September 2, 2005 @ 6:00am
Anyone for Fascism?
Well, of course not! The very idea! Jack-booted thugs beating up Jews, extermination camps, book burning, people being jailed without due process, the secret police breaking in at two in morning,… everything Americans hate, everything we fought a war against.
"Fascist" is a word we toss at our enemies, a name we call people whose attitudes and beliefs we disagree with, or who seem dictatorial and arbitrary.
But what, exactly, is fascism? Purged of its unpleasant connotations it is nothing more than an alternative form of political organization for nation states. It arose during a period of European history when citizens of constitutional monarchies and representative democracies became disillusioned with their governments.
It arose even in Great Britain, where a brilliant English politician, despairing of what he believed was the inability of the government to move swiftly and decisively during the depression, formed the British Union of Fascists. Sir Oswald Mosely wrote extensively about the theory of this new governmental form, which was called the Corporate State.
The details of this alternative form of governance can be explored at a fascinating web site devoted to Sir Oswald and his writings. Link
Why bring this up? Because when people for whatever reason withdraw from democratic electoral politics there is a tendency, in despair, to accept a rapidly self-aggrandizing form of the state.
Here is Mosely on why Fascism was so appealing:
……. we ask whether any honest man or Movement in politics would not make his first proposal and his first duty to create an instrument of Government by which he could carry out the promises he had made and the policy for which the people have voted. Yet all the old parties combine to resist this principle of elementary honesty, and to denounce as the denial of liberty any suggestion to give to the people the first principle of liberty in the actual execution of the policy they desire. As a result the vote becomes ever more meaningless, and fewer people take the trouble to exercise it as they learn by bitter experience that, no matter the party for which they vote, they never by any chance secure the policy for which they have voted. Farcical becomes the parliamentary scene as the people realize that in a dynamic age this system can never deliver the goods, and like all systems in decline the parliamentary mind seems anxious only to produce its own caricature.
After WW II
Mosely was imprisoned by the British government during the war. He was never charged with a crime and he was never allowed access to judicial redress.
After the war he continued to write on political issues and somewhat softened his views, while at the same time making clearer what he considered the nuts and bolts of a government run as a corporate state. An excellent summary statement of his views is available here.
The dangers inherent in all of this I leave to the reader to calculate.
8:01:52 AM 
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