Sunday, April 13, 2003

A Whiff of Fascism in the Air What is “fascism”?  It is not an anachronistic term, even though it is not used much today.  I see three elements to fascism:   1)     an unquestioned, destructive nationalism that creates one set of rights, beliefs, actions for citizens, and another for non-citizens, and the rest of the world.   One of the essential constructs of fascism is that other countries, other people’s, are valued only to the extent they support or oppose the nationalistic policies of the fascist country.  The neo-con ideology of American power is classic fascism in this sense:  we dominate all—opposition from other countries, other peoples is a hostile act, either they accept our dominance, or they are enemies.   2)     An alliance between powerful business interests or oligarchs and a political party.  The party appeals to nationalism and fear in suppressing opposition, but the result is makes the society safe for total domination by business interests.  A devil’s bargain is struck in which the corporations or landowners who fund the party let it control the government, in return for government’s money and repressive state power being used to protect corporate interests.    3)     The encouragement and tolerance of extremism and illegal acts, if they are committed by the fascist party or their supporters.   Here are three news stories from this weekend:   In Massachusetts, the republican legislative Brian Lees leader has introduced a bill to make protest organizations and individual protestors pay police costs when police are forced into expenditures as a result of peaceable assembly and protest.  Such a proposal shows the legislator as someone who would go to totalitarian lengths to suppress political protest.  In Iraq, for example, after Saddam Hussein murdered a political prisoner, his family would be charged for the expense.  You are welcome to email Brian Lees and congratulate him for taking such a repressive tactic directly from Saddam Hussein.   Also, on Saturday , Amnesty international reported that while executions overall fell significantly throughout the world in 2002, in the U.S. the number of executions rose.   Also this week, news came out that the U.S. prison population is nearing 2 million, giving the U.S. the distinction of having the highest rate of human incarceration on the planet—more than any dictatorship, more than any of the axis of evil countries, more than anyone.   For the most part, the U.S. is compared simply to other western democracies when calculating the overall rate of incarceration.  But the fact that our country is now the number one jailer on the planet, in terms of imprisonments per 100,000 people, is truly shocking.   Finally, and this really deserves a separate article, it appears that the world spanning images of cheering Iraqi’s pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein was actually a staged media event, plotted carefully and under the control of the U.S. marines, who imported hand-picked Iraqi’s to do the job.   If true, this staged event shows just how desperate the U.S. government is to get people to buy into its single accepted view of the world.   Control of the media is crucial at a time like this, when primed by their own ideology and corporate backers, news broadcasters are ready to accept as unquestioned truth everything staged by the government.   So we have legislators calling for more legalized suppression of speech, the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, and a staged media event designed to shock enemies into submission.  Ahh, the whiff of fascism in the American air. 7:27:02 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 5/1/2003; 11:43:29 PM.