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

[Luther Blissett]

I think that the original quote might have had to do with "modernism" as opposed to "the modern world" or "the modern era" though of course I'm not sure. Modernism, as the rejection of all traditions, has been wrestling with, in opposition to, and competing with fascism since its conception around the late 19th Century, and vice versa. The early 20th Century's version of fascism was made possible partially through its response to modernism (which also had its own built-in aesthetics [though, as a modernist, I would argue that the timeless aesthetic, a pursuit of self-improvement, Utopianism, and democracy, was derived strictly from form and immaculately inspired by the philosophy]). We could have a similar discussion about defining modernism and socialism - two innately twinned concepts outside of the realm of politics and art.

Yes, I think classical fascism was very much a modern reaction to modernism - meaning, the worldview prevalent in the West by the late 19th and early 20th century; not just the art movement. That's not all I think about it, but it's a good excuse to add an interesting text to this thread.

Sandro Bocola (author of the seminal but under-selling "The Art of Modernism") influenced my thinking on this, partly because he's right, and partly because when you translate several hundred pages of an author you actually like, it makes for the deepest possible reading. It becomes very hard not to be influenced. Among art critics, Bocola (I hope he still lives) is commendable for writing a textbook on the subject that interspersed sections of straight history between chapters on particular artists and movements. It makes for great reading, although these are still short-form for the subjects he tackles (relativity theory and psychoanalysis summed up in 12 pages) and so at times he telescopes and exaggerates. As an art critic, he couldn't help but give a highly personalized version of the NS history. He sees Hitler as a failed artist who turns to politics as his new medium. (There's no doubt Hitler understood himself as a performer and took pains to refine and rehearse everything about his image and impact on crowds.) Of course the "Entartete Kunst" exhibition plays a major role in Bocola's telling of the story, at least in the longer form. And Hitler becomes the force that ends up driving the locus of modernist art from Europe to the United States, where many refugee European artists keep tight company with each other and hold court for the many up and coming Americans who would succeed them at the top of the art world.

I must still have the chapter on National Socialism from the full version of his book in file form, but I can't find it. I later translated a highly abridged, illustrated timeline version of "Modernism," which I have found. It's incredible the optimistic historical spirit of the time that (some) people who grew up postwar could still evoke, even as late as 1998.

The relevant passage:

1945-1980. Triumph and Consummation

Before we can follow the subsequent development of Modernism, we must turn to one of the darkest chapters of European history: the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, the terror of National Socialism, and the Second World War.33

The worldview and self-concept of the modernist era, which had already found its artistic, scientific, political and social form and expression before the First World War, began during the interwar period (documented on pages 62 to 83) to spread throughout the Western world. The social and political models of the modernist idea — democracy, political equality of the sexes, separation of church and state, the right to education and information, and the protection of the private sphere — came hand-in-hand with hitherto unheard of claims to self-determination. The fulfillment of these claims, however, was perceived among broad strata of society not only as an enrichment but as a threat. The intellectual attitude of Modernism had not simply reduced dependence and social repression and helped raise the standard of living; it also destroyed the worldview and mental structures that until then provided protection and stability. The prevailing mood of the new era was marked by a general sense of insecurity.

This insecurity could be tolerated without objection only for as long as it shined in an optimistic light, i.e. for as long as the promises of the newly gained rights and freedoms could push the associated fears into the background. With the outbreak and mounting intensity of the material and spiritual crises of the postwar period, that was no longer the case. The ambiguity of the modernist era — the ineradicable link between freedom and insecurity — was increasingly perceived as intolerable. In nearly all European countries, radical nationalist and anti-democratic movements rose up with new offers of absolute certainties and promises that the life of each person and of the nation could be put back on solid spiritual and economic foundations. The declared goal of these movements, which we nowadays describe as fascist, was the creation of a totalitarian state. The most extreme and fateful manifestation of this attitude of mind (as a political revolt against the modernist idea) was found in German National Socialism.

The core of National Socialist ideology lay in Hitler’s Social Darwinist racial doctrine. According to that, humanity consists of superior and inferior races; the superior have the right to subjugate the inferior and use them in the service of their own goals and purposes. In this scheme the best and most valuable race is that of the German peoples, the "Aryan" race. The idealization of the Aryan went hand-in-hand with a fanatic anti-Semitism that in the end led to a systematic extermination of the European Jews.

The Jew functioned as a stand-in for all people, forces or institutions that directly or indirectly questioned Hitler's inflated self-image and claims to power. To Hitler, democracy and the League of Nations, pacifism, Marxism and modernist art were all Jewish inventions; the Soviet Union, "international finance capital," the German Revolution of 1918, the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles were all works of "international Judaism." It is pointless to refute these nonsensical claims. The common denominator that connects all of these manifestations branded as ”Jewish” is the mental attitude or worldview of which they were an expression. Hitler's image of the enemy — "international Judaism" — has a paradigmatic significance. It stood for the spirit of Modernism.

With Hitler's seizure of power in Germany in January 1933 came the legal disenfranchisement and the material persecution of the Jews. At the same time, cultural life was to be "freed of all Jewish influence" (literally: "dejudaized"), protected from the subversive influence of "international" thinking, and regained as a province of "Aryan genius." Accordingly the Bauhaus was shut down on April 11th, 1933, followed by the infamous book burnings on May 10th and, finally, the "purging" of the museums and galleries.34

Hitler's foreign policy was marked by the same ruthless determination that he had displayed in the pursuit of his domestic goals. After the annexation of Austria, the bloodless occupation of the Sudetenland and subsequent absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia, German armed forces overran the Polish borders on September 1st, 1939, setting off the most destructive war in history, which ended after five and one-half years with the utter defeat of the Axis powers.

The repercussions of the Second World War on cultural history were comparable to those of the French Revolution, this time affecting not just Europe but the whole world. Henceforth the world was split into two blocs divided by a boundary running right through the middle of a devastated Europe that had ceded its political, economic and intellectual hegemony to the new world powers — to the United States and the Soviet Union. The sense of self that had once sustained the Old World lay buried beneath the rubble.

The extent of the destruction and horror unleashed upon the world by a country as cultured as Germany — with its history of great thinkers, poets and musicians — the discovery of the concentration camps and the accounts of the systematic murder of six million Jews, the photographs of prisoners, the mass graves, the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka united the civilized world in its abhorrence of Nazi terror and shattered any remaining illusions about the intellectual and moral supremacy of Western civilization.

All progressive, liberal and anti-bourgeois tendencies, in spite of the often unbridgeable gulfs among them, were thus cast in a new light and gained newfound respectability and vindication. With his failed attempts at restoration, with his insane extreme of political absolutism, Hitler ultimately helped to bring about the triumph of precisely those ideas and principles that he had so bitterly opposed. Internationalism, social pluralism, democracy and communism became the dominant factors in the politics of the postwar world. To secure world peace and advance international cooperation, 52 governments convened on October 24, 1945 to adopt the charter of the United Nations, which among other goals purposed the protection of human rights and basic freedoms.

This reappraisal redefined the intellectual life of Western democracies, in particular influencing their artistic consciousness. Much of the old cultural context came to be equated with a Europe of power-hungry nation states, and with traditions and values that were held responsible for the catastrophe just endured. Modernist art was not tarred with the same brush; it represented one of the few achievements of Western culture that could still be idealized. Its condemnation by the Nazis and their persecution of its exponents made it into a symbol of intellectual resistance, of the integrity and continuity of a liberal European consciousness. In the United States and the countries of western Europe, the great masters of Modernism were now presented to a broader public in individual and major group exhibitions. The outsiders and the revolutionaries of the pre-war era became established figures.

Even as they celebrated their belated triumph, even as some of them — Matisse and Giacometti spring to mind — actually created their most important works, the artists of a war-scarred Europe lacked the will and strength to build on previous artistic developments in a creative and innovative way. That fell instead to the relatively unsullied and unburdened American artists, who had recently discovered modernist art for themselves, and who sought to create their own, truly American works that would rank alongside those of their much admired predecessors.

[...]

PS - When the CIA soon after decided to do undercover PR work for the Abstract Expressionists, I would say this was an example of them (for a change) not being fascists.

.

This is great. Amazing. Very affirming, and I'd like to read the whole book. There was a direct pedagogical lineage from the Bauhaus —> Basel —> my program, and I had felt a strong connection to modernism long before really learning the history of the philosophy and its conflicts with fascism.

[Luther Blissett]

Just found out today via the Daily Heller that Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung was connected to Sophie Scholl.

This last question is more for me than the average reader. I know that Sophie Scholl, the heroine of The White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group, was connected to Ulm in some way. Otl Aicher was married to her sister. Is there more of a connection?
Otl Aicher knew the Scholl family since his youth. Aicher was one of very few pupils in Nazi Germany who had refused to join the Hitler Jugend. Therefore, he could not get his diploma from the secondary school qualifying for university admission or matriculation (Abitur). Aicher loved Sophie Scholl. He reports about it in his autobiographical sketch “innenseiten des kriegs.” The marriage with her older sister Inge then appears as a surrogate activity.
Aicher knew about The White Rose and Hans and Sophie Scholl's involvement. Aicher escaped his own arrest by a most fortunate circumstance - he would have been as well executed.

I had no idea that Ulm was founded in part by Sophie Scholl's older sister. Insane.

[JackRiddler]

Let's bump this thread, the subject having come up recently in a lesser one.

[American Dream]

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2013/ ... scism.html

What do we mean by "fascism"?

"Fascism" means different things to different people. To help explain how we use the term, here is a set of quotes from Three Way Fight contributors and people who have influenced us. The quotes don't all agree with each other, and none of them should be considered an "official" position. Rather, they are intended to sketch out a general perspective and set of issues we consider important.


Definitions

Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis. (J. Sakai, "The Shock of Recognition")

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Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist political and cultural power while promoting economic and social hierarchy. (Matthew Lyons, "Two Ways of Looking at Fascism")


Competing with the Left

Fascism is not a danger because it is ruling class policy or is about to be adopted as policy. Not even because it could have major influences on this policy. Nor is it a danger because of the "rahowa," racial holy war, that is advocated by some fascist factions. The policies of official capitalism carried out through the schools and the criminal justice and welfare systems are both a far greater and a more immediate threat to the health and welfare of people of color than fascist instigated racial attacks and their promotion of racialist genocide. The real danger presented by the emerging fascist movements and organizations is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left. This default is more than a possibility, it is a probability, and if it happens it will cause massive damage to the potential for a liberatory anti-capitalist insurgency. (Don Hamerquist, "Fascism & Anti-Fascism")

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The left had better begin to deal with the fact that issues that are regarded a part of our movement; "globalization," working class economic demands, "green" questions, resistance to police repression etc. are now being organized by explicit fascists and others who might as well be. Nor do we have a patent on decentralized direct action. That is exactly what the fascist debate around "leaderless resistance" is about. Finally, the question of who and what, exactly, is anti-capitalist remains very much unsettled. Some of the fascists take positions that at least appear to be much more categorically oppositional than those of most of the left. (Hamerquist, "Fascism & Anti-Fascism")

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The assumption that in fighting fascism we would automatically enjoy majority support has crashed -- just look at India or Austria right now. As has the delusion that fascism built its movements solely on bigotry and violence. Even the Nazi movement not only strongly manipulated themes of social justice and restoring civic order, but built its mass base by a grassroots network of fighting squads, self-help groups and social services. What fascists did crudely in 1930 is being done in a much more sophisticated way today -- as we can see in the Muslim world. In place after place, the far right is drawing on the energy of "anti-colonialism" and anti-Western imperialism. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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We forget that fascism has always been mainly a movement of the young. That many youth in 1930s Germany viewed the Nazis as liberatory. As opposed to the German social-democrats, for example, who preached the dutiful authority of parents over children, the Hitler Youth gave rebellious children the power to keep their own hours, have an active sex and political life, smoke, drink and have groups of their own. Wilhelm Reich pointed out long ago that fascism in practice exposed every hypocrisy and internal cultural repression of the old left. (Sakai, "The Shock of Recognition")

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While it intensifies oppression and murderously attacks the left, fascism also appropriates leftist anti-elitism in distorted form. In place of a structural analysis that focuses on dismantling systems of power, fascists portray evil elites as an insidious cultural or racial threat to be purged. For example, fascism attacks bourgeois values and "parasitic" business elements (sometimes, but not always, defined as Jewish) while defending the underlying institutions of private property and class exploitation. Historically, this approach has enabled fascism to tap into real social grievances, such as those of some middle-class groups who resent the power of big business but also have a stake in class privilege and feel threatened by working-class movements or oppressed communities below. (Lyons, "Is the Bush Administration Fascist?")


Totalitarian mass politics

Fascism doesn't just terrorize and repress. It also inspires and mobilizes large masses of people around a vision of collective rebirth in a time of crisis. Building a mass movement outside traditional channels is central to fascism's bid to win state power. As a regime, fascism uses mass organizations and rituals to create a sense of participation and direct identification with the state. Fascism celebrates the nation, race, or cultural group as an organic community to which all other loyalties must be subordinated. In place of individual liberties or social justice, fascism offers its followers a culture of action, virility, heroic sacrifice, cathartic public spectacle, and being part of a vast social organism. (Lyons, "Is the Bush Administration Fascist?")

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I think many people look at fascism and say, "What a load of crap. How could anyone really believe that stuff?" Even many antifascists look at the fascist movement as a joke, violent, but a joke. No doubt the fascist movements have their share of the knuckle-draggers, idiots, and the politically inept, but don’t all movements have these types? I would actually say that in a real fascist movement, the more inept and foolish would be eliminated from the ranks. Fascism prides itself on ability, commitment, and sacrifice.



Fascist movements of the past were popular because they offered a total ideology with accompanying programs for action. Millions embraced fascism not because these people were stupid but because fascism provided a vision for social transformation amidst a time of international crisis. Fascism was able to mobilize masses of people.



I think this is important. The perspective I hold essentially sees fascism as a real movement of ideas that can draw people in and motivate them. It is an ideology and world view we are gonna have to compete with on more than a physical or military level. (Interview from Beating Fascism: Anarchist anti-fascism in theory and practice)


Revolution

By "revolutionary" the left has always meant overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist or communal or anarchist society. Fascism is not revolutionary in that sense, although it may use those words. Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself. Not simply to sit atop the old pile, but in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule. One cannot read "The Turner Diaries" seriously or understand Timothy McVeigh's politics (he was slaughtering the federal government not the Black Radical Caucus) without facing this. The old left propaganda that fascism is "a tool of the ruling class" is today just a quaint idea. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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Fascism overthrows old political elites and sweeps away established forms of political rule. It posits society as an organic hierarchy and rejects the Enlightenment principles of pluralism, equality, and individual rights. In the name of a fascist cultural revolution, it tries to reshape all institutions to embody a unified ideology imposed from above. Some kinds of fascism go further and revolutionize the socioeconomic order, too, 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. (Lyons, "Is the Bush Administration Fascist?")


People of color and the global south

Two points: First, there is a real potential for working relationships and alliances between white fascist movements and various nationalist and religious tendencies among oppressed peoples. In no way does this potential involve the denial of the reality of white supremacy and racial and national oppression. It only means that the left cannot count on the responses to this pattern of oppression, privilege and domination fitting into its neat and comfortable categories.

Second, there is no reason to view fascism as necessarily white just because there are white supremacist fascists. To the contrary there is every reason to believe that fascist potentials exist throughout the global capitalist system. African, Asian, and Latin American fascist organizations can develop that are independent of, and to some extent competitive with Euro-American "white" fascism. (Hamerquist, "Fascism & Anti-Fascism")

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[T]he critical turning point now for fascism is not just in Europe. With the failure of State socialism and national liberation parties in the capitalist periphery, in the Third World, the far right including fascism is grasping at the leadership of mass anti-colonialism. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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Mass movements based in religious fundamentalism and various types of warlordism exist everywhere in the third world. They often have anti-capitalist features and frequently these have a quasi-fascist aspect. This should not be surprising. The crumbling structures of the national liberation states and the fragmented and demoralized elements of the communist movements in these areas are more likely to be fertile grounds for fascist development rather than a force against it. The foreign control of capital, labor, and commodity markets distorts the development of parliamentary and trade union traditions. The form of global capitalism that dominates in the periphery of the world capitalist system is not healthy terrain for the reformist leftism that predominates in capital’s historic center. (Hamerquist "Fascism & Anti-Fascism")


Men and women

[Fascism] exults in the violent military experience that is said to be "natural" for men, while scorning the soft cowardly life of the bourgeois businessmen and intellectuals and politicians….

It was early 18th century euro-capitalism itself that first redefined women not as free citizens and "not as patriarchal property of individual men, but as a natural resource of the nation-State". Fascism exalts this, and makes of women a semi-slave resource of the State restricted to the margins of an essentially male society.

One part of this discussion is whether political movements or social phenomenon can be said to have gender. Yes, fascism appeals to women as well as men. Yes, Nazism owed much to German women, no matter how unwilling feminists now are to admit that. But we have said "men" so often when discussing fascism because we are being literal. It is a male movement, both in its composition and most importantly in its inner worldview. This is beyond discrimination or sexism, really. Fascism is nakedly a world of men. This is one of the sources of its cultural appeal. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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In an emerging fascist culture, the traditional forms of oppressing women become exaggerated beyond the point of recognition. The patriarchal nature of fascism places women in a particular class, or sub-class. Women become mere property, dominated and exploited by a male authority.

But herein lies the contradiction…. A fascist movement will draw its strength from both men and women. Hitler's rise to power wasn’t merely the work of stormtroopers in the streets, it was made possible by the mass support of women. Hitler promised the creation of a cultural value system in which the contributions of "Aryan" women to the fascist German society would simply be child rearing and care of the home and hearth. A new proletarian slave class of gypsies, Jews and North Africans -- made up of men, women and children -- would handle the work previously done by "Aryan" women. All sexual elements outside of conceiving for the master race would be handled by state-promoted brothels. (Xtn, "Introduction" to Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement)

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While all far-right movements are male supremacist, they embody a range of doctrines and policies on women and gender issues -- including some drawn from the left and even feminism. (Lyons, "Notes on Women and Right-Wing Movements")


Capitalism

Fascism grows out of the masses of men from classes that are abandoned on the sidelines of history. By transforming men from these classes and criminal elements into a distorted type of radical force, fascism changes the balance of power. It intervenes to try and seize capitalist State power -- not to save the old bourgeois order or even the generals, but to gut and violently reorganize society for itself as new parasitic State classes. Capitalism is restabilized but the bourgeoisie pays the price of temporarily no longer ruling the capitalist State. That is, there is a capitalist state but bourgeois rule is interrupted. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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The new fascism is, in effect, "anti-imperialist" right now. It is opposed to the big imperialist bourgeoisie (unlike Mussolini and Hitler earlier, who wanted even stronger, bigger Western imperialism), to the transnational corporations and banks, and their world-spanning "multicultural" bourgeois culture. Fascism really wants to bring down the World Bank, WTO and NATO, and even America the Superpower. As in destroy. That is, it is anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist. Because it is based on fundamentally pro-capitalist classes.

Fascism, in this slowly accelerating global crisis of transformation, believes in what we might call basic capitalism, o.g. capitalism. It is the would-be champion of local male classes vs. the new transnational classes. Enemy of emigrant Third World labor and the modern supra-imperialist State alike, fascism draws on the old weakening national classes of the lower-middle strata, local capitalists and the layers of declassed men. To the increasing mass of rootless men fallen or ripped out of productive classes -- whether it be the peasantry or the salariat -- it offers not mere working class jobs but the vision of payback. Of a land for real men, where they and not the bourgeois will be the one's giving orders at gunpoint and living off of others. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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In or out of power, fascism is not a capitalist puppet but an autonomous force, whose agenda sometimes clashes with capitalist interests in important ways. Business support was crucial to both Italian and German fascists in their drives for power, and they in turn aided big business by smashing the labor movement, imposing top-down stability, and promoting centralization of capital. But as these fascist regimes consolidated themselves, big business increasingly lost political control: it lost the power to determine the main direction of state policy. In Germany, the Nazi program of conquest and genocide simply overrode capitalist priorities -- such as exploiting scarce skilled workers instead of slaughtering them -- even if big industrialists made millions along the way. (Lyons, "Is the Bush Administration Fascist?")


Transforming class society

While usual classes are engaged in economic production and distribution, fascism to support its heightened parasitism is driven to develop a lumpen-capitalist economy more focused on criminality, war, looting and enslavement. In its highest development, as in Nazi Germany, fascism eliminates the dangerous class contradiction of the old working class by socially dispersing & wiping it out as a class, replacing its labor with a new unfree proletariat of women, colonial prisoners and slaves. The "extraordinary" culture of the developed fascist State is like a nightmare vision of extreme capitalism, but the big bourgeoisie themselves do not have it under control. That is its unique characteristic. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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Fascism de-proletarianized Aryan society. Or to put it more precisely: it created an Aryan society that had never existed before by de-proletarianizing and genociding the former German society. The Nazis pursued Adolf Hitler's evolving strategy, which was to simultaneously promote both techno-industrial development and the Aryan re-organization of classes. If it is the superior race man's destiny to be both a fierce soldier and ruler over others -- as the Nazis held in a core belief -- then how can this superior race man at the same time be packing groceries for housewives at the supermarket or bucking production on the assembly line?…. By the millions, newly Aryanized men were shifted into military & police service and into being supervisors, office workers, foremen, straw bosses and minor bureaucrats of every sort. The new proletariat that started emerging was heavily made up of involuntary foreign & slave laborers, retirees, and -- despite Nazi ideology about women's "natural" place in the kitchen and nursery -- women. (Sakai, "Shock of Recognition")

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The German left communist, Alfred Sohn-Rethel… thought that the German fascist state and society were developing features that foreshadowed a new "transcapitalist" exploitative social order. The most important of these features was fascist labor policy where, in significant areas of the economy the distinctively capitalist difference between labor and other factors of production was obliterated. Labor, not just labor power, was consumed in the process of production just like raw materials and fixed capital. The implications are barbaric and genocidal and genocide was what occurred. But this was not the genocidal aspect of continuing primitive accumulation that is a part of "normal" capitalist development. That type of genocide is directed mainly against pre-capitalist populations and against the social formations that obstruct the creation of a modern working class and the development of a reservoir of surplus labor. The German policy was the genocidal obliteration of already developed sections of the European working classes and the deliberate disruption of the social reproduction of labor in those sectors -- all in the interests of a racialist demand for "living space." (Hamerquist, "Fascism & Anti-Fascism")


Classical versus neo-fascism

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 tap into 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. (Lyons, "Two Ways of Looking at Fascism")

[American Dream]

Note to mods: I'm completely good with merging this thread with the "The United States is Not Fascist" thread, should you choose to do that.

[seemslikeadream]

I see no reason to merge threads



Early every year the seeds are growing
Unseen, unheard they lie beneath the ground
Would you know before their leaves are showing
That with weeds all your garden will abound?

If you close your eyes, stop your ears
Shut your mouth then how can you know ?
For seeds you cannot hear may not be there
Seeds you cannot see may never grow

In January you've still got the choice
You can cut the weeds before they start to bud
If you leave them to grow high they'll silence your voice
And in December you may pay with your blood

So close your eyes, stop your ears,
Shut your mouth and take it slow
Let others take the lead and you bring up the rear
And later you can say you didn't know

Every day another vulture takes flight
There's another danger born every morning
In the darkness of your blindness the beast will learn to bite
How can you fight if you can't recognise a warning?

Today you may earn a living wage
Tomorrow you may be on the dole
Though there's millions going hungry you needn't disengage
For it's them, not you, that's fallen in the hole

It's alright for you if you run with the pack
It's alright if you agree with all they do
If fascism is slowly climbing back
It's not here yet so what's it got to do with you?

The weeds are all around us and they're growing

It'll soon be too late for the knife
If you leave them on the wind that around the world is blowing
You may pay for your silence with your life

So close your eyes, stop your ears,
Shut your mouth and never dare
And if it happens here they'll never come for you
Because they'll know you really didn't care

[stillrobertpaulsen]

An interesting post on this subject at DU during the 2008 Meltdown:

bdf Donating Member (430 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Sep-21-08 09:47 PM
Original message
I can't believe it's not fascism

The US economy is collapsing and it looks like at least a trillion dollars will be spent in bailouts of companies that essentially put all their money on a three-legged horse and are now crying their eyes out until the gov't reimburses them.

Is action necessary? Yes.

Should those responsible be held accountable and the rescued companies be obligated to return taxpayer money eventually? In an ideal world, yes. But if in the real world it's a choice of punish the guilty or head off a recession then there's only one choice. Whatever the situation, the priority has to be to fend off economic collapse.

Is the plan on the table the best way to go about it? I'm no economist and can't say. Krugman has been right about most things and he agrees with it; other economists say it's madness.

Is the bail-out socialism (a welfare state) for the ultra-rich? You could call it that, although socialism is not a synonym for communism. Or you could call it fascism (which would be correct). Or you could call it communism (which would also be correct).

Dr Lawrence Britt came up with 14 definining characteristics of fascism by comparing various fascist regimes. But if you study it you'll realize that most of the 14 characteristics are common to tyrannical dictatorships of any flavour throughout history. On the surface, only two of those 14 characteristics appear to distinguish fascism from communism. But upon closer inspection there is no difference.

Point 8, the use of religion, appears to distinguish fascism from communism. "Those godless commies" has been a common refrain for a century. And we know that Wehrmacht soldiers in WWII had belt buckles which said Gott mit uns (God is with us). Case closed, right? Wrong. Hitler (and Dubya) both represented themselves as speaking for God, but Lenin, Stalin and Mao were essentially regarded as Gods. The words of Lenin, Stalin and Mao were treated with the same sort of reverence as religious texts and their authority was unquestionable—they spoke ex cathedra.

Point 9, corporate power being protected, appears to distinguish fascism from communism. After all, as the quote has it, Benito Mussolini stated that "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." Depending upon which source you look at, either Mussolini originated that, or he stole it, or he never said it. It doesn't really matter. In communism the state "controlled the means of production" (the government ran the big corporations) and in fascism the big corporations were effectively in charge of the government. In either case it is (as Mussolini may or may not have said) the merger of state and corporate power.

The only real difference between communism and fascism is the fairy tale used to justify a tyrranical dictatorship to the populace. Both appeal to the working classes (who are more numerous and therefore the determining factor in an election) in different ways. You may think, if you only know of the Mussolini quote/not-quote, that fascism made it's appeal to the rich—the full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers Party; the Republicans continue to convince the gullible that "a rising tide floats all ships." In reality the people who control, and benefit from, fascism/communism are neither the heads of state or the heads of corporations but the international bankers.

Prescott Bush, Dubya's grandfather, supported Hitler in WWII and worked with Hitler's industrialists even after the US entered WWII. In his defence he might have argued that the Constitution defined treason as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" and he wasn't giving it, he was selling it. Congress cut off that line of defence by passing the "Trading with the Enemy" act. Prescott carried on regardless. Gov't investigators found out about Prescott's German operations and shut them down (but didn't say anything until after the war was over for fear of damaging morale). But the gov't didn't find all of Prescott's German operations, and he continued to run those that hadn't been discovered. Prescott had earlier tried to arrange a fascist coup to unseat FDR by using military force.

So if you're thinking of this current bail-out plan as socialist, it's not. It's the culmination of Dubya's grandfather's fascist dream. Which you can call a communist dream if you wish, because the two are basically identical in all that counts (which is who gets rich by it). If you don't see this, it probably still strikes you as odd that the arch-neocons such as Wolfowitz started out as devout communists and apparently changed their spots by becoming fascists. Same spots, different label.

Why have I written all this? Because the bail-out plan, as currently drafted, tells me we're all fucked if it's adopted. It gives the treasury secretary the power to give money to any damned company he wants at his discretion. That removes the power of the purse from Congress, which constitutionally is a no-no. The treasury secretary's decisions in this regard are not subject to judicial review. That actually is constitutional because Congress is permitted to put specific legislation beyond judicial review. I don't know if that has ever happened before but that clause of the Constitution should never have been put in. However, the same draft bail-out plan also puts the treasury secretary's actions beyond Congressional review. That's definitely unconstitutional because one of the key obligations of Congress is oversight of the executive branch.

If this draft bill goes ahead, Congress will have (unconstitutionally) signed over most of its powers to the executive branch. It's already signed away a lot of them by refusing to impeach and ignoring presidential "signing statements" stating simply that Bush refuses to comply with legislation. But this one will be the final straw. The "power of the purse" is the last piece of constitutional power that Congress retains over the Executive. Once this is passed then the Treasury Sec can spend any amount of money the President wants on any damned thing the President wants (really, it's that broad).

Wake up and smell the jackboots.

After Clinton, they selected Dubya. Makes me wonder, who do they have lined up after Obama? Who could take our current state of creeping fascism and make it, in the immortal words of Michael Ledeen, "faster please"?

[82_28]

It's funny. I got laughed off of, not out of, Metafilter for bringing this shit up about how the bush family supported both "sides" back in probably 1999 or 2000. Now (not because of me) it is commonly accepted. Then tompaine.com, immediately after the "selection" had a litany of articles saying progressives need to get over the scam and begin refocusing our efforts on environmental shit. Talk about ignoring the elephant in the living room. So I wrote about that too, only to get the kibosh. I, we, put up with being blamed for getting Bush selected because we voted for Nader. Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine was derided for being non-factual. Bullshit. I grew up there. Everything he and his staff put forth in that film is complete truth. I grew up there.

We live now in a society where all we do is stroke the feelings and egos of soldiers and "thanking them for serving" when in fact they are merely employees for a company. I don't get thanked for serving other than what I do by not working for a corporation that kills. This term of existence is fucked the fucked up. And yes, fascist. I wonder what Michael Moore is up to these days. . .

Ho-hum.

Also. I remember going to buy the box set of his Awful Truth series he had just to show friends. This was before youtube of course and everyone was amazed when I played it for them or loaned it out. Now everyone is jaded and doesn't give a shit. Fascism needs a reason. We are clearing that crest.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Now everyone is jaded and doesn't give a shit. Fascism needs a reason. We are clearing that crest.

That the National Stasi Agency can do what they do in an environment free from fear that they might actually prosecuted for breaking the law (not to mention all the facets of our Too Big To Fail Financial Elite operating in the same environment) is a direct result of that reason. That the next Presidential election will be comprised of candidates where one party is so in lock-step with the 14 defining characteristics of fascism linked above that PNAC signatory Jeb Bush is actually being described as a moderate is also indicative of how we're clearing that crest. The other party just needs to find a way to neutralize/ostracize Elizabeth Warren so that everyone there's on the same page.

[JackRiddler]

bumping because of that other thread.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36836&start=30

If these are to be merged then only under THIS title please!

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Right-wing group deemed to have fascist characteristics
Rejecting libel suit, judge says extra-parliamentary Im Tirzu draws influence from authoritarian ideology

by Adiv Sterman September 8, 2013, 10:16 pm


Im Tirzu activists demonstrate during a rally marking the Nakba anniversary at the Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, on May 13, 2013. (photo credit: Roni Schutzer/Flash90)

The right-wing, extra-parliamentary group Im Tirzu draws influence from fascist ideology and, therefore, implying that the group is fascist does not constitute an act of incitement, a Jerusalem District Court judge ruled.

Justice Refael Yacoby determined in a decision last week that the founders of a Facebook page that regularly criticized Im Tirzu and accused it of being fascist did not suggest that there was a full parallel between the group and fascist ideology, but rather pointed to some similar underlying characteristics.

Yacoby’s verdict came in response to a libel lawsuit filed in 2010 by Im Tirzu against the eight founders of the Facebook page. Im Tirzu demanded NIS 2.6 million ($713,000) in compensation from the founders of the Facebook page.

The statement “Im Tirzu is fascist” does “not imply complete identity between the plaintiff and the principles of fascism in all its components, but only to a certain resemblance to fascism,” the judge wrote in his decision.

“Simply put, the plaintiffs see nationalism and the Israeli public as paramount, while the defendants advocate for a more universal aspect,” he added.

Yacoby acquitted seven of the eight defendants of all charges, but ruled that a Facebook post published by one of the accused, Roy Yellin, could be seen as suggesting that Im Tirzu wished to promote a Nazi-like racist ideology. The judge concluded that Yellin’s statements could therefore be considered libelous and advised both parties to independently reach an agreement with regard to compensation.

A number of high-profile witnesses were called to the stand to attest to Im Tirzu’s alleged fascist undertones, among them historian and writer Zeev Sternhell, who argued that the group displayed traits that are similar to early-stage fascist movements; and religious scholar Tomer Persico, who testified that, during a public debate with Im Tirzu founder Ronen Shoval, the latter admitted that he was influenced by thinkers whose teachings later served as a basis for fascist ideology.

During the trial, Shoval admitted that Im Tirzu had hired private investigators to gather incriminating material from human rights organizations that, he claimed, were engaged in “covert anti-Zionist” activity. Shoval further admitted to sending investigators to the office of one of the defendants’ attorneys, Michael Sfard.

Yacoby concluded by expressing criticism of the group’s conduct prior to, and throughout, the trial and stated that, in his opinion, Im Tirzu should not have filed the suit to begin with.

In response to the verdict, Im Tirzu’s attorney Nadav Haetzni issued a statement condemning the court and accusing the judge of overlooking integral aspects of the lawsuit.

“The courts ignored the most critical legal aspects and arrived at a flimsy conclusion that severely imperils Israeli democracy,” Haetzni said, adding that Im Tirzu would appeal the decision in the Supreme Court.

Yes Virginia, right-wing Zionists can draw their inspiration from fascism.

[seemslikeadream]

Human Rights
Israeli army recruitment plan aims to incite Christian-Muslim tensions

Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
Nazareth
31 July 2013

Men carry banner reading Yaffa says no to racism and settlements in Arabic and Hebrew

Critics of a new Israeli army recruitment campaign say it’s designed to fragment the Palestinian community and make it more difficult to obtain their rights.
(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)

Leaders of Israel’s Palestinian minority have accused the Israeli authorities of intensifying efforts to push Christian and Muslim communities into conflict, as part of a long-running divide-and-rule strategy towards the country’s Palestinian citizens.

The allegations have been prompted by a series of initiatives to pressure Christian school-leavers into the army, breaking the community’s blanket rejection of the Israel army draft for the past 65 years.

Leaders from the Palestinian community, Christian and Muslim, who have spoken against this new enlistment effort have been called in for investigation by Israel’s secret police. In an Orwellian inversion, they have been accused of “incitement to violence.”

The issue first came to prominence last October when the defense ministry quietly staged a conference close to Nazareth, the effective capital of Palestinians in Israel, to promote military service among Christians.

The participation of three local clergymen in the conference sent shock waves through the Muslim and Christian communities.

The move was seen as a prelude to launching a more general recruitment drive among Palestinian Christians. Currently both Christians and Muslims, comprising nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, are exempt from conscription.
Instilling “Zionist values”

In an apparently related step in July, a Christian in Nazareth whose brother is an official in the defense ministry announced the establishment of a Christian-Jewish party. Municipal elections are due in late October.

The movement, which also runs an enlistment forum to encourage Christians to serve in the army, has paired with a far-right Jewish group, Im Tirtzu.

Im Tirtzu has been behind various McCarthyite campaigns, including pressuring Israeli universities to dismiss staff seen as left-wing; lobbying to strengthen “Zionist values” in the school curriculum; and seeking penalties for Israeli nongovernmental organizations supporting the rights of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Officials in Nazareth have warned that their city is at risk of becoming a flash-point for inter-communal fighting if Israel continues to stir up sectarian tensions.

Dominated by its Christian institutions but with a two-thirds Muslim majority, Nazareth has been struggling to temper sectarian divisions since the late 1990s. That was when the Israeli government promoted a provocative project to build a mosque next to the city’s main Christian pilgrimage site, the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Israel’s Palestinian Christians, numbering 125,000, or about nine percent of the Palestinian minority, are mostly located in Nazareth and its surrounding villages.

continued....

http://electronicintifada.net/content/d ... sity/12445
Students from Im Tirzu reportedly confronted Palestinian students at the university protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza last November, shouting racist slogans including “Death to the Arabs.”

[Sounder]

From stillrobertpaulson's post


http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 89x4053069

Is the bail-out socialism (a welfare state) for the ultra-rich? You could call it that, although socialism is not a synonym for communism. Or you could call it fascism (which would be correct). Or you could call it communism (which would also be correct).

Dr Lawrence Britt came up with 14 definining characteristics of fascism by comparing various fascist regimes. But if you study it you'll realize that most of the 14 characteristics are common to tyrannical dictatorships of any flavour throughout history. On the surface, only two of those 14 characteristics appear to distinguish fascism from communism. But upon closer inspection there is no difference.

Both communism and fascism seek to remove what little of the aspects of self-determination that still remain among the general population.

Fascism is recognized in this removal of options for self-determination.

In that case communism is fascism, and as far as communism claiming to be a cure for alienation, what a laughfer.

I wonder how many of the anti-fascist screamers are using their rhetoric merely as a cover for their own fascistic mentality.

[seemslikeadream]

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

The real extremism is not of the far-left and the far-right, but of the fascist center. Golden Dawn’s strategy of tension ultimately benefits the elite.


Fascism is capitalism plus murder.— Upton Sinclair (winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize)


The killing of Pavlos Fyssas by a group of Golden Dawn thugs was no accident. All the evidence seems to indicate that the leftist hip-hop artist was stabbed to death in a premeditated murder. “They didn’t like him,” a former member of the neo-Nazi party said in an undercover interview with the Ethnos newspaper. “He had some lyrics dissing Golden Dawn. For me he was brave. Anyone can write whatever they want. That didn’t put a weapon in his hand, however. He was an anti-fascist and he was singing it and they knew it.” And so Pavlos was murdered, in cold blood and in front of his girlfriend’s eyes, as the notoriously fascist DIAS police stood by and did nothing.
Now, as violent riots once again engulf the country and the anti-fascist left understandably calls for revenge, Greece’s corrupt corporate and political elite can once again play its favorite trump card: the country is descending into chaos, left and right are battling for control over the streets, and so a broad alliance of the “responsible center” is the only thing that can save democracy from the imminent threat of civil war. This narrative of the “two extremes” — also known as the horseshoe theory — is the most sinister myth facing Greece today. In reality, it is nothing but a strategy of tension that serves to obscure the violent extremism of the center that is truly ripping the country apart.
After all, who created the morbid social conditions in which fascism could rise from the dead to begin with? It’s the transnational class alliance of foreign bankers, EU leaders, IMF technocrats and Greece’s own corrupt elite who — with their dehumanizing austerity measures and rabid market fundamentalism — created the arid ground on which Golden Dawn could spread its poisonous seeds of hatred in the first place. When a country loses a quarter of its annual output in just five years, and 28% of its population and over 60% of its youth are out of work, it’s no surprise that some in the disaffected middle class will end up being driven into the arms of those promising national glory in place of economic security.
But we need to take the critique further. Not only did the corrupt neoliberal elite — personified by the political leadership of Nea Dimokratia and PASOK — create the preconditions for the rise of Golden Dawn as a fascist party; they themselves have been setting the parameters of fascist policy-making for decades, long before Golden Dawn was even elected to Parliament. As Augustine Zenakos just pointed out in a hard-hitting piece for Borderline Reports, it wasn’t Golden Dawn that created concentration camps for immigrants, criminalized HIV and tortured handcuffed detainees — it was the successive governments of the center-left and center-right that did that. They have been doing it for decades and no one in Europe ever seemed to care.
The elite-propagated narrative of the “two extremes” thus serves a sinister purpose. Most crucially, it deflects attention away from the elite’s own wrongdoings and shifts the blame for the crisis squarely onto the shoulders of the weakest members of society: the immigrants — an easy scapegoat to make up for the lack of national self-esteem. In the process, it keeps the country’s powerful extra-parliamentary left distracted by focusing almost all its attention on fighting fascism instead of fighting capitalism. As long as anarchist militias are needed to run anti-fascist motorcycle patrols through immigrant neighborhoods, the banks, ministries and Troika delegates will all be safe from harm.
By willfully breeding a climate of civil war, the ruling elite can proudly position itself as the “responsible savior” that will pull Greece back from the abyss. Here, Golden Dawn’s warmongering rhetoric and the racist and anti-leftist violence of its thugs in the streets comes in particularly handy for those in power: as long as the neo-Nazis keep the pressure on by playing “bad cop” (quite literally, as one in two cops are alleged to have voted for Golden Dawn in the 2012 elections and the party has penetrated deep into the country’s police force), the shaky centrist coalition of Nea Dimokratia and PASOK can cling to power and maintain its privileges by falsely positing as the “good cop”.
Of course, none of this is new. The US-backed military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 till 1974 make explicit use of a similar strategy of tension to keep a lid on the revolutionary left and popular resistance to the dictatorship. Right-wing terror was deployed in an attempt both to provoke a violent reaction from the left and to keep the left distracted from its struggle against the authoritarian state. In Italy, during the 1970s and ’80s, the government actively colluded with neo-fascist terror cells (most notoriously in the Bologna massacre of 1980) in order to shape the social contours of a “civil war” that would distract the left from its only real objective: revolution.
Following last week’s Golden Dawn attack on a group of Communists who were putting up posters for a KKE youth festival, Dimitris Psarras — a writer who has followed the rise of Golden Dawn ever since the fall of the military junta in 1974 — told The Guardian that the neo-Nazi organization was deliberately pursuing such a strategy of tension: “Their agenda, clearly, is to create a climate of civil war, a divide where people have to choose between leftists and rightists.” Golden Dawn’s party members and even its members of parliament often speak in exactly those terms. Last year, Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros told Paul Mason that “there is already civil war”:
Greek society is ready — even though no-one likes this — to have a fight: a new type of civil war. On the one side there will be nationalists like us, and Greeks who want our country to be as it used to be, and on the other side illegal immigrants, anarchists and all those who have destroyed Athens several times.

In this sense, it is utterly absurd to speak of the far-left and the far-right facing off in a civil war that threatens to undermine Greek democracy. Apart from the obvious point that the centrist elite undermined democracy a long time ago, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset already showed back in 1970 that the horseshoe theory of political extremism is simply nonsense. Fascism, Lipset observed, is in fact the extremism of the center. Rather than the far-left and far-right bending off from the center and approaching one another in their violent means and authoritarian ends, fascism is actually the extremist perversion of liberalism, with which it shares a great aversion for the emancipatory struggles of the poor and excluded, as well as the political goal of bringing the disaffected middle class back into power.
Moreover, there’s nothing more rabidly violent and thoroughly terrorist in Greece right now than the economic policies of the “centrist” government itself. We already have plenty of evidence that austerity kills: HIV rates are up, child mortality rates are up, suicide rates are up, and with the health budget slashed in half, people are literally dying from the most preventable diseases just because they can’t get their hands on basic drugs. The measures are meant to function like shock therapy: for the past year, the people have been caught in the headlights, paralyzed by the intensity of the assault on their livelihoods. 120.000 young people simply fled the country. The millions who remain increasingly suffer from depression and anxiety.
But following the murder of Pavlos, coinciding with the resurgence of a number of struggles in the public sector, the anger is starting to brew over into the streets again. It has now become clear that the fascist para-state is the elite’s last bulwark against the rage of the masses. To further their strategy of tension and defend the capitalist state from its revolutionary adversaries, Golden Dawn will try to drag the left down into civil war with it. We must not allow that to happen. However disgusting and dangerous these neo-Nazi pigs may be, the left has bigger fish to fry. As long as austerity-loving bankers and politicians run free in government, fascists will roam the streets.
And so, if fascism is capitalism plus murder, then there is only one way to honor the memory of our murdered anti-fascist compañero: by confronting the capitalist state head on. Now is not the time to get distracted by Golden Dawn’s reactionary rhetoric of civil war. The rise of fascism is a symptom, not the cause, of the crisis that finance capital has forced onto Greek society. It’s time to go back on the offensive and remind ourselves of our one and only real objective in this struggle: to put an end to the capitalist terror that has bred the murderous climate in which Pavlos lost his life. This is our only objective: to continue the revolution for which he died. Pavlos vive!

[JackRiddler]

Thank you for that beautiful article by Jerome Roos, SLAD.