Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

[hanshan]

...

compared2what? :


But it's just not true that we might as well be living under a regime of censorship. Information that outrages the government does see daylight in the mainstream media fairly regularly. Granted, it usually either doesn't outrage the audience/readership, or doesn't move them to act on that outrage, or -- nine times out of ten, I'd say -- doesn't strike them as anything all that important, or interesting, or relevant to their lives, or (quite possibly) comprehensible. However, it is there.

And besides that, the MSM aren't the only game in town. The burgeoning wilds of the internet are also right here, being not censored, for those who take an interest in such things.

_______________

I'm sorry if I seem persnickety. That's not my intention. It's just that there are places like China (or Burma, or Equatorial Guinea, or Iran, etc), where they evidently haven't yet heard that overt censorship isn't necessary anymore. It makes an appreciable difference.


persnickety?

- eh _________________ how 'bout accurate?


...

[brainpanhandler]

In re: The OP.

Obviously, I wouldn't say the U.S. is now a fascist country. Personally, I don't even see much sign of a creeping police state. Or at least not significantly more or one than there sometimes has been in the past without triggering a full-on loss of freedoms. (Which is not to say that kind of thing isn't always an evil, all on its own, btw.)

But I obviously would say that there are more incipient signs of what might later develop into a fascist coup nowadays than I really feel comfortable seeing, since I just did say exactly that on the "Fuck Obama" thread.

I'll try to make a list. But generally speaking, even if nothing else was going on: There are just a whole lot of parallels between the present-day U.S. and (to choose a well-known example) Weimar Germany. And societies that are on the wain in the way that America's presently is do tend to veer towards fascism when their economies go south.

So some movement in that direction is probably just human nature, which never learns, evidently.

Curious to see your list and curious why you say, "Obviously, I wouldn't say the U.S. is now a fascist country", because it's not so obvious to me at all. I don't expect an exact repeat of previous fascist regimes, their form and tactics. In fact, I expect that some lessons will have been learned and fascism will take a different form while still being recognizably fascism. Fascism lite as it were. More sophisticated cultural engineering propaganda, less overtly brutal tactics. That sort of thing. We do of course still have some freedoms, but they sometimes seem like mere tokens that have no way of being threatening to power. I mean what good are free speech zones? And what sort of freedoms did non-scapegoats of the third reich have, at least formally? I mean a gilded cage is still just a gilded cage.

[2012 Countdown]

Re; USA is now Fascist. I would say yes! Technocratic fascism.

btw, anyone familiar w/ a 90s band 'Consolidated'?
I have a few of their albums. Good stuff, imo.

Friendly Fascism


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zchtjTwx9ok

Uploaded by Oraculator on Aug 9, 2009

Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen to the end of the twentieth century and the arrival of friendly fascism.
Regrettably, millions will die as before. But just think of the tremendous selection and savings you'll gain.
Of course the loss of freedom and democracy are tragedies, I know, but consider the entertainment value contained within and to remind you, it is you, the people, who have mandated this course of our fate so please come with me...
Look at the new face of power in America. This is your future you can never leave. Who said tyranny can't be fun? Friendly fascism having so much fun, what else do you need?

You'll learn to like what you must do. If you resist you are suppressed. You
are told who to fight and when by Bush/Obama the Nazi Fascist Friends. Alienating technology
wipes out our sense of community. Millions will die just like before. We disconnect and
start the war. We make life a commodity. We turn animals into machines. Kinder and
gentler slaughter house. Big business and big government distract us with entertainment.
They manufacture our consent while we destroy the environment."
-


Consolidated - Friendly Fascism CD

http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/mus ... ascism.htm

[compared2what?]

Curious to see your list and curious why you say, "Obviously, I wouldn't say the U.S. is now a fascist country", because it's not so obvious to me at all.

I'm afraid that "obviously" mostly just indicates that the sentence it's in originally followed rather than preceded: "I obviously would say that there are more incipient signs of what might later develop into a fascist coup nowadays than I really feel comfortable seeing, since I just did say exactly that on the "Fuck Obama" thread."

But I should have deleted it. Because I wasn't trying to say that it was obvious on its face. And I don't think it is.

(I haven't had time to compile a list worth posting. But I haven't forgotten about it. And your request means something to me.)

I don't expect an exact repeat of previous fascist regimes, their form and tactics. In fact, I expect that some lessons will have been learned and fascism will take a different form while still being recognizably fascism. Fascism lite as it were. More sophisticated cultural engineering propaganda, less overtly brutal tactics. We do of course still have some freedoms, but they sometimes seem like mere tokens that have no way of being threatening to power. I mean what good are free speech zones? And what sort of freedoms did non-scapegoats of the third reich have, at least formally? I mean a gilded cage is still just a gilded cage.

IIRC, under the Third Reich, non-scapegoats had some rights, such as the right to bear arms, although I guess that the implications of that fact have been lost on those who equate gun ownership with independence in the present.

Because what non-scapegoats under the Third Reich didn't have -- formally or informally -- was political or social autonomy of any kind. There was only one legal political party. It had its own paramilitary secret police force. Active dissent was explicitly prohibited and absolutely repressed by the state, via the simple expedient of sentencing those who engaged in it to death. Even more passive forms of non-compliance -- ie, insufficiently vigorous participation in state-sponsored leisure and/or cultural activities -- were very severely sanctioned. And all of that (plus much, much more!) was a systematic, inevitable fact of daily life.

____________

Free speech zones are profoundly objectionable. But they aren't the only available venue for political protest. Furthermore, it's still possible to engage in sustained, public, explicitly oppositional political protest in defiance of the law (Occupy, IOW) without engendering reprisals that are any different than they've really ever been in any free society on earth.

And I don't really know what else to say.

Power seeks to perpetuate its own privileges. For that and other reasons, there's no such thing as an institutionalized system -- political or otherwise -- that grants those subject to it the right to overthrow, replace or dismantle said system, without effort, on request. Serious oppositional political protest does therefore come with negative consequences that are designed to function as a disincentive to it pre-attached.

And that's not the only obstacle to bringing it about. Existing systems are inherently resistant to change. People are inherently more invested in protecting and/or pursuing their own interests than they are in doing the same for others. It's difficult to achieve voluntary, happy consensus in a mixed group. And [BLAH BLAH BLAH].

In short: The odds that any movement for some kind of major political and/or social change will be able to attain its goals quickly, easily, and to the satisfaction of all participants are always very, very long. In fact, they quite frequently don't attain any of them, ever. For that matter, even bringing about incremental change requires more time and effort than most people are willing and/or able to spare. And usually some sacrifices, too.

But that's just life, afaik. The question (at least as I understand it) is whether or not the state makes the pursuit of political and personal freedom -- such as autonomy/choice wrt what you say and do -- systematically impossible. By some and/or any means. Because if it does, it's definitely totalitarian and possibly fascist. And it it doesn't, it's not.

I mean, how do the people positing that it's presently impossible to pursue political and/or personal freedom in the United States because the government systematically prevents or prohibits all attempts to do so account for the Tea Party? It hasn't been around very long. It's explicitly very hostile to established interests and powers. But it not only hasn't been suppressed, it's actually made some significant gains on a national level.

Fascist states just don't allow that type of thing to happen, unless I'm missing something. So what am I missing?

[compared2what?]

For the anti-fascist dance party.

[barracuda]

- The trains are late.

[JackRiddler]

I mean, how do the people positing that it's presently impossible to pursue political and/or personal freedom in the United States because the government systematically prevents or prohibits all attempts to do so account for the Tea Party? It hasn't been around very long. It's explicitly very hostile to established interests and powers. But it not only hasn't been suppressed, it's actually made some significant gains on a national level.

Fascist states just don't allow that type of thing to happen, unless I'm missing something. So what am I missing?

You really lose me here and show a lack of sophistication that's quite unusual for you. The "Tea Party," now pretty much defunct as a factor in US politics, was a successful effort by the Republican Party right-wing to rebrand itself as a secular economic justice movement in the wake of the 2008 election, so as to take Congress in 2010. It partly owes its success thanks to the incoming administration's intentional dissolution of the movement that had brought it into power; its total capitulation to the zombie bankers; and its creation of a Neo-Clintonian cabinet with nothing but neoliberals and vetted national-security wonks at the helm of the key departments. That created the vacuum for allowing a right-wing counterpopulist movement to present itself as the new opposition to tyranny in a country that had just repudiated the Bush agenda and shifted a few feet to the left.

Prior to the inauguration, the "Tea Party" was little more than the Ron Paul 2008 campaign. Afterward, some dick on CNBC who didn't rant about the bank bailouts ranted about the (bogus) mortgage modification program, HAMP, as if it was a socialist atrocity, and this was treated by the rest of the corporate media like Bastille Day. The most ideologically fascist ruling class elements in this country (Kochs et al.) paid a couple of hundred million dollars to promote the "Tea Party" as a supposed third party movement that just happened to be led exclusively by long-familiar Republican politicians and campaigned for Republican candidates. FOXNEWS turned into Tea Party Channel and the rest of the corporate media gave absolute free ride, if not ideologically, then by covering these developments as if a legitimate third party had arisen, and as if its largest demonstrations (twice about 80,000 people in Washington) ran into the millions.

The ideology is Republican to the core, with a fascist bent. Freeloaders and immigrants and privileged blacks and America-hating liberals drove this country into debt and moral depravity! Now the Real Americans must take it back. In concrete policy terms, this means cutting everything public, privatizing everything, and completely deregulating whatever corporate crime is left to deregulate. The hostility you see to "established interests and powers" is the traditional right-wing delusion of revolt directed against the imagined power of "liberal media" and education and the currently African-American imperator. Of course it wasn't suppressed! It was a goosed-up expression of reaction with fascist tendencies. How can you imagine this was an opposition movement?

Also, I ask that you go back to the last page and read my long post on the various usages of the word fascist. It was in large part written in response to your earlier posts.

.

[barracuda]

[Project Willow]

The network into which I was born and to whose violence I've been subjected my entire life is fascist. Their captive population is not at will to pursue personal or political freedom. Their clandestine activity subverts democratic and judicial processes, and they are funded by the state.

For some of them, Hitler's birthday is an annual celebration.

[JackRiddler]

The network into which I was born and to whose violence I've been subjected my entire life is fascist. Their captive population is not at will to pursue personal or political freedom. Their clandestine activity subverts democratic and judicial processes, and they are funded by the state.

For some of them, Hitler's birthday is an annual celebration.

You know, I was actually going to bring something like that up as an example back in my totally unread post on the different meanings of fascist:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35352&start=15#p475294

This country is highly compartmentalized. Fascism, like war, is everywhere and nowhere. I go to the supermarket, I hang out - where's this perpetual and global war we're supposedly in? Okay, I'm far removed from the hostilities, but where's the homefront mobilization? I can completely ignore it. It doesn't need very many dedicated supersoldiers willing to charge into death for god and country. It needs button pushers and technicians. It needs taxpayers. It needs the 80% or more of non-essential personnel to be apathetic. My own assigned role in this war machine is to be powerless in changing it, and to see how my opinions against it serve merely to validate that we're supposedly a democracy and a republic and a really good nation. Since I can express these opinions, after all - some would say at exorbitant length!

US institutions evolve smoothly into different stages while avoiding open breaks. I doubt there will ever be an explicit military or fascist coup d'etat, as that would wreck the most important illusions we have. Didn't we already have a literal coup d'etat, meaning the execution of the chief executive on behalf of a military cabal, in 1963? Wasn't that followed by some pretty explicit assassinations of dangerous opposition figures, and I'm not just talking about the justly celebrated heroes but the death squads put out on local leaders like Fred Hampton? And what are MK and its presumed successor programs, if not part of a post-fascist establishment using lessons learned from classical fascism?

Such realities are kept on a need-to-know basis. We may not have the world's biggest population but we do have the biggest economy, which makes a lot of space for niches. The fascist toolkit and, as you say, explicit fascist ideology are prevalent in many realms, even as the great bulk of the people have less reason to see it, or can get by with some reassuring observation that, hey, as long as I can write these words on the Internet, the system is not yet fascist, or even that none of its many compartments should be described as such.

This is the special talent of America, in contrast to other regimes that expose their repressive nature too readily, even though most of them don't manage to imprison anything like the proportion of the population imprisoned here. We make sure that our Single Corporate Party state has two perpetually warring right wings, to paraphrase Gore Vidal, and that truths are not suppressed but drowned out by hurricanes of noise and bullshit. We don't kill whistleblowers, we break them in the press or bankrupt them in courts, and only save the prison and the torture for a select few, like Bradley Manning or the other Brad, the one who exposed massive tax evasion activity at UBS and was the only one who was punished for it! We destroy the "middle class" in salami slices, not a meat grinder. The wise among the ruling elite would like to let us keep the right to blab our complaints to each other without effect forever. It's only necessary to repress and to roll out the sophisticated crowd control tech and to make up false plots and to kill us when we organize and start showing an effect. Fascism in America is soft. It's selective. It's niche-based. It's subtle, and usually avoids the appearance of ideology. It moves slowly. Its passionate outbreaks are only occasional, and these are dressed up as something terrible that happened to us - the Russians having a bomb, the Iranians seizing an embassy, the entire angry Islamic world somehow implicated in an irrational attack on our freedoms out of pure religious spite. It works by threatening potentials - the ability to nuke the world, for example - as much as by direct manifestation.

.

[Canadian_watcher]

This country is highly compartmentalized. Fascism, like war, is everywhere and nowhere. I go to the supermarket, I hang out - where's this perpetual and global war we're supposedly in? Okay, I'm far removed from the hostilities, but where's the homefront mobilization? I can completely ignore it. It doesn't need very many dedicated supersoldiers willing to charge into death for god and country. It needs button pushers and technicians. It needs taxpayers. It needs the 80% or more of non-essential personnel to be apathetic. My own assigned role in this war machine is to be powerless in changing it, and to see how my opinions against it serve merely to validate that we're supposedly a democracy and a republic and a really good nation. Since I can express these opinions, after all - some would say at exorbitant length!

US institutions evolve smoothly into different stages while avoiding open breaks. I doubt there will ever be an explicit military or fascist coup d'etat, as that would wreck the most important illusions we have. Didn't we already have a literal coup d'etat, meaning the execution of the chief executive on behalf of a military cabal, in 1963? Wasn't that followed by some pretty explicit assassinations of dangerous opposition figures, and I'm not just talking about the justly celebrated heroes but the death squads put out on local leaders like Fred Hampton? And what are MK and its presumed successor programs, if not part of a post-fascist establishment using lessons learned from classical fascism?

Such realities are kept on a need-to-know basis. We may not have the world's biggest population but we do have the biggest economy, which makes a lot of space for niches. The fascist toolkit and, as you say, explicit fascist ideology are prevalent in many realms, even as the great bulk of the people have less reason to see it, or can get by with some reassuring observation that, hey, as long as I can write these words on the Internet, the system is not yet fascist, or even that none of its many compartments should be described as such.

This is the special talent of America, in contrast to other regimes that expose their repressive nature too readily, even though most of them don't manage to imprison anything like the proportion of the population imprisoned here. We make sure that our Single Corporate Party state has two perpetually warring right wings, to paraphrase Gore Vidal, and that truths are not suppressed but drowned out by hurricanes of noise and bullshit. We don't kill whistleblowers, we break them in the press or bankrupt them in courts, and only save the prison and the torture for a select few, like Bradley Manning or the other Brad, the one who exposed massive tax evasion activity at UBS and was the only one who was punished for it! We destroy the "middle class" in salami slices, not a meat grinder. The wise among the ruling elite would like to let us keep the right to blab our complaints to each other without effect forever. It's only necessary to repress and to roll out the sophisticated crowd control tech and to make up false plots and to kill us when we organize and start showing an effect. Fascism in America is soft. It's selective. It's niche-based. It's subtle, and usually avoids the appearance of ideology. It moves slowly. Its passionate outbreaks are only occasional, and these are dressed up as something terrible that happened to us - the Russians having a bomb, the Iranians seizing an embassy, the entire angry Islamic world somehow implicated in an irrational attack on our freedoms out of pure religious spite. It works by threatening potentials - the ability to nuke the world, for example - as much as by direct manifestation.
.

Jack, this ^ is brilliant. i bolded my favourite parts.

[brekin]

I think it is interesting to look at what the proponents of Fascism were selling and what they sold.
Much like the Nazi's (National Socialists) they wrapped some progressive elements into their agenda
and their platform became popular because of some reforms and promised reforms. They also unified their countries
which makes discord and partisan infighting a blessing I sometimes think.

Much like the conversation about a Green Totalitarian State it probably is possible to have a Solar Energy Charged, Gender Equal, Living Wage, Animal Loving country that also bakes people in ovens. Many people were conned by Obama's promises. Looking over some of the bullet points in the below manifesto its not hard to see how desperation and a desire to change the status quo can usher in the Devil you don't know.

Contents of the Fascist Manifesto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_manifesto
The manifesto (published in "Il Popolo d'Italia" on June 6, 1919) is divided into four sections, describing Fascist objectives in political, social, military and financial fields.[2]

Politically, the manifesto calls for:

* Universal suffrage with a lowered voting age to 18 years, and voting and electoral office eligibility for all age 25 and more, including women;
* Proportional representation on a regional basis;
* Voting for women (which was opposed by most other European nations);
* Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector;
* The abolition of the Italian Senate (at the time, the senate, as the upper house of parliament, was by process elected by the wealthier citizens, but were in reality direct appointments by the king. It has been described as a sort of extended council of the crown);
* The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers (this concept was rooted in corporatist ideology and derived in part from Catholic social doctrine).

In labour and social policy, the manifesto calls for:

* The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers;
* A minimum wage;
* The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions;
* To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants;
* Reorganisation of the railways and the transport sector;
* Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance;
* Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.

In military affairs, the manifesto advocates:

* Creation of a short-service national militia with specifically defensive responsibilities;
* Armaments factories are to be nationalised;
* A peaceful but competitive foreign policy.

In finance, the manifesto advocates:

* A strong progressive tax on capital (envisaging a “partial expropriation” of concentrated wealth);
* The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor;
* Revision of all contracts for military provisions;
* The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.

The manifesto thus combined elements of contemporary democratic and progressive thought (franchise reform, labour reform, limited nationalisation, taxes on wealth and war profits) with corporatist emphasis on class collaboration (the idea of social classes existing side by side and collaborating for the sake of national interests; the opposite of the Marxist notion of class struggle).
[edit] The Manifesto in practice

Of the manifesto’s proposals, the commitment to corporative organisation of economic interests was to be the longest lasting. Far from becoming a medium of extended democracy, parliament became by law an exclusively Fascist-picked body in 1929; being replaced by the “chamber of corporations” a decade later.

Fascism’s pacifist foreign policy ceased during its first year of Italian government. In September 1923, the Corfu crisis demonstrated the regime’s willingness to use force internationally. Perhaps the greatest success of Fascist diplomacy was the Lateran Treaty of February 1929: which accepted the principle of non-interference in the affairs of the Church. This ended the 59 year old dispute between Italy and the Papacy.

[tazmic]

> Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Whenever I find myself entertaining an elitist attitude, I think, that's the fascist in you, that's the easy blindness that comes from not wanting to look, and I remind myself of the only principle that has served me well in life, without fail, and find myself at last humbled.

[Luther Blissett]

The world really is very very different today than the world in which any historical regime existed, that's not just hyperbole or ego. Accelerating technological advances don't really have an analog to other big leaps of developmental progress in history. When we talk of "explosions" in the past, they would often occur over periods of hundreds of years.

We have the Holocene Extinction, Moore's Law, Global Warming Potential, the Seven Billionth Person, and Robotic / Cyber Warfare. Not many were totally prepared for all of that, but one class that was certainly poised to take advantage of all of it was the Power Class through the magic of public relations. The little people take care of the rest in many of the ways that Jack describe.

[brainpanhandler]

Free speech zones are profoundly objectionable. But they aren't the only available venue for political protest. Furthermore, it's still possible to engage in sustained, public, explicitly oppositional political protest in defiance of the law (Occupy, IOW) without engendering reprisals that are any different than they've really ever been in any free society on earth.

Maybe so and pepper spray and nightsticks aren't a death sentence but for all practical intents and purposes the effect is damn near identical.

The question (at least as I understand it) is whether or not the state makes the pursuit of political and personal freedom -- such as autonomy/choice wrt what you say and do -- systematically impossible. By some and/or any means. Because if it does, it's definitely totalitarian and possibly fascist. And it it doesn't, it's not.

That then is clear and probably serves in place of the list. I'm not sure why you want to place the bar that high. It seems to me that post wwII the fascists would need to find a kinder, gentler but possibly no less fascist way of holding onto power and privilege and oppressing anyone and anything that threatens that.

I mean, how do the people positing that it's presently impossible to pursue political and/or personal freedom in the United States because the government systematically prevents or prohibits all attempts to do so account for the Tea Party? It hasn't been around very long. It's explicitly very hostile to established interests and powers. But it not only hasn't been suppressed, it's actually made some significant gains on a national level.

Fascist states just don't allow that type of thing to happen, unless I'm missing something. So what am I missing?

I'll let you respond to Jack on this one, but I'll mention that perhaps this is where the more sophisticated cultural engineering comes in. I think today's fascists learned something from the successes and failures of their predecessors.