The road to fascism ?

[Morgan Kane]

Europe is sliding .... France also : not to fascim but to more authoritarian regim and oss of democracy

Or new prime minister m Fillion explaining that he wishes the largest victory of right in parliament election to prevent useless debate and loss of time !

That' s would seem reasonnable except that it means that democratic debate, confrontation of solution to determine the best one is useless : the leaders know.

More, it negates totally the role of parliament . theorically, even the members of the majority are allowed to express doubts and to think.

Manipulation of langage :

ministry of immigration and national identity : you don't telel that immigrants are a threat to national identity, you suggest it .

social added value tax : beetwen 11 000 000 000 and 15 000 000 000 euros of gifts to rich people ( less income taxe, nomore taxation of succession - paid by 15 % of population ) and increase of added value taxe, paide by every one and more proportionnaly by poors who consumate all their income.

if we look at the criteriums used above and at the new governement, i am afraid many of them are fullfilled on a soft indiirect more but fullfilled !

[zilch]

Sorry, but I do not see Chavez as any hope. He's on the way to his own brand of Caudillismo-Fascism.
But maybe you were joking.

Half joking, to me Mr Chavez represents what happens when a country allows capitalism to get out of hand.

[L'Etranger]

Half joking, to me Mr Chavez represents what happens when a country allows capitalism to get out of hand.

In this sense he's completely an offspring of Capitalism that screwed that continent over and over again, yes.
I am watching Evo Morales of Bolivia who, for me, has a better moral basis, so far. But let's see.

[Demiurge]

[SIZE=1][SIZE=2]I'd argue that Lincoln, FDR and Churchill were genuine war leaders, whereas Bush is not.

By what definition? Your personal view of the legitimacy of the war? Certainly the scope of the wars Lincoln, FDR and Churchill fought were greater, but then so were their transgressions. And FDR never faced an attack on the American civilian population. Churchill and Lincoln were instrumental in the creation of their conflicts, though Churchill wasn't in power at the time, his rhetoric certainly steered the UK toward declaring war on Germany.

In order to identify anything then you need to know it's defining characteristics. What do you think of the following article Demiurge that defines the 14 chief characteristics of fascism:

Source - http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle4113.htm

It's adequate, though certainly steered toward the author's own view and preconceptions.

I would say that the US was farther along almost all of the 14 stated indexes in the 50s and 60s. Was Truman a fascist? Ike? Kennedy? I guess we have a sliding scale of what our radical left think defines as fascism (and yes, in the US at least only the radical left is talking about that term at all).

As far as the points I disagree are specific to America of the 21st century:

3: Scapegoating. I think the Bush admin has done backflips to avoid this one. The easiest possible thing to do in the wake of 911 would be to point at the Muslim community and scream that they were evil. That most assuredly didn't happen, either through government channels or through domestic policies. Speaking as someone who has been randomly chosen every time I've flown to be searched since, and watched while elderly matrons were searched while young arabs weren't. I'm aware it goes beyond that, and yes, the fundamentalist terrorist has been made a bogeyman, but that's different than focusing your hatred on an entire creed of people. There has been relatively little if any violence against Muslims in the US since 911.

5: Rampant Sexism. There's been no change in this area in recent years, and there's no doubt we are farther along than we were in decades prior. Complete nonfactor. And of course I think a bit disingenous - fascism doesn't have to be tied to sexism. You could make the same argument with almost every governmental system on record - almost all of them have been dominated by men. It's only in the last century with the focus on intelligence and knowledge compared to physical capacity that said physical capacity didn't translate into social and therefore political dominance.

6: A controlled mass media. Not even close, there are hourly attacks on the Bush admin in the media and of course the internet makes it likely every second.

10: Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Labor in the United States isn't the force it once was, but that happened before Bush came into office. And of course labor unions played a significant role in returning the Congress to the Democrats in the 2006 elections.

11: Disdain for academia and the arts. Bush doesn't favor either group certainly, nor does his constuitency, the religious right. However, we are far, far from the suppression of the intelligentsia as expressed in so many fascist regimes. Universities are at the core of the American education system, and they are certainly biased to the left of the american populace in their political views. American science and research are still prominent in the world.

Certainly the Nobel committee thinks so - of the last awarded prizes, the Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Economics prizes all went to Americans. The only ones that didn't were the non-scientific prizes of Peace and Literature.

12: Obsession with crime and punishment. Again, hardly a factor that is specific to fascism. Again, outside of the war on terror and dealing with potential terrorists, not something that most americans see as a pressing concern. While you might argue concerning the legitimacy of the drug war and how that could be better handled, it's not a new policy (it was just as prominent during the terms of that evil fascist Bill Clinton, who didn't inhale). I'm still waiting for American citizens to disappear from the Patriot Act. And the first goal of any police state, disarming it's population, is as far away from ocurring as ever - amazingly after the Virginia Tech shooting there was as much noise about gun rights as gun control in the Congress and the american public.

If a police state ever tried to suppress middle America, they'd find the Iraqi insurgency to look like a child's play thing.

14: Fraudelent elections. Gore lost. If he had just won his home state, then he'd have won, but they didn't want him as their president. And while you might disagree with the way the system was created, it was the legal way of determing the Presidency when the election started, and the 4th time in history that the winner of the plurality of the popular vote didn't win the Presidency because they lost in the electoral college. Three of the 4 possible criteria to determine the hanging chads showed Bush the victor (including the one used), the Supreme Court upheld it, and those evil ballots that lost the Democrats the Presidency were designed by the local democrat election boards.

Mussolini (who should know) originally defined Fascism thusly:
Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.... The fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.... Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number.... We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a Fascist century. If the nineteenth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the 'collective' century, and therefore the century of the State

That level of authoriatarianism simply isn't expressed in the US, as seen by repeated loses by the Bush admin in Congress over his most dear held legislation (social security reform, immigration reform), the admin's many loses in the Court system in terms of how it's dealing with potential enemy combatants (it just lost two more cases in the last month, one by military tribunal overruling the Bush admin's declaration of an individual's status), the loss of Congress during the midterm elections, and of course the fact that Bush is going to have to step down in a year and a half.

Fascism also normally included a large measure of economic controls, that allowed for capitalism in service to the state but had a far more planned economy radiating from the government than we see today. Price controls, state controls, government dictates on resource allocation, a large component of central planning - some economists have even argued that Western European economies are derived from previous fascist principles.

From wiki:
According to sociologist Stanislav Andreski, fascist economics "foreshadowed most of the fundamental features of the economic system of Western European countries today: the radical extension of government control over the economy without a wholesale expropriation of the capitalists but with a good dose of nationalisation, price control, incomes policy, managed currency, massive state investment, attempts at overall planning (less effectual than the Fascist because of the weakness of authority)."[38] Politics professor Stephen Haseler credits fascism with providing a model of economic planning for social democracy.[39]

Another interesting note is while there is a slight upswing in military spending by percentage of GDP in the US in the last 3 years (after decades of downward trends), even with the Iraq war we are spending less as a percentage of our GDP then we were in the 50s, 60, 70s, 80s, and just now reaching the same level as the 90s. In absolute terms we are spending more, but the US economy is considerably larger.

http://www.truthandpolitics.org/mili...ative-size.php

As a US citizen living outside of Washington DC, I have some concerns about the expansion of the Federal government's powers in the name of stopping terrorism, but I'm just not seeing a trend toward authoritarianism or fascism that some are decrying.

[Grey Mouser]

Thanks for the reply Demiurge. Your post demands a longer response than I have time for right now. I might have to respond piecemeal, taking a point or two at a time.

Technically speaking, each point deserves a thread of it's own.

[Kevin McCabe]

Then, you're a bit nearsighted. Wiretaps without warrants (USA PATRIOT), Secret Courts (FISA), National Security Letters, opinions from the federal oracle placing restrictions on speech and advancing the cause of legitimizing the merger of church and state in derogation of the establishment clause, an Attorney General who attempted to legitimize torture (one of only two propositions that the whole of mankind agrees on is that torture is a crime, the other being piracy), and my personal favorite, as I just one a case to the contrary in my home state's Supreme Court, Cheney's stance on obtaining bank records. How much more do you need? I could drone on for quite a while.

[Kevin McCabe]

By the way, does anyone know what is meant by the bit in The Dreamthief's Daughter about Walt Disney?

[Cordley]

Uncovering the Bundle, Fascism

This list appears to be very well informed. As an artist I got rousted a lotfor drawing and painting.The country at war with a word, thug cops, surveillance everywhere,cheap drugs, private armies,lying press, Fascism, the making of the national Socialism into international Corporate Fascism.
A corrupt war machine reducing the poor to slavery, like the nightmare Debord foresaw.
I remember when Lyndon Johnson brought down the mild Humble Harold Wilson and the Brits went to war.
London shut down overnight. Being a Celt became a crime. Speaking, singing, recording or worse broadcasting the truth made one chargeable. And not a word was said at the time.
The Beast woke up in America and ravages all. It is not the few killers that are dangerous no it's the incompetent and corrupt who respond to to the crime with greater crime.
There are those who will to quote the late Zevon Stand in the Fire. Be well,

[Kevin McCabe]

I'm not sure I understand the reference to LBJ/Wilson

[Cordley]

Road to Facisism

What happened was a coup that very few people saw. The Americans put money in the IRA's paw and brought down Harold like a sack of woe. LBJ hated Wilson as only a corrupt Texas Cracker can( I come from hard scrabble Okie-Texas stock). Wilson didn't have a chance, the wheels came off, he looked the fool.
Of course the pop scene had to go and with it the money for art seems to have gone for cameras and war. Little Village said it all as do the Knofflers.

[pocnib]

Hmmm, it seems that the world as a whole is starting to lean more towards totalitarianism, it is not just the American parallels, though they exist I find the similarities to be more of a stretch than a true path. Personally I say that we need to focus a lot more attention inward than we have in the past several decades (Don't worry about US, fear Germany and Japan, we won but now fear Russia, Russia's cool, but Islamic extremists want to kill us all) but at the same time other countries need us to keep an eye on things, mainly the already single-party China, and now Russia. As for the latter Putin has already canceled multiple elections, arrested and shut down most of the independent media outposts, and most recently, made multiple political parties be labeled as illegal, all but ensuring a man of his choice being elected when he has no choice but to allow an election...

[Cordley]

The Road to Fascism- On the Road Again

Immigration from Latin America become an issue about seven or eight years ago when the builder in Colorado start using illegals to sub contract his huge developments. Suddenly small contractors who were working the lump were replaced by Mexican labor at great saving to Richmond Homes. Guys making eighteen to thirty five dollars an hour had the wages cut to ten to fifteen an hour and being the lump there was nothing they could do. They the elected a new master (BushII) and he betrayed them.
Liberal thought it was neat they could get next to free servants for their mountain manses. Conservatives loved the slave wage people. There being no real health or education services in the United States meant the Emergancy room was the only place required by law to treat the slaves. The schools being extensions of the prison system just threw their hands in the air and let the non English speaking immigrants sink out of education.
The new reality of no industial base for the economy has fired or bought off millions of steel, auto, aircraft, communications and computor workers. Their children now compete for service jobs with people looking for survival wages.
Capital playing the old game divide and rule and with the corruption of the unions has brought the so called middle class of spoiled craft workers to their knees.
The slaves are restive too. they feel the hostility of 'crackers and Blacks.
The drug of choice of the immigrants is heroin booze and weed. The home team is on crack, speed and weed.
The majority of the thirty million illegals are young and male. These are people with little education, the Mexican Government breeds the labor and the North Americans consume them.
The educated Mexican likes living in Mexico and has little reason to head for a new start in the United States as a laborer. One can see where the formula for fear based violence has been created by the conservative corporate state.
Along with the influx there is a clamoring from the capitalists for cheaper ports in Mexico . So they are building huge new ports and toll roads to run goods from the West Coast of Mexico into the heart of the US and Canada. These will be truck routes for Mexican trucks driven by Mexicans and paid Mexican wages all the way to Alaska. Thus turning truck drivers into dry wall hangers, a step into economic extinction.
All this is without any addressing of Mexico's internal problem of total corruption. The Mexican screaming about the US Border is the same Mexican who shoots intuders from the South.
I spent several years growing up in Oaxaca and found the template of total corruption the model imposed by the Gringos of the North. The local police and the American dominated CIA-FBI are busy with the help of the Mexican-US Army moving the weed crop North. Every mothers son with an education has their hands in the pot.
As an Antro student at the University National I saw antiquities taken from the ground and sold to the underground market allowed by the authorities. People died horrid deaths, the antquities trade is as brutal as the drug trade.
As a reporter I once asked a La Raza official about the problem of corruption in immigration. He started punching me, my editor was accompanying me had her eyes opened. I had one eye closed.
The Mexican culture is simply corrupt differntly from the gringo. The paper that I was working for in North America lost it's credit for exposing La Raza.
An activist girl friend in Oaxaca Was raped and murdered over the 'Dirty War' for educating peasents. The men who killed her were educated by or North Americans part of School For the Americas.
Fascism depends on lies (the press) and fear of violence (the police-army.)