rigorousintuition.ca

Fascist America? Not Exactly

January 04, 2012

By Paul Street


Iowa City, IA, January 3, 2011. Imagine if the United States really was, as a number of my fellow leftists claim to think, “a fascist state.”[1] To fit the description, it wouldn’t be enough for the U.S. to be plagued by:


the fierce co-joining of state and corporate/financial power

the persistence and deepening of harsh racial inequality and oppression

stark class disparity (in a country where the top 1 percent owns more than a third of the wealth and the top 20 percent owns 84 percent) producing grotesque hyper-opulence for the rich and powerful Few alongside deep poverty for tens of millions among of the Many

a viciously narrow one-and-a-half party system whose two wings are equally captive to “the unelected dictatorship of money”

a largely defeated and pathetically tamed labor movement

millions of stateless workers whose lack of legal status renders them super-exploitable by employers

a giant military system and war machine that maims and murders millions of innocents abroad

a significant mass of the citizenry that relies on war and empire to make a living and functions as a mercenary population for the elite

an ongoing history of waging illegal wars of aggression abroad

an authoritarian disabling of functioning democratic institutions at home

a pandemic of irrational thought and anti-intellectualism

the violent government suppression and ubiquitous surveillance of domestic dissent

the regular use of military methods and technologies in domestic policing

government assault on basic civil liberties (including the right not to be indefinitely detained without facing charges and without legal representation) and human rights at home and abroad

right wing propaganda systems that (among other things) conflate the right-centrist pseudo-liberalism of business Democrats like Barack Obama with socialism and even “Marxism”

a massive incarceration and criminalization system that keeps a very disproportionately black and Latino army of more than 2 million Americans behind bars and marks more than 1 in 3 adult black males with the lifelong stigma of a felony record

an intellectual class and university and media systems that supinely serve the corporate and financial elite and that elite’s state

the systematic marginalization of radicals and genuine dissenters

the savage concentration of news, information, communication, and cultural institutions into the hands of a tight corporate oligopoly, with corresponding authoritarian ideological consequences

a narcissistic culture of hyper-masculinized nationalism that justifies war and empire with claims of special American “greatness”

a political culture that blames the disadvantaged for their own position at the bottom of the nation’s ever-steeper pyramids of class, race, and ethnicity.


All of these things and more of a terrible and authoritarian nature can be discerned by those willing to see in the contemporary U.S. They are largely consistent with the notion of a “fascist America.” It’s not for nothing that many contemporary Hitler-worshipping European fascists look with favor upon the U.S. as a kind of role model.

Still, there would have to be more for the U.S. to fit the description “fascist state.” To be really fascist, the U.S. would have to be under the thrall of a charismatic dictator who had undertaken a conscious, explicit, and rapid assault on nominally democratic bourgeois-electoralist and representative institutions. That dictator would be supported by a highly mobilized mass of millions of dedicated, proto-militarized, and everyday (largely lower middle class/petit-bourgeois) authoritarians ready to do his bidding at home and abroad. This marching fascist multitude would seek to honor the sanctified Nation State (fatherland) by physically assaulting liberals, radicals, trade unionists, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, libraries, universities, civil society groups, and all political parties other than the ruling regime’s.

In a fascist America, the Occupy Movement would have been lucky to have lasted one night in a single city park before Fuhrer (let’s say) Beck’s minions would have run protestors off with broken bones and worse, herding many into buses and trains to be sent to work camps. There Occupiers would toil under armed guard alongside mostly black prisoners in the making of war materials. It is unthinkable that they would have lasted in their parks for many weeks and even received a considerable amount of half-way favorable media coverage, with journalists freely reporting that more than two thirds of the population supported the movement’s goals.

Untold thousands of Muslims would have been murdered inside the U.S. (not just in the Middle East and Southwest Asia) and sent to giant internment camps. Books would be burning in the streets. Barnes&Nobles outlets would not be allowed to carry volumes from Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Howard Zinn or even books by Michael Moore, who would have been whisked off (along with the liberal Rachel Maddow, perhaps) to an unnamed federal detention center in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (the staff at “Democracy Now” would reside in Guantanamo). Elections would be dispensed with. Much of the media would be shut down. The parts that remained would be subject to ruthless centralized control from ideological authorities (some transferred over from FOX News) in Fortress Washington. Democracy and justice activists would have to meet secretly and would live in constant danger of beating, torture, and disappearance.

The “grassroots” core of the nation’s hard right wouldn’t be a bunch of comfortably retired white Republican Tea Partiers who claim to support the “free market” but who want to close the borders and keep their Medicare and Social Security[2] and who don’t particularly enjoy collective action. Instead, they would be younger, steely-eyed, truncheon-wielding, jackboot-wearing shock troops who love nothing more than rugged mass head-cracking action against various perceived liberal, racial, radical, and national enemies of the Founding Fathers’ land at home and abroad. The nation would be on a war footing, poised to invade not just distant Middle Eastern or Asian states but its immediate neighbors Canada and Mexico.

That’s what a truly “fascist America” would look like. It obviously hasn’t arrived and it’s unlikely to appear anytime soon. The hypothetical scenarios I just laid out amount largely to the transplantation into contemporary America of developments that are rooted in the toxic historical subsoil of interwar Europe (particularly of course in Italy and above all Hitler’s Third Reich Germany), the real and time and place for serious discussion of actual historical fascism. Even it could actually access it, the American ruling class doesn’t particularly need that particular mode of rule, which is less stable and durable than the current, considerably softer neoliberal regime of corporate-managed fake-democracy, whereby most of the population is generally de-mobilized, individualized, and fragmented and popular governance is slow-cooked to death through a million plutocratic, state-capitalist cuts. Under the American model of elite-managed shadow democracy, the reign of the Few masquerades as popular self-determination and “the free market” instead of lurking behind the explicitly repressive and holy State.

Even if real historical fascism could be translated across times and place to the modern U.S. it would be largely redundant for America’s powers that be. The American elite already gets the basic regressive and authoritarian outcomes of fascism – increased exploitation and division of the working class, deepening concentration of wealth and power, the disabling of political democracy and social justice, the marginalization of dissent and critical thought, and the advance of stupendous and lucrative militarism and empire – without having to unleash the full brutality of fascist dictatorship.

So why do some radicals and progressives like to throw the word fascism around with great bravado in connection with the contemporary U.S.? Beyond simple sociopolitical and historical ignorance (and I think fascism is a fairly complex historical subject matter), I think many of them may do it for an understandable shock effect. The parallels between contemporary and ongoing authoritarian/racist/classist/sexist/corporatist/ nationalist/imperialist Americanism – see my opening bullet points – and the Third Reich (and for that matter and to a lesser degree with the Soviet Empire of 1928-1991) are no laughing matter. The contemporary U.S. may not be a fascist totalitarian state. But it is highly questionable whether it deserves any longer to be considered a democracy. As veteran left-liberal political scientist Sheldon Wolin argued four years ago on the eve of the fake-progressive corporate imperialist Barack Obama’s ascendancy, the U.S. may have “morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled.” Wolin’s chilling book Democracy Incorporated described a mass-incarceration-ist and militarized nation, “where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive – and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best,” Wolin argued, “the nation has become a ‘managed democracy’ where the public is shepherded, not sovereign [emphasis added]. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answer to state controls” and where “unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies.” In Wolin’s view, Cheney-Bush America had the potential to become modern history’s third great totalitarian formation, succeeding the brown fascism of Hitler’s Germany and the red fascism of Stalin’s Russia.

Particularly “unnerving” to me is the possibility that this formation could be the most sophisticated and powerful species of authoritarian rule yet developed. As the brilliant Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey noted back in the Reagan-Thatcher era, the greatest and most potent long-term threat to “the liberal-democratic freedoms we are all supposed to enjoy” has not come from the 1984 “left” but rather in the deceptively “un-coercive” form of “a widespread social and political indoctrination, an indoctrination which promotes business interests as everyone’s interests and in the process fragments the community and closes off individual and critical thought.” The critical homeland and headquarters of this indoctrination and the deadly, oxymoronic and Orwellian “corporate-managed democracy” it breeds was of course the outwardly liberal and ostensibly freedom-loving United States, where the art and science of “taking the risk out of democracy” (what Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman later and famously termed “manufacturing consent”) – something different and arguably even more dangerous than the open and explicit bludgeoning of democracy – was, for various historical reasons, carried to new levels (see Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Alongside the ever more imminent ecological self-destruction imposed by the profits system and the ever-present danger of nuclear war, this great authoritarian threat (potentially “totalitarian” by Wolin’s account) underlines the desperately “fierce urgency of now” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) when it comes to expanding the great American democracy upsurge that broke out last year in Madison, Wisconsin, Columbus, Ohio, Zucotti Park and more than 850 Occupy sites across the nation and world. On that note, I will now depart to see what kind of sand I can throw into the authoritarian gears of the fake-democratic Iowa Caucus extravaganza on this very cold evening of January 3, 2012.



Paul Street (http://www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many books and studies, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman&Littlefied, 2007), and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011). Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com



Selected Endnotes

[1] See for one example among many Michael Pirsch, “America is a Fascist State Because it is Racist,” Black Agenda Report (October 18, 2011) at http://www.blackagendareport.com/conten ... -it-racist

[2] See Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio, Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011)

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://zcommunications.org/fascist-amer ... aul-street

Even if real historical fascism could be translated across times and place to the modern U.S. it would be largely redundant for America’s powers that be. The American elite already gets the basic regressive and authoritarian outcomes of fascism – increased exploitation and division of the working class, deepening concentration of wealth and power, the disabling of political democracy and social justice, the marginalization of dissent and critical thought, and the advance of stupendous and lucrative militarism and empire – without having to unleash the full brutality of fascist dictatorship.

This is an important point. A term that has been thrown around some mail lists I listen to is Liberal Fascism, which I think is pretty accurate. You could also call it "Sustainable" fascism, which puts an emphasis on the ecological issue that is the main focus of this new version of fascism, now that political control is no longer an issue. I disagree with the OP about calling it fascism, though. It should be called fascism, so that people will understand it is only a different means serving the same philosophy. For the shock value, yes. People need to be shocked.

^^^^
Yes, well-reasoned there undead. America's totalitarian corporate-technocracy is rather a different degree of fascism, NOT of Kind. I rely a lot on Mussolini's original definition of Fascsim as a merging of corporate and state -- the military adventurism, repression of opposition, Nationalistic bombast, persecution of targetted enemy 'others', the whittling-away of alternative 'acceptable' POV, the dismantling of public services that serve common needs & promote universal ideals, the erosion of individual sovereignty, etc. -- these all follow from the basic fascist perversion that has been engineered to serve elite interests. The central figurehead of Dictator isn't really necessary since a coalition of feudal powers manages to exercise fascist power through a kind of neoliberal bureaucracy behind the scenes of a faux-Democratic Technocracy.

And indeed, people NEED shocking with acknowledging the bitter truth of their having aided-and-abetted their own betrayal by those pandering to the legacy of a 'new, improved' Technocratic Reich that uses war and oppression as preferred instruments of state.

I'm going to agree with undead, as well. Language is just language; we have to look at its effect. The average person is naive to the extent of political control wielded by a tiny corporate elite. People generally understand fascism to mean extreme government control. We have that. Call it "friendly fascism." Maybe you call it "rising fascism" or "creeping fascism." Yes, you can buy a Michael Moore book, but there are more people in prison per capita than any country ever. As the poor experience it this is as oppressive a nation as any before.

Michael Parenti argues that we live under under a form of fascism. Here's his video series on the history of fascism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Bc4KJx2Ao

The real story is that fascism=capitalism-- not in theory, but in reality. The people running the whole are capitalist fascists. They're certainly not socialists. You do have anti-fascist capitalists like Ron Paul, but they have no power at this point.

Btw, American Dream, I'm curious what *you* think. You post lots of good articles, but I think you're smarter than the writers you post.

I agree with the OP that the US is not generically a fascist state. Rather, we live under the political condition of National Socialism: a patronising, debilitating socialism for the masses and a deep, transgressive socialism for the military/financial industrialists and their intelligence community collaborators, all woven into the populist schema of nationalist Americana evidenced most vividly during these never-ending election cycles.

This essay by John Lukacs posted by Sweejack some time ago nicely lays out the distinctions between fascism and national socialism and demonstrates why it makes more sense to think of the US as a kind of volks reich, endlessly struggling to save the world from the corrupting influence of anyone who isn't American enough:

Sweejak wrote:The Universality of National Socialism (The Mistaken Category of 'Fascism')

PDF
http://nationalism.org/library/science/ ... R-2002.pdf

wordspeak2 wrote:Btw, American Dream, I'm curious what *you* think. You post lots of good articles, but I think you're smarter than the writers you post.

Very true that just because I post something should never be taken to mean that I would defend it down to the last punctuation point.

In this case, I'm leaning in the direction of Paul Street's call to differentiate between classic Fascism and whatever creepy "liberal democratic" can of worms I see currently in the U.S.

The primary reason why I think this distinction is so important- and I do agree that shock value has its place- is that I myself have been taken in by apocalyptic memes that in retrospect I see as misguided. Currently, I also know people who are firmly convinced that mass internment camps are just around the corner. I also know of people who believed in a John Zerzan type model of impending ecological crisis that was not helpful at all. I do believe that in the world we have plenty of looming crises- including ecologically and with Authoritarianism- but I still hold out for maintaining a meaningful distinction regarding hardcore Fascism of the type alluded to in the OP.

Now allusions to boiling frogs, on the other hand...

undead wrote:This is an important point. A term that has been thrown around some mail lists I listen to is Liberal Fascism, which I think is pretty accurate. You could also call it "Sustainable" fascism, which puts an emphasis on the ecological issue that is the main focus of this new version of fascism, now that political control is no longer an issue. I disagree with the OP about calling it fascism, though. It should be called fascism, so that people will understand it is only a different means serving the same philosophy. For the shock value, yes. People need to be shocked.

The problem is that it no longer has the power to shock. Most Americans, with some justice, hear the word and assume that it's just the left hyperventilating again. In my opinion, the use of terms like "fascism" actually makes it more difficult for us to really look at the situation and draw clear eyed conclusions about it, as this excellent article does admirably.

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Compartments. This is a country in perpetual war, and yet where is this war? Anywhere but here. We are told we are at war, under threat, and half our income taxes are in fact being spent on it; in other parts of the world, ships and troops are deployed, missiles and drones are launched, cars and houses explode, people die. We are told to thank the troops for their service. Excessive security measures at airports, and occasionally on bridges and at subway entrances, are said to be related to it. But no war on my street, right?

It's much the same with fascism. Institutions in which an unforgiving state exercises absolute force over a powerless individual. That's a fair description of what is experienced by most people caught up in the criminal justice-prison-industrial complex. Then there is the ever-expanding surveillance state, and the establishment of doctrines and laws that will allow far worse fascism in practice. Yet there are large areas of life, where most of us spend our daily lives, where it seems remote and silly to even think of fascism. Workplaces often have fascist aspects, but everyone's got the freedom to just walk out the door and take up residence under a bridge. The question of whether you feel or see modern "friendly" fascism in action very much depends on where and who you are.

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Semantics. But regardless of how you define "fascism," let's just whittle it down to its essence, shall we?



And, of course, there are different flavors of fascism. Here are some thoughts a few years ago from Chris Hedges regarding the rise of Christian fascism. Ron Paul, anyone?

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

February 8, 2007 | Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

. . .

Street can be good, and that's pretty good, but having the theme of his essay basically being "c'mon, things aren't that bad" is kind of offensive.

It most certainly a new form of fascism, one that is insidious, patient, and almost invisible.

Maybe we need a new term. How about a simple "neofascism" or "shadow fascism".

George Carlin said that "Hitler lost WWII but fascism won". Did it ever. Fascism learned from its mistakes and realized that to succeed it would have to do exactly what is described here, to rise slowly and clandestinely, under the disguise of the worship of capitalism and equating it with "our way of life".

We now have fake democracy, fake journalism, fake opposition (just like professional wrestling) and a beautifully constructed system that feeds into everybody's fears of the dangerously crazy "other side". OMG what if Santorum wins??? Better support Obama again, at least he's not Santorum!

But the illusion is the glue that makes the magic trick, and thus the con, work at all, which is why I'm so fascinated with the illusion and so preoccupied with pulling back the curtain for people to see.

Jack Riddler wrote:Compartments.

That is precisely the mechanism, internal and external.

Street wrote:Democracy and justice activists would have to meet secretly and would live in constant danger of beating, torture, and disappearance.

Obligatory...

Substitute Democracy and justice activists with National Security State victims, and there is yet another domestic group but unnamed. Many thousands of us live that way, every day, right now and have done for many decades. Street leaves off his bullet list the huge shadow of that state, as do most even sensitive left analysts because they do not know exactly how it functions, and have been conditioned against mentioning it overtly.

As for rhetoric, here is Hedges on Wolin:

Hedges wrote:Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by “power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions,” Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling [Citizens United] illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation.

Nordic wrote:Street can be good, and that's pretty good, but having the theme of his essay basically being "c'mon, things aren't that bad" is kind of offensive.

I don't see it that way. Just because we might not be able to correctly call it fascism doesn't mean things aren't that bad. Fascism at least can be fought. I'm not so sure what we're witnessing now can be. Fascism is European, or at least Old World. Europe is a terrible and wonderful place. People there have deep roots and traditions and centuries of fascinating but mostly awful history. Sometimes they even learn from it. The United States on the other hand started as a business deal. The founding fathers were all businessmen out to protect their property and their profits. Even the allegedly divinely inspired constitution was a deal with the British Crown and related business interests. Not much has changed. At bottom, America is still a business enterprise designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. That's why long term thinking is anathema, compassion is scorned, and the social nature of the human animal is ignored. Please don't misinterpret me when I say fascism is too good for this country.

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I began putting together this post for the occupy thread,
but thought the essay Occupy Religion would perhaps
disrupt the flow.
~ A.

_________________
Much appreciation to ninakat for posting Chris Hedges’s C-Span interview. I had just read the essay below and very much agreed with it until my listen to Hedges, who throughout much of the interview assumes a stoical countenance and I think for very good reasons. He begins (at approx. 1.04.00) a succinct explanation of the rise of the Christian Right’s use of disenfranchisement of working men and women that is directly linked to an utter despair with regard to both household economics and Earth’s biodiversity.

(This paragraph is a simple compilation-paraphrase of approximately 30 seconds of Hedges’s talk.) Economic dislocations bring with them destructions of families and communities; substance abuse, emotional abuse; all the attendant challenges that occur when communities break down. People (can) retreat from that reality based world, a retreat that can perpetuate nonreality based belief systems. Totalitarian systems can be nonreality belief systems exampled by historical, magical inevitabilities in which a deity intervenes on behalf of a human. Perhaps, the only way to bring those in great despair back into a reality based world is to reenfranchise them into the economy via the occupy movement. Hedges then refers to Weimar.

Since I’ve not been an eye witness, I don’t know how prevalent tolerances for religious points of view have become within the occupiers’ locations and general assemblies anywhere. As an Internet observer, however, I’m presenting the following essay as representative of what has not been revealed enough at RI.

_________________
Occupy Religion: Don’t Let Religion Occupy You
— Liam Fox, News Junkie Post | Jan 1, 2012 at 1:45 pm

Religion, and religious institutions, are not only granted undeserved credit for their role in social movements, but are also not afforded the responsibility they deserve for the damage they inflict to the movements they infect, and the communities represented by those movements. Christians are all too ready to yell about the involvement of Islamic organizations in the Arab Spring, yet, as Occupy Churches spring up in American tent cities, and Occupy Faith groups begin to flourish, they turn a blind eye to the history of hierarchy, misogyny, and homophobia that has plagued revolutionary communities from the early European protestants, to the nationalist Irish under British rule, and the African-American community civil rights movement.

Religions are, by their nature, hierarchical. They worship a godhead and follow the rules ordained purportedly by that godhead. They do not arrive at decisions through consensus. They cannot. They must obey the rules and dictates of the godhead, and, at most, allow that a select group of god experts interpret those rules and dictates. Believers, adherents, and followers, do not have a say in what the teachings of the godhead are. The Occupy Movement is not only leaderless, but, by extension of that, be ‘followerless’ as well.

If any think that the Democratic Party, or MoveOn.org, or large corporate/political/bureaucratic unions are the biggest threats of co-option, they are completely missing what is being allowed to happen right under their nose.

Religion, and religious institutions, represent the greatest threat to the Occupy Movement. Religious leaders, such as priests, ministers, clerics, clergy, and acolytes et al, exert their leadership by claiming to be fellow followers of an invisible, silent entity that speaks and communicates through them. They refuse to admit that their godhead is nothing more than a construct of humans, that they exploit, and they fail to explain why their interpretations of the teachings of their supposed singular godhead has as many variations as their are religious leaders.

The advent of interfaith ceremonies and activities clearly demonstrates this hypocrisy. The all knowing god, that has always been, and always shall be, has either been on a pretty steep learning curve for the past few hundred years or is a human construct that directly reflects the attitudes of the believers and the society they live in. Supposed adherents to religions, whose holy scriptures claim that their god is the only true god, and that all other religions must be shunned, and whose followers must be either converted or killed, should not be praying together. Not unless they have the authority to change what their godhead teaches, and demands, through the holy scriptures that claim this to be an offense punishable by death.

Religions are still denying equal rights to women, homosexuals, and any that do not adhere to their doctrines and dogmas. Is this what the Occupy Movement stands for? Why are religions being given a carte blanche where others are vigorously denied. Why are sermons and teachings being allowed that tell Occupiers what they must do rather than make proposals to Occupiers, open those proposals up to critical, clarifying questions, allow themselves to accept friendly amendments, and then seek consensus or be blocked because they violate the fundamental values of the movement?

I was at a gathering of occupiers where speeches were being given by representatives from a variety of community groups. A representative from a Native American group stood and explained that their community’s spiritual tradition demands a hierarchical structure because their prophecies claim that the four different colors of peoples on the planet would each find their own way, and, that for Native American people, people that share their color, a hierarchical structure was their way. The group sat silent, most nodded approvingly and thanked the speaker for their wonderful offering. No one challenged the assertion.

What? Hierarchy, segregation, division, and separation… all OK because it’s framed as spiritual, prophetic, and part of someone’s religious belief. Our societal conditioning does not allow us to challenge even the most egregious violations of our values when they are framed in such terms, apparently.

Religions claim that many movements have come out of their institutions and congregations. The truth is: In Ireland, as in America from the time of restoration through the civil rights movement, churches and religious institutions were simply the only community spaces where activists could organize. The movements occupied the churches out of necessity. They didn’t see the danger, as we’ve all been programmed not to, with religion. Now, they as communities, and their movements seeking emancipation, have suffered as a result.

Religions have a prolific history of being just chameleon-like enough to infiltrate entire communities and cultures, adopt their lingo, appropriate their practices and traditions, and then completely usurp and control them. This cannot be allowed with the Occupy Movement. This must be aggressively resisted.

Religion should not be Occupying the Occupy Movement. Intolerance cannot be tolerated, regardless of how it is dressed up and justified. The Occupy Movement should only be occupying religions as a means of dismantling their destructive and divisive influence over our society and politics, equal to, or greater than, any corporation or financial institution, and introducing the unconditionally equal, personal empowerment of direct democracy and consensus building. Amen.

[MORE PIX.]

Okay, it's not exactly the same. I guess I am more inclined to call it fascism because most people can understand that more easily than "something new that is much worse than fascism was". Perhaps "late-stage fascism"? The semantic distinction has little use outside intellectual circles such as this board. Also, what wordspeak said, that fascism=capitalism is important to communicate. Even to say that fascism=capitalism=apartheid=slavery, because these all have the same ultimate goal and are orchestrated by the same people.

. George Carlin said that "Hitler lost WWII but fascism won". Did it ever. Fascism learned from its mistakes and realized that to succeed it would have to do exactly what is described here, to rise slowly and clandestinely, under the disguise of the worship of capitalism and equating it with "our way of life".

I agree with Nordic/George Carlin. Let's remember that Bush's grandfather and other American banking conspirators like the Rockefellers funded the Nazis. Rockefeller and Bush interests are still at the helm of the U.S. national security state. So on edit I think the key term for actually expressing the true reality is NAZIS. The people at the top of the military-industrial-complex hierarchy are absolutely NAZIS. That's what people need to understand. They were involved in executing 9/11; they are fucking Nazis. "Fascist" is, indeed, a term too pigeonholed on the Left. But the fact that we can buy a Michael Moore book does not mean our permanent government, responsible for killing JFK, is not run by insane eugenist Nazis. It only means that this is what they can get away with at the current time. They've made a political calculation that in order to maintain and tighten global control and expand their system of capitalism around the world they need to be smart about it, allow a certain amount of pluralism and very much allow the appearance of it. Hence the work of foundations like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, which promote a liberal pluralism but ultimately hold the interests of preserving the system that allows a tiny elite to control almost all the power and wealth. Some good works have been done about how foundations do this, such as "Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism" by Joan Roelofs. Meanwhile, in many ways the system is methodical in its attacking of the Left- for instance, the purging of hard-Left professors that went on especially in the seventies. You see very few socialist or Marxist professors at universities these days, a tiny percentage of what there used to be. It's a steady, deliberate, long-term war on hard-Leftism.

Barracuda, I haven't yet read the whole Lucaks piece, but I'm confused at what you think is the efficacy of using the term "National Socialism." Nazi Germany wasn't real socialism- quite the opposite- and neither is this. How is it socialism? It's socialism for corporations only, as Greg Palast puts it. Witness the bailout.