Reclaiming the Issues: Islamic or US GOP Fascism?
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Reclaiming the Issues: Islamic or US GOP Fascism?
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[Hartmann is arguing against the Bush Regime's GOP Neocon fascism. He also
soft-pedals the Democratic party's version of exactly the same thing....
Amerkkkan fascism with a prettier face. Don't fall for it. A Kerry
presidency would have merely slowed down the Evil Empire's destruction,
while making the US look more civilized. We agree with Hartmann's
recommendation of Sinclair Lewis's great book, "It Can't Happen Here." He's
also pitching his own new book and Robert Kennedy Jr's, the lazy way -- with
Amazon links. Go to Hartmann's website to read his stuff and follow his
links if you want to support Amazon. We'd encourage you instead to patronize
independent non-chain book sellers, if any still exist in your area. We
consider the Democratic Party --- whether it's the squishy liberal MoveOn
wing, or the Neocon Lieberman/Hillary wing -- as simply Amerikan fascismo
dressed up in civilized costume. They are all devoted to continuing the
mindless rapacious exploitation of the rest of the planet by the one rich
superpower that just wants to be comfortable and suck oil up as long as it
can. Amerikkka is a country run by One Party with Two Names. -NY Transfer]
sent by Thom Hartmann - Aug 29, 2006
see http://www.tomdispatch.com
Reclaiming the Issues: Islamic or Republican Fascism?
by Thom Hartmann
In the years since George W. Bush first used 9/11 as his own "Reichstag
fire" to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his
corporate cronies, many across the political spectrum have accused him
and his Republican support group of being fascists.
On the right, The John Birch Society's (See: http://www.jbs.org/node/740 )
website editor recently opined of the Bush Administration's warrantless
wiretap program: "This is to say that from the administration's
perspective, the president is, in effect, our living constitution. This
is, in a specific and unmistakable sense, fascist."
On the left, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. specifically indicts the Bush
administration for fascistic behavior in his book " Crimes Against
Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the
Country and Hijacking Our Democracy."
Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival
strategy is to redefine the term "fascism" so it can't be applied to
them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: "This nation is at
war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us
who love freedom, to hurt our nation."
In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and
other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a
fundamentalist theocracy, not fascism.
But theocracy - the merging of religion and government - is also on the
plate for the new American fascists (just as it was for Hitler, who
based the Nazi death cult on a "new Christianity" that would bring "a
thousand years of peace"), so they don't want to use that term, either.
While the Republicans promote the term "Islamo-fascism," the rest of the
world is pushing back, as the BBC noted in an article by Richard Allen
Greene ("Bush's Language Angers US Muslims" - 12 August 2006):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4785065.stm
"Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies agreed that the term [Islamic fascists] was
meaningless.
"'There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology
as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with
the term,' he said. 'This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong
emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything
about the content of their beliefs.'"
Their beliefs are, quite simply, that governments of the world should be
subservient to religion, a view shared by a small but significant part
of today's Republican party. But that is not fascism - the fascists in
the US want to exploit the fundamentalist theocrats to achieve their own
fascistic goals.
Vice President of the United States Henry Wallace was the first to
clearly and accurately point out who the real American fascists are, and
what they're up to.
In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as
Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is
a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in
The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against
the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are
not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The
FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man
who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did
in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to
use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public
information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the
truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public
into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Vice President Wallace was using the classic definition of the
word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to
have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni
Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a
merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his
name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of
government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically
through the merging of state and business leadership, together with
belligerent nationalism." (The US dictionary definition has gotten
somewhat squishier since then, as all the larger dictionary companies
have been bought up by multinational corporations.)
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet
titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism
spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government
of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of,
by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when
he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e
delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations.
Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to
sneak their money to folks like John Boehner and covertly write
legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out his concern about the same
happening here in America in his 1944 Times article:
"If we define an American fascist as one who in case of
conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are
undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are
probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include
only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and
deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their
interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar
wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for
political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it
was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate
cartels. The real problem would come, he believed, when the media was
concentrated in only a few hands:
"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the
next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the
cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested
that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the
war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative
southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally
syndicated "conservative" radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz
Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism.
Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American
democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a
Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the
book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid
prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize
the President. As Lewis noted in his novel:
"The President, with something of his former good-humor [said]:
'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't
belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out
of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of
State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President
"Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly,
the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous
by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known
and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in
the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing
business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President
Wallace's thinking when he wrote in The New York Times:
"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip
service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed
for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate
surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from
monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were
clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and
are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present
unpleasantness' ceases."
Thus, the rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and
the middle class, giant corporate behemoths wipe out small and middle sized
businesses, and a corporate iron fist is seizing control of our government
itself. As I detail in my new book "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The
Middle Class" the primary beneficiaries of this new fascism are the
corporatists, while the once-outspoken middle class of the 1950s-1980s is
systematically being replaced by a silent serf-class of the working poor.
As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to
jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary
advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust
democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure
their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an
effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some
monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice
President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write
legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We
The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small
businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade
union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and
distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that
civilization itself is at risk because of gays or Muslims, Wallace
continued:
"The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment
and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they
can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play
upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.
It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case
been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some
people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they
hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to
the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with
the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers
and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their
deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their
newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity,
every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every
opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of
the United States saw rising in America, he added:
"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every
liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but
are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final
objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture
political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of
the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal
subjection."
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has
deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally,
must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same
time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars
second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and
deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial
oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large
businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman
Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers &
acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision
of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation
earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his
party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:
"...Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have]
carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the
privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power,
reached out for control over government itself. They created a new
despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a
result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the
Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name
almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the
institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to
take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech:
"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow
of this kind of power!"
In 2006, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace
confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is
again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate
conservatism," and "the free market" in a "flat" world. The RNC's
behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said:
"In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution.
In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand
for."
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full
circle. Thus it's now critical that we reclaim the word "fascist" to
describe current-day Republican policies, support progressive websites that
spread the good word, and join together this November at the ballot box to
stop fascist election fraud and this most recent incarnation of
Republican-fascism from seizing complete and irretrievable control of our
nation.
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author,
and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried
on the Air America Radio network and Sirius
[We're leaving out all the book promo links that pitch Amazon.com. See
above for Hartmann's latest book. Or go to his website below for his Amazon
pitches. Better yet, find another way to buy his books than patronizing
megacorps. Like an independent non-chain bookstore, if one still
exists in your town. -NY Transfer]
Links:
http://www.thomhartmann.com
http://www.airamericaradio.com/thomhartmannpage
http://www.sirius.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Sirius/CachedPage&c=Channel&cid=1104779630493
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