.
So it would appear that the answer to the question whether Israel and the U.S. are developing into fascist-style states would have to be a qualified yes, meaning that they are not quite there yet but all the indicators are pointing that way. It is perhaps time for both the American and Israeli people to wake up to smell the roses and ask themselves what kind of government they really want to have. Will it be a nation governed by laws that apply to all citizens and with a ruling class reined in by constitutional restraints or will it be an all-powerful regime packed with generals and constantly at war both with its neighbors and ultimately with its own people. That is the choice that confronts us.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 25, 2013 10:31 am
by JackRiddler » Sun Aug 25, 2013 2:50 pm
JackRiddler » Thu Aug 23, 2012 11:17 pm wrote:Some of these answers have been very good in defining, on the one hand, the emotional qualities of social interaction that can be usefully described as fascist (82_28) and, on the other, the political qualities of explicitly fascist ideology, movements, parties or states.
So I'm quoting several of those below.
I think it would be useful at this stage to disentangle different ways in which the word is applied.
I think we can distinguish three types of usages, although they shouldn't be seen as mutually exclusive: [or exhaustive!]
The fascist drive: Extreme authoritarianism coupled with a particular fetish for power expressed in outbursts of often arbitrary brutality, generally against the designated out-group and the weak. This can be highly individual. It is extremely patriarchal with a violent cult of manhood, that must be said up-front, although it may simultaneously allow selective images of women as warriors as well as faithful nurturers of the national offspring. Fascism's primary appeal is to stupid, violent, frustrated, fearful men. (As an aside, it should be noted that there are types of authoritarian personalities that are not fascist and do not fetishize violence, even if they recognize it as the necessary bottom-line for order.)
Ideological fascism, movement fascism or "classical fascism" is the particular organized form that developed out of 1890s militarist nationalism and came to the fore in many European nations in the 1920s and 1930s, very much in response to the rise of communist revolution as well as the perceived depravities of liberal bourgeois society. Its global faith was that racially-defined nations are at war with each other for survival and supremacy. The nation is the required state religion. Society must be forged with violence into a unity that actively excises and ritualistically destroys the designated others and all who won't conform to the national way. All persons receive a defined role within a steep hierarchy that is considered organic and natural; in a functioning society, we are all parts or cells of a single body. Deviations cannot be tolerated and must be punished. And yet all this is in the service of traditional elites and those who were already rich and powerful. In the ideology, it is the modernist, foreign-influenced or internationalist abandonment of supposed national traditions that cause the chaos that the fascists arise to vanquish, so naturally they view their radicalism as a defense and renewal of conservative values. In the actual history, it was the majority of traditional elites and the powerful, again in several nations from Italy in 1922 to Spain in 1936-9, who chose to become or to support fascist parties as a response to real economic and political crisis. I should mention that all this was positively bathed in the idea that this was true "freedom," and I think that's still a word fascists like to front today. Also, fascism is going to take on an intensely particular national character in each nation, so that fascists regimes will not all look the same from the outside, and of course they are unlikely to label themselves fascist.
Third is the fascist way of governance, the mass-psychological handbook of how to use fear, hatred and national flattery; the institutional technology and ideological tropes that can actually be detached from a generally fascist worldview and deployed by any state or large organization. These techniques preceded and were also mutated within the classical fascist states, and continue to be developed and adapted and remain available for use to this day.
It's untrue to simply call the US fascist, although I'd say a large part of the Republican Party has become ideologically so, and the likes of Limbaugh and Beck and the political Islamophobes a la "libertarian" Pamela Gellar as well as many of the televangelist Christianists are clearly would-be fascist rulers, not to mention leaders of movements large and small; though luckily the movement members are mostly obedient job-drones in the normal economy and otherwise couch potatoes. (Alex Jones is small-potatoes whose main contribution has been to muddy the waters around the so-called "conspiracy" issues beyond reclamation.) I've often said that if the German variant of fascism (its own species, indubitably) required total mobilization of all popular resources to enable a relatively small country's plans to conquer, the American leviathan's post-fascist imperialism does best when 80 percent of more of the people simply sleep. Gives a whole new meaning to Silent Majority.
Meanwhile, the highly compartmentalized and segregated realms of nation-state and society include many institutions that make use of fascist governance: within the prison-industrial complex, the military, the "drug war" and "war on terrorism," the reaction to protest and strong social movements (ranging up to mass imprisonment and assassination), and of course in the way that many corporations handle their "human resources." It's hard to look past the many elements of fascist ideology or rhetoric within the political discourse, and the degree to which these are far more top-down than in Nixon's time (when the white majority entered the grip of a genuine popular reaction). The US state has often supported regimes overseas that are classically fascist or neo-fascist, such as the Condor nations among many other examples. The US has been a pioneer of the fascist toolkit, establishing research programs and international schools of torture and violent counterinsurgency. The state has prepared and wargamed for decades for the contingency of implementing a full and open military rule in the name of freedom, if this is ever considered necessary; and the expansion and perfection of the surveillance regime is the most impressive achievement in that effort.
Finally, the term is absolutely subject to abuse and has been watered-down from over-use and projection. So we have PC fascists, feminazis, the idea that Obama leads a fascist movement, Islamofascists - these tend to come from people on the right who confirm that "projection is powerful" - and, of course, over-easy application by leftists of the fascist label to any authoritarian or arbitrary policy.
And as a post-script, it is useful to distinguish between what I've called classical or ideological fascism as opposed to post-fascism (the passing of the fascist "toolkit" into the common realms of governance, which can also come in a liberal form) and neo-fascism (explicit attempts to revive classical fascism). [examples: Golden Dawn in Greece, NPD in Germany, US Nazis, etc.]bks wrote:At the core of fascist ideologies is an aggressive contempt for what it perceives to be weak. Could be women, Jews, the poor, socialists, etc.82_28 wrote:Capriciousness in law and how it is meted out. A general lack of concern, amidst the subjects for one another. Fear. A contradiction in simultaneously being for your nation but do everything you can to destroy it as corporations hollow it all out.
A government with a lack of empathy. A government with built in rules of empathy, but they remain rules, they don't emerge from the human heart, all the while remaining capricious enough to be incomprehensible yet set in stone.
Money and religion.
War.
Distrust.
Surveillance.
The State is more important than its many communities.
Total control over how the children are raised.
Rigidness and totally careless for those who do not have the means.justdrew wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FascismFascism promotes political violence and war as forms of direct action that promote national rejuvenation, spirit and vitality. Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations to commit or threaten violence against their opponents.
The fascist party is a vanguard party designed to initiate a revolution from above and to organize the nation upon fascist principles.barracuda wrote:- cult of extreme nationalism
- totalitarian ambition
- expansionist imperialism
- fetishised masculinism
- blurred demarcation between the state and corporationElvis wrote:
That said, FDR made this essential point about fascism:"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938. Message to congress.
by coffin_dodger » Fri Sep 13, 2013 6:06 am
by American Dream » Wed Sep 18, 2013 8:52 am
American Dream » Tue Jul 30, 2013 5:13 pm wrote: http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2012/ ... ology.html
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Golden Dawn’s fascist ideology
by The Consul » Wed Sep 18, 2013 2:16 pm
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