Judeofascism -- an Exploded View:
"For any imperial policy to work effectively...it needs moral and intellectual guidance.... It is much to be doubted that the United States can continue to play an imperial role without the endorsement of its intellectual class.... It is always possible to hope that this intellectual class will...help formulate a new set of more specific principles that will relate the ideals which sustain American democracy to the harsh and nasty imperatives of imperial power."
--Irving Kristol
FRIENDLY FASCISM?
The post-911 events really bring home to me the dangers of fascism, American-style. The Bushies are embracing a deeply militaristic, neo-fascistic national security model, and the new Bush Doctrine is a very scary piece of imperalist policy that is going to have terrible consequences, globally.
Bertram Gross wrote a book in the early 1980s called Friendly Fascism; in it, the professor outlined how fascism could come to power in the United States. Fascism is a word we never see anymore, replaced by terms like "ultraconservative" or "extreme right-wing" or "ultranationalist" -- but "fascist" is a forbidden word, anymore (although "neo-fascist" sometimes appears to describe fringe hate groups). It is only used to reference classical fascism -- the kind everybody thinks of when you say "fascism" -- Italian Fascists, the Nazis, uniforms, mass rallies, World War II.
The popular wisdom is that fascism was killed with World War II -- that it is a bankrupt and dead ideology, a relic of the past. But this is a very dangerous and misguided belief, for fascism still lives as an idea, and has evolved for the last 60 years after the collapse of classical fascism in World War II.
The following sections are excerpted from Friendly Fascism. This long book is dated in some respects, and reflects an Old Left sensibility, but it was ahead of its time as well. I can't possibly do it justice, so I'm just adapting a comparison between classical fascism and so-called "friendly fascism" to show how the idea can and has evolved. If you think on these points, you can find many examples of them in practice in our society.
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FRIENDLY FASCISM VS. CLASSICAL FASCISM
"There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself."
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Classical fascism (CF): Drives by capitalist laggards (Italy, Germany, Japan) to build new empires at the expense of leading capitalist powers.
Friendly Fascism (FF): Drive to maintain unity of Free World empire, contain or absorb Communist regimes, or else retreat to Fortress America. FF: An integrated Big Business-Big Government power structure with new technocratic ideologies and more advanced arts of ruling and fooling the public.
"Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over our eyes and ears and make believe that there are no monsters."
--Karl Marx
CF: Liquidation or minimization of multiparty conflict and open subversion, with little use of democratic machinery and human rights.
FF: Subtle subversion, through manipulative use and control of democratic machinery, parties, and human rights.
CF: Negative sanctions through ruthless, widespread, and high-cost terror; direct action against targeted scapegoats.
FF: Direct terror applied through low-level violence and professionalized, low-cost escalation, with indirect terror through ethnic conflicts, multiple scapegoats, and organized disorder.
"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
--Adolf Hitler
CF: Ceaseles propaganda, backed up by spies and informers, to consolidate elite support and mobilize masses.
FF: Informational offensives backed by high-technology monitoring, to manage minds of elites and immobilize masses.
CF: Widespread benefits through more jobs, stabilized prices, domestic spoils, foreign booty, and upward mobility for the most faithful.
FF: Rationed rewards of power and money for elites, extended professionalism, accelerated consumerism for some, and social services conditional on the recipients' good behavior.
"The average American is just like the child in the family."
--Richard M. Nixon
CF: Anxiety relief through participatory spectacles, mass action, and genuine bloodletting.
FF: More varied relief through sex, drugs, madness, and cults, as well as alcoholism, gambling, sports, and ultraviolent drama.
CF: Internal viability based on sustained, frantic, and eventually self-destructive expansion.
FF: Internal viability based on careful expansion, system-strengthening reforms, multilevel co-optation, and mass apathy.
"Overgrown military establishments are under any form of governemnt inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."
--George Washington
[snip]
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