Many people have noticed similarities between what happened in Germany in the 1930's and what is happening now in America. This recent article explores some of the parallels.

Fascism then. Fascism now?

The Toronto Star
Nov. 27, 2005

When people think of fascism, they imagine Rows of goose-stepping storm troopers and puffy-chested dictators. What they don't see is the economic and political process that leads to the nightmare.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...d=970599119419

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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. " --Noam Chomsky

Unfortunately, you and the article are not talking about Fascism, you're talking about Corporatism. Corporatism is the phenomena of large corporations combining their interests to control the national government(s) and protect their interests. Fascism was the attempt to control the left (communists and so forth) by means of an authoritarian, anti-democratic movement that used nationalistic and non-rational motifs (like aryan supremacy or "the nation as a body") to stir the population. It was Fascism that eventually ran out of control and led to the atrocities we know about from history.

Corporatism, on the other hand, has been going from strength to strength in the last half century. We definitely live in a Corporatist world, which is NOT the same as living in a free-market economy. The fact that this is so seldom discussed, except by left-wing morons, speaks volumes about who controls the political agenda nowadays. Just as an example, Bush is obviously working mainly for the oil industry in America, rather than for the American people as a whole. Issues like abortion and family values, while very important, serve to obscure the fact that the average person has less influence on government now than they did a generation ago.

Real Fascism is no more than just Corporatism. If you study the relationship of the Third Reich with the German big business community what Hitler and the Nazis managed to put together was Corporatism with a 'perverted' racist shell on top of it. Many people who call themselves 'conservative' are fooled by the term 'national socialism'. The term socialism used in that context is not related to Marxism as many people think. The only aspect 'national socialism' that relates to socialism is the government controls all the means of production but under Fascism it does so in partnership with the large corporations. The other aspect of Nazism that makes it a perverted form of Fascism is that Nazism covered itself and integrated racism within it structure. This is similar to the fact that Russia took Marxism and integrated Russian chauvinism and Russian imperialism into it's socialism and came up with a 'perverted' form of socialism called Soviet-ism.

I used the term perverted with quotes here because both Fascism, Marxism, and Socialism are themselves perverted forms of governments so the term is in a large sense redundant.

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"I was born at night, but it was not last night night"

Fascism, as a recognizable style of government, flourished briefly in a number of countries around the world in the twentieth century. Fascism is a more general phenomenon than just the particular instances of it that occurred in Germany and Italy in the 1930's and 40's. For a broader look at just what characterizes fascism, let's start with a study done several years ago by a prominent political scientist, Dr. Lawrence Britt, who wrote an article about fascism ("Fascism Anyone?", Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20) with an extensive and detailed listing of the primary identifying characteristics of fascism.

This excerpt is in accordance with the magazine's policy.

Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), Salazar (Portugal), Papadopoulos (Greece), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. More and more people are starting to recognize the many similarities between these characteristics and the current situation in our country.

The 14 characteristics are:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism. Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights. Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause. The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military. Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism. The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media. Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security. Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined. Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected. The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed. Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts. Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment. Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption. Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections. Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. " --Noam Chomsky

I really fear that one of the aspects of 'fascism ' which are seeing here in this country is that an extreme minority 'religious' faction has taken the point with one of our political parties. This extreme has also formed a mutual alliance with the corporacrats and the Neocon as current rulers of Republican party and is taking this country down the path toward fascism. They are using nationalism as a tool but now they call it 'patriotism'. These three factions, the extremist religionists, Neocons, and corporatists are using each other to achieve what each of them want. The sad part is that in total there is nothing that any of this tripartite of forces wants that is good for the over all economic, social, or political health of our country.

While they are doing this they obscure the real facts by claiming that the Democrats are taking us on the path toward socialsm. There is some truth with that but faction of the Democrats though evil also they are, who may want to take us to socialsm is no where as powerfull as the tripartite of the neocons, the corporatists, and the extremist religionists who are heading toward facsism.

I see all of this heading towards the destruction of what this country was founded on. First to go will be our economic freedoms and then our personal freedoms such as free speech will go down the drain.

The extreme religiosity of the right 'religious' right is very much like the the racism that the Nazis brought into the open in Germany and used it as a tool to achieve power.

It is not as far as Germany was in 1933 but we are seeing the same patterns.

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"I was born at night, but it was not last night night"

The majority of the people in this country are still moderate and still care about the things they've always cared about. These groups that control the GOP cannot hang on to power indefinitely, because they do not resemble the majority. The more extreme they get, the more the Democrats will resemble the majority by default. People might get carried away in ideological moments, but they do catch on when things are getting out of hand.
Of more concern than the extremists is the apathy and feelings of powerlessness within Americans. If there were a way to reverse this trend, we'd not have to fear fascism or socialism.

I agree with the premise. The parallels are disturbing. Hitler invented a myth of a special German past. Many in the USA cling to our own historical myth. Reagan personified it. He, and many others, thought the good 'ol USA was a Frank Capra movie.
I think Full Metal Jacket cuts closer to the bone.

Some of what I read and hear from the liberals in this country sound reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Starting with the attacks on religion continuing through the attempts to use government to play Robin Hood. The problem that the left doesn't realize is that the religous within the Republican party do represent a majority. Which is why election after election after election the democrats get spanked and leave with hat in hand. They don't realize that their extremist views are in the minority. They just don't get it and I don't think they will in the near term either. I think it will take a few more beatings before it really sinks in.

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JMS gets another English lesson:

Quote:

there is no "mostly unique;" thats like saying "sometimes always," its an oxymoron - its either one or the other.

The result:

Quote:

By the mid-19th century unique had developed a wider meaning, “not typical, unusual,” and it is in this wider sense that it is compared. The comparison of so-called absolutes in senses that are not absolute is standard in all varieties of speech and writing.

During WWII, in the course of fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japan, Americans got to see the naked face of fascism - aggressive wars, military brutality, disdain for human rights, torture, death camps, etc. There is a sorry, sordid history of US corporate support for Hitler before the war and even in the early stages of the war, that prompted many prescient warnings about the danger of fascism rising in America. Nowadays most people have forgotten those warnings and many seem to be in denial that fascism is even possible in America, let alone that we may be moving fast in that direction under the neo/con regime. Here is a warning written by the Vice-President of the United States during WWII, who saw full-blown fascism in all it's ugliness and horror and who had the intellectual honesty to recognize the seeds of this mental and moral sickness even in his own country.


The Danger of American Fascism

Henry A. Wallace, (Vice President of America, 1941-1945)

An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:
What is a fascist?
How many fascists have we?
How dangerous are they?

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases:

The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler's game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini's vaunted claim that he "made the trains run on time." In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler's claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:
Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique.
Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and "with malice toward none and charity for all" go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. " --Noam Chomsky

People are still posting Britt's 14 Characteristics of Fascism, huh? Never mind that his conclusion are erroneous. Maybe it's because people just love numbered lists - it's a great marketing ploy. It's the same trick used to sell magazines. Kiplinger's: 10 Must-Have Stocks for Your Portfolio; Cosmopolitan: 7 Sure-fire Ways to Get Him to Commit; etc...

Here are the real characteristics of Fascism. And I am going to ensure that they will be immortalized by giving them this title...

6 Signs You are Living in a Fascist Society.

1. There is a dictator who wields absolute power.

2. That dictator does not recognize individual rights.

3. There is only one political party.

4. Citizens are executed without trial for political offenses.

5. Expropriation, redistribution, or nationalization (i.e., government sanctioned theft) of private property.

6. Censorship.


And as far as I can tell, item number 5 is the only area where I can see the U.S. approaching any real danger.

In any case, that's it - just 6, not 14 as previously reported. We can all breathe easier. Did I mention that there is a number in the title?