"I was raised in fascist Italy until age 17 and will never forget the ugliness of totalitarian control over people's lives. After two years in Brazil, I came to America in 1949 and wept when I saw the Statue of Liberty.
Today, in horror, I see all the unmistakable signs of a new wave of fascism, cleverly concealed behind pseudo-patriotic, Christian rhetoric.
(this article was written in March 2001...BEFORE 9/11, the patriot act and the invasion of Iraq Fascism has certainly taken greater hold on America since.)
To believe that the separation of powers will always protect the American people from tyranny or to deny the very possibility of fascism coming to power in the United States amounts politically to one and the same thing. By ignoring the covert nature of fascism, the will to fight against it is inevitably undermined.
Fascism came to power first in Italy in 1922 and soon Hitler, in great admiration of Mussolini, established Nazism in Germany. The Republican Florida coup used methods remarkably similar to both, including the corruption of the highest authorities in our nation.
America is now threatened by colossal multinational corporations. The new Republicans, having been bribed with an ocean of money, are at the service of these supranational powers and promote the deceitful view of their masters: that the federal Government is tyrannical and counter to the goals and ideals of "freedom-loving people." The new "compassionate-conservatives," i.e., the extreme right wing Republicans, promote greater state autonomy and fewer federal laws. They want us to forget that WE THE PEOPLE established a Constitution to protect our lives from foreign and internal enemies.
Behind Republican anti-federalism -- so staunchly upheld by George W -- is a shrewd "divide and conquer" ploy that would allow giant corporations to control the much weaker power of any single state. Naive as the plot may be, it has taken in millions of credulous middle class Republican voters. Promises of trillion dollar tax cuts and the rantings of the pseudo-Christian Coalition have exerted enough influence to cause many to vote for a return to the disaster of a Republican economy where only the rich prosper.
If you investigate carefully, you'll soon discover that these evil right wing forces want to create a private army to accomplish a series of theocratic/authoritarian goals allegedly to cleanse the "corruption" of America. They claim that the corrosive influence of the federal Government is "shown" through the existence of high taxes, restrictive gun laws, federal regulations (especially those protecting the environment from the greed of major exploiters, civil rights and reproductive rights), multiculturalism, sex education, and public education. Historically, these incipient fascist forces first opposed voting rights. Now they propose the abolition of one man-one vote, the institution of second-class citizenship, the persecution of women, people of color, those professing other belief systems (or none at all), and homosexuals.
Nazis prided themselves on their technology while clinging to ancient beliefs about "blood and soil." Neo-Christianoids or pseudo-Christians believe that the three important aspects of their eventual world dominion are: (1) a state-of-the-art satellite system (and its television broadcasts); (2) fundamentalist schools (with their emphasis on crackpot science and racist school texts); and (3) a fundamentalist church system in control of the state through cult control of congregations.
Most Neo-Christians in this post-Christian era are Christianoids who use the pulpits of various disguised branches of old Calvinism to promote an elitism that they hope will eventually replace democracy with a plutocratic oligarchy of the rich and Christianoid leadership. Their mission statement is a mixed blend of early Gnosticism, the anti-Gnostic Medieval Church, anti-Catholic Puritan ideology, anti-Luther/Calvinist Counter-Reformation, and a fascist view of the state as the ultimate expression of Christian faith. Rarely do we find among them devotion to the real teachings of Christ beyond the most superficial lip service. The Christian Coalition resembles Christianity as much as the Spanish Inquisition represented Christ's love and compassion.
Aware of the power of religious faith, Mussolini made his first act "The Lateran Pacts," an historical agreement between the Church and the Italian fascist government which secured the Vatican State and perpetuated medieval pre-scientific concepts of unquestioning obedience to the party elite and Church authority. These Pacts caused the destruction of constitutional government for nearly three decades until thousand of Allied soldiers lost their lives to rid the world of fascism and its German brand nazism.
As Alvin Toffler noted in "Future Shock", a "reversion to pre-scientific attitudes is accompanied, not surprisingly, by a tremendous wave of nostalgia." Right wing Republican campaign rhetoric suggests turning the clock back to an idealized version of 1950 America, forgetting that after half a century the world has irrevocably changed -- partially due to technological advances and progress on human rights.
At the Nuremberg Rally in 1934, Hitler said that "only brainless dwarfs" would fail to see that Germany had been the "bulwark against the Communist floods, which would have drowned Europe and its culture." He told his followers there that he had saved Germany from chaos caused by "Jewish intellectualism." Pat Robertson's Christianoid book, The New World Order, reading like a pamphlet from the John Birch Society, uses old Jew-hating references when touching on apocryphal Illuminati and Freemason conspiracies. His broadcasts are a stream of veiled insinuations about conspiracies.
David Barton, a right wing Christianoid of the first order, spoke at the 1993 Concerned Women for America convention about the Christian Reconstructionist creed. He says that the basis for American laws should be "whatever is Christian is legal. Whatever isn't Christian is illegal."
In the South, pseudo-Christians are targeting Jews for conversion. Coexistence and respect for diversity of opinion are no longer tolerable options. The primary agenda for America's right-wing/militia groups is to reject federal laws and regulations, treat people of color and women as second-class citizens, forcibly stop abortions and methods of birth control, execute homosexuals, and persecute Jews by accusing them of myriad evil conspiracies.
At the Nuremberg Rally, Hitler claimed "alien life and ideas forced on nations by Jewish intellectualism, which is racially without a basis, led to an alien, rootless state and internationally to complete cultural chaos." Buchanan, when still a member of the GOP, referred to a "so-called Holocaust survivors' syndrome," which he described in the New York Post (March 17, 1990) as "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics."
This echoes white supremacist and Christian Reconstructionist groups that believe Jews are not the "real Jews." Christian Reconstructionists believe that their church is empowered to "advance Christ's kingdom in time and history." They claim that "the problem for the unconverted . . . is a lack of submission," and that the Bible commands "the godly to take dominion in the earth" and "reconstruct" it according to their interpretation of the Bible.
George Bush's advocating federal financing for "faith based" social programs is only the first step toward removing the separation of church and state. At one point, Hitler claimed that by stigmatizing Jews he was "doing the work of the Lord," and religious leaders as well as the average German applauded.
Leaders of paranoia exploit the confusion and anger of their followers by focusing it on whatever element of society they want to blame for problems. Ultimately, impressionable simple minds persuaded by absurd alarmist arguments conclude that killing the scapegoat eliminates the problem.
We have seen this in Nazi Germany, in Red China, in Cambodia, and recently in Bosnia and Kosovo (George W didn't know where Kosovo was -- maybe Dick Cheney can help him find it on the map).
One of the most typical features of fascism has been what Umberto Eco calls an "appeal to a frustrated middle class." Supporters of the extreme right wing are people worried about their jobs, especially those who haven't updated their skills or those stigmatized by some as "The Great Unwired" because they are not computer literate. The geographic distribution of Republican majority states supports this contention, for in the 2000 election they took the states with less Internet traffic and lost where people have daily access to online media.
The Internet reveals how the powerful bonds of industrial society that we have depended on -- law, common values, standardized education, and cultural productions -- are rapidly changing due to the Information Revolution. So far, the ignorance of conservative old wealth has failed to understand what these changes mean, and by embracing and financing a fascist plot to install into power the abysmally ignorant George W Bush and his corrupt family, they have clearly demonstrated their inability to understand that the Information Revolution has already triggered as much economic and social upheaval as was brought on by the Industrial Revolution.
For the GOP to resort over the last eight years to medieval power intrigues -- from the Contract with America to the Florida Coup -- is to court a major ecological and economic catastrophe.
In the Middle Ages, lepers and Jews were accused of plotting to usurp Christian governments by poisoning the drinking water. Jews were accused of spreading the Plague by poisoning wells. Jews and witches were accused of ruining crops, and spreading sickness and heretical beliefs. In Nazi Germany, Jews were accused of undermining the sanctity, economy and solidarity of German society. The accusers turned out ultimately to be destroyers of Germany. Today the extreme right wing still conceal their KKK white sheets in their sordid skeleton closets. They persecutes homosexuals, resist equal rights for women and minorities, and opposes environmental sanity, which is our only chance to secure enduring economic prosperity. The far right pseudo-Christians and other assorted kooks and fuzzy thinkers accuse "secular humanists" and their "evil Jewish henchmen," ecology scientists, human rights advocates, environmentalists, and "gender feminists" of being the enemies of society.
Christian lecturer and reactionary Wilma Leftwich said that the One World Government plot is led by "secular humanists." She says that "they" want to impose marriage and child taxes, a sweeping two-child family policy, offer economic incentives for birth control, put fertility control drugs in the water supply, restructure the family through the "feminist/socialist movement," and actively encourage increased homosexuality.
In August 1995, James Dobson of Focus on the Family claimed that "sexually decadent gender feminists" were plotting to take over the U.S, a typical fascist method of hate promotion. In the same speech, he accused godless Chinese of subsisting on a diet of aborted [female] babies -- a peculiar, ancient libel traced to a 6 or 7 AD tract known as Pseudo-Methodius. Dobson and Rush Limbaugh are the epitome of the neo-fascist. This war-promoting libel also rears its ugly head in ludicrous, Neo-Christianoid folklore that bears an uncanny resemblance to old folktales of witches practicing infanticide to feed an army of intelligent, musical toads with the power of human speech!
To reveal these American neo-fascists evil intentions, one need only observe the transparent resistance of the illegitimate Bush government to enacting hate crime legislation and to giving support to the establishment of an international court against war crimes to protect humanity from the horror of genocide. Clearly, fascists, knowing their own hatred and evil intentions, are not about to help set up any legal instruments that will punish crimes they expect to commit themselves when their hoped for time to reach for total takeover comes. Florida 2000 was only a preview of coming attractions.
Today there is a parallel between the economic and social milieu of the US and Nazi Germany, especially in the debate over health care. Then -- as now -- the central issue was who should receive what kind of care, and for how long. In Nazi Germany, medicine was considered a national resource reserved only for people who showed the greatest prospect of recovery and future productivity. Adherents of eugenics -- from Nazis to promoters of the National Institute of Health's Violence Initiative --claim that everything from criminal/violent behavior and alcoholism to rampant unemployment and labor unrest can be blamed on "faulty genes."
Adherents to this social/political movement also believe in inferiority of some races and superiority of others -- a view that extends to various ethnic groups and social classes as well. Nazis had their forced sterilization and euthanasia laws; courts decided a person's "value" to society. It is incredible to realize that America had the Johnson Act, which authorized more than 60,000 eugenic sterilizations between 1907 and 1941. (Most state sterilization laws were not repealed until after the 1960s.) Republicans need not worry. Compassionate Dick Cheney, who believed Nelson Mandela should spend the rest of his life in prison, will whisper in George's ear ideas of "final solutions."
Today, the "compassionate conservatives" consider legislation that limits welfare recipients to five years' worth of benefits in a lifetime. They are uneasy about aid to the elderly or to AIDS victims. They passed "three strikes" laws so that anyone who may have broken a law three times can be locked away forever, even for stealing a single loaf of bread. This law is a fascist dream come true; consider the manner in which innocent people have been framed by law enforcement departments, especially in Texas and Florida.
Dick Cheney, like Newt Gingrich, voted to end school lunches, so that more children might learn from hunger. In Nazi Germany, they advocated reducing rations for the aged, people with terminal diseases, repeat offenders, and the mentally ill. What passes as "tough-on-crime laws" in the mind of the ugly right wing mob is no different from the Nazis' judgment that "some have no right to live."
Fascism involves a "system of sexual dictatorship devised to impose arbitrary moralistic values in the individual in the interest of state approved authoritarian marriage and family where the male will is absolute." Hitler said that "the emancipation of women is an invention of Jewish minds." Today, the extreme right wing frets that "secular humanists" are restructuring families through the "feminist movement," and actively encourage increased homosexuality. The fear of "sexual freedom," viewed as sexual chaos and sexual dissipation by pseudo-Christian reactionaries like Ashcroft, works hand in hand with a fear of economic freedom for ordinary citizens. Welfare is for corporations. Tax cuts are for the rich. Let the people get trickle down crumbs and keep unemployment and low wages going so the bottom line for the rich may continue to grow fat. Those distorted fears are being fostered by the conservative who want to conserve not nature, a people's well being, or freedom, but only their bottom lines and privileges. Their unsurpassed hypocrisy lurks behind all calls for "safeguarding only Christianoid culture," which, in the final analysis, amounts to a racist, intolerant, techno-plutocracy trying to appear as civilization.
The "Christian" Coalition had no problem agreeing with Buchanan when he declared that "our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free." What may follow are goose stepping SS (State Secret Police) with Christianoid crosses on their armbands.
Fascists like to use simple language and concepts, a rhetoric that appeals to simple-minded thugs. Fascists constantly attempt to win the support of functional illiterates, the ignorant, and fuzzy thinkers. George W is a case in point: the perfect puppet with papa pulling the strings. Note how George avoids careful analysis and thoughtful commentary on issues. Note that Al Gore's intelligence was disparaged during the 2000 election by the captive media.
Al Gore and the Liberty Movement are strong and will remain strong because they adopt intelligence to protect freedom. America's Federalist Papers are not the kind of literature Bush, Cheney or Greenspan could ever understand or apply.
To realize the cretinism prevalent in the extreme right point of view, consider its claims that "women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measure of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism" as males.
George had his coup, so let us call it for what it is: AN ILLEGAL FASCIST POWER GRAB. "The election is over" bray embarrassed Republicans. Let's forget the fight. Let's come together and move forward." One can only accept a fair loss, not deceit, mob action, or thievery. Would anyone in his right mind accept a car thief's plea," Please forget it! I stole it and it's mine now!!!" while the thief is still driving the car he stole?
Neo-Republicans are against everything America stands for. They and their corrupt court accomplices annihilated the votes of all American citizens. The crime of the century is not forgivable until corrected. We must never forget it for a single day.
Come 2002 let us kick out as many Republican fascists as possible and then let us re-elect Al Gore in 2004. Then our Nation can move forward and perhaps establish Justice and Liberty once and for all.
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