5 posts tagged “fascism”
The last post I made was actually a response made to a response to this post. I figured it would make a bit more sense in the context.
I keep running into this and it's bugging me. Everyone keeps using language like this, but it doesn't make any sense.
"Our troops are doing a great job defending our country."
How do you argue with that? They're not aggressive, they're not invading or occupying, they're defending our country, they're on the defense, they're being attacked.
But what's the reality? When was the last time our country was actually defended by our soldiers? World War II when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was when it started, and Japan invaded Alaska. Japan was attacking us, and we defended against them successfully. Since then we have never been attacked by another nation. Our military action in Columbia isn't defending our nation. Our military action in Afghanistan isn't defending our country.
We were attacked on 9/11. I guess you can say we're defending against Al Qaeda now. But lets be clear, Iraq has nothing to do with this. No Iraqis were involved with 9/11. Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq until we invaded that country.
I'm not actually sure if we're defending against Al Qaeda much actually, it seems like we're using the Marshall's job of rounding up bad guys to bring them to justice. We're also trying to stabilize regions in Persia which breed terrorists, but we don't use that terminology about our police forces. We don't say Marshalls or Detectives are "defending" the city when they track down a criminal. We don't say our police services are "defending" our cities when their presence deters crime.
I wouldn't say they're "defending" our nation, I would say they are "serving" the nation. I'm not sure whose interests they're always serving, mostly it seems like corporations' interests.
Now that I think of it, when corporations and governments merge like we see here, that's actually the definition of fascism.
This is originally a discussion on Facebook:
I've got an idea though, instead of being insulted because a statement might include your family, how about we think in the abstract for a while.
Just because someone you love and respect is doing something they feel is honorable, does it automatically mean it can't be put under a critical microscope? Can we not address this issue and tease out certain moral issues?
First we should define fascism, and then we can see how it applies to the USA: Fascism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary (1983) 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." Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile's entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana read: Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. No less an authority on fascism than Mussolini was so pleased with that definition that he later claimed credit for it.
Paxton defines Fascism as "a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination."
- Overwhelming crisis: Communism, terrorism
- Playing the victim: "Attacking our way of life" "attacking freedom"
- Natural leader: Bush has a "unitary" legal outlook placing himself above the law, and he's frequently talked about how his judgment should be trusted as he is the decider
- Dominate others: Nation-building in South America and Asia, et al
- Foreign contamination: Currently the big thing in politics is the immigration issue.
Now that we have defined Fascism and started to place it into our context of the modern USA, let's further explore this:
The US leaders - who have placed dictators in power in Chile, Velezuela, Columbia, El Salvador, Vietnam, and all the other places we have crushed public, democratic movements in other countries to sustain our "way of life" in America - will tell you that our nation-building efforts were to maintain US industry and US dominance over world markets. Our military has been used all over the world to support US corporate expansion in the global market. This is nothing our government hides from us, they tell us it is good to have military in place in certain places as it benefits our economy. This is a merger of government and corporations: corporatism, also known as fascism.
Corporations can't use military force to push their goals, so they have a relationship with the government to do this for them.
If your family is in the military it doesn't mean they're bad people.
They can have pure motives, but when you look at the macro situation,
the US has been using military force for the last 60 years to promote
US business in the global economy to "preserve the US way of life."
This means we need to have cheap coffee because the American way of
life is to drink coffee, so we go into countries and set up unjust wage
systems so the foreigners can't succeed against our business and we can
have cheap coffee at the expense of their wellbeing.
Just watch this video and be well informed.
It's interesting to me that neo-conservatives support "exporting democracy" to the rest of the world while simultaneously supporting fascism in the States.
They say we need to be in Iraq to bring democracy to the region and then say we need to get rid of our religious freedom in the States because it allows Muslims in America to practice their faith. I just read a letter the other day written by a neo-con who said our "liberal" Constitution is preventing us from ethnic profiling and in preventing Muslims from moving into neighborhoods where they can practice their "radical" religion.
What this essentially looks like (here comes Godwin's Law) is Nazism. The National Socialist party in pre-war Germany used very religious language within the Christian churches to speak against these foreigners who have come to Germany who practice a different religion and have become successful in some areas. These "foreigners" were the Jews. In the 21st Century USA we now have this same nationalistic rhetoric except now the "foreigners" are Muslims, and their religion is Islam.
Where this fear comes from is this bogus idea that the USA ever had a cohesive culture like other countries have had. We are a nation of immigrants and have always had dozens of different cultures within one Nation. But the neo-con is afraid this American "culture" will change when more immigrants come. Change. Communist China is big on the nationalistic thing recently as well, sounding a lot like the neo-cons in America. They're promoting the conservative, traditional Chinese language and neo-cons are promoting English-only. China is promoting traditional names, dress and repressing Western influence.
Nationalism suits the Fascists well.
Excellent: "Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign" by Keith Olbermann
And because you're too lazy to read:
