Is it fascism yet?

[taterguy]

[seemslikeadream]

1. ?

[wtbymark]

2. is that a pier to nowhere? n/t

[taterguy]

3. It is what it is

And how many piers go to destinations?

[SouthernerforObama]

4. Palin's Bridge?

No idea actually - but looks a little warm to be Alaska. lol

[taterguy]

6. And you claim to be a North Carolinian

:eyes:

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

5. No.

[McCamy Taylor]

7. It has been fascism in the US for a lot longer than people realize.

It wasn't fascism when Europe was engaged in colonialism, because most of Europe was still a monarchy at the time, and they did it for the glory of their kings and queens. France was the exception. I guess France was the other crypto-fascist power besides the United States.

Here is all you need for fascism:

1. A bunch of companies that run everything from behind the scenes

2. Some political puppets who are either "elected" in rigged elections or who have been installed in coups or who have been declared ruler for life but who are not divine rulers (then they would be more important than the company owners, like Louis XIV of France). These are the guys who pretend to make all the decisions. They are the lightening rods for the public anger. If things go sour, they are the ones who get lined up against the wall and shot---or sentenced to death at Nuremberg. The guys up at Number one are just as guilty as these guys, but they get a wrist slap and then are invited to start doing business again.

3. A "preferred" working class, selected because it is more X-ian, X being the name of the country. So in the US, they are more American. In Germany, they are more German. In Italy, they are more Italian. In Indonesia, they are more Indonesian. This chosen working class is told that all its problems derive from the scapegoated working class

4. The scapegoated working class. Jews in Germany. Communists in Italy. Chinese in Indonesia. Blacks/recent immigrants in the US. These workers are the villains who must be controlled at all cost---and they are also available at all time for cheap unprotected labor since they have no rights and can be thrown into prison camps. If there is a crisis, the political leaders will reassign the blame here.

3, which makes up the mass of the fascist country and gets most of the work done and generates most of the wealth that lines the pockets of 1 is told what to do by 2 which gets its orders from 1. 3 is told to fear 4 and it invests most of its energy in persecuting and hating 4. 3 is duped into thinking that 1 is its friend and that 1 loves it more than it loves 4 (even though 4 is often the preferred worker since it will work for less). If 3 gets wise to the scam, it tosses 2 out of office, and 1 finds new puppets to fill the roll of 2 and it all starts over again.

This is the American system of government and has been for over a century. Fascism is exactly the same thing, except with more control of number 3 often in an attempt to persuade them to fight colonial wars that will allow number 1 to steal the wealth of other countries. In these situations you add a number

5. Foreign enemies who threaten X.


The model for this system actually emerged under a limited monarchy in England (the Hanovers so they do not count, they were just some German upstarts the wealth British imported to keep the rightful kings away from the throne). In early industrialized England, they would import workers from Ireland. Recall that the British conquered Ireland long before and had treated the Irish much as Blacks were treated in the US after the Civil War. They could not vote, own property, they were subject to sudden arrest, imprisonment, torture, death. They were not considered human. In Ireland, they were often starving. When British workers (the number 3s above) would start getting notions about collective bargaining or unions, the business owners (the numbers 1s) could imporr Irish workers as scab labor. Since the Irish hated all British equally, there was no sense of workers' solidarity. They did not care whose job they were taking. And the British workers despised the Irish. The people who would take the heat would be the politicians, who would be condemned for allowing the Irish to invade Great Britain---and because of Britains limited resources, a system like this could be used only in moderation.

In the U.S., where immigration was a way of life and the frontier was limitless, this scam is probably what made a bunch of wealthy families the billionaires they are today. Play the workers off against the most recently arrived immigrant group. Engels said that the US would never achieve socialism as long as the bosses could do this with immigrants.

[taterguy]

8. Not according to Post #5

And in case you didn't know, OMC is never wrong

[seemslikeadream]

9. ..........

:rofl:

[taterguy]

10. Link please

I hate it when people make ridiculous claims and don't back them up with any evidence

[seemslikeadream]

11. Did you want a link to OMC being wrong or American Fascism?

[seemslikeadream]

12. Here's the American Fascism link, OMC I will not spend 2 seconds running down his bullshit

The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism
by Chris Hedges
www.theocracywatch.org, Nov 15, 2004
(This is an article by Chris Hedges that no major publication will print.)


Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School , told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States . It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge .
He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams . Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." This too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg , including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma , has included in his campaign to end abortion a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina , wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral values."

[McCamy Taylor]

13. Did you want a link to it being fascism or not being fascism? Here is a definition of fascism.

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. – Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

It is all there. The "mass based" is the number 3, the "X-ian workers". The "traditional elites" are the number 1s who try to keep their involvement secret as much as possible so that the number 3s think they run things. You "internally cleanse" number 4 and "externally expand" against number 5. The number 2s are the ones who orchestrate the violence so that it achieves the goals that benefit the traditional elites who would never be involved in a truly chaotic or revolutionary movement, unless they were in control and knew exactly how they stood to gain from it.

Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany were both very, very good for business. Mussolini was a leftist until business bought him. In the case of Germany, people who participated in war crimes got off with wrists slaps at Nuremberg and were doing business with the allies withing a few years.

[seemslikeadream]

14. Fascism: the Real Story by Michael Parenti

Fascism: the Real Story
excerpted from the book
Contrary Notions
by Michael Parenti
The Michael Parenti Reader
City Lights Books, 2007, paperback

p341
Fascism is the name given to the political movement that arose in Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who ruled that country from 192.2. to 1943. Nazism was a movement led by Adolph Hitler, who was Germany's dictator from 1933 to 1945. Nazism is considered by most observers to be a variant of fascism, as to a lesser degree was the militaristic government that controlled Japan from 1940 to 1945; so too the Falangist movement led by Francisco Franco, who in 1939 took over Spain after a protracted civil war, with the military aid of the Italian and Nazi fascists.
p342
... the major characteristics of the fascist ideology.
First, the leadership cult, the glorification of an all-knowing, supreme and absolutist leader.
Second, the idolatrous worship of the nation-state as an entity unto itself, an absolute component to which the individual is subsumed. Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state. That was Mussolini's and Hitler's dictum. Hitler's henchman Rudolf Hess once said, "Adolf Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Adolf Hitler," thereby wrapping both the leadership cult and the state cult in one. The leader is the embodiment of the state, and the state is supreme.
Third, glorification of military conquest and jingoism: the state is vitalized and empowered by subduing, conquering, and enslaving other peoples and territories.
Fourth, propagation of a folk mysticism, with its concomitant xenophobia and racism. The Nazi slogan was em Volk, em Reich, em Führer (one people, one empire, one leader), an atavistic celebration of the special blood lineage and wondrous legacy of the people. Along with this comes a disdain for other peoples and nationalities. For the Nazis and most other Eastern European fascists, the core enemy was the Jew, who was seen as the perpetrator of all societal ills. Behind the trade unionists, communists, homosexuals and others were the Jews, wickedly alien creatures who would pollute the pure-blooded and undermine the state.
Fifth, on behalf of the interests of the giant business cartels, there was a concerted suppression, both by the Italian fascists and German Nazis, of all egalitarian working-class loyalties and organizations, including labor unions.
Of these various characteristics of fascism, the last one is rarely talked about by mainstream historians, political scientists and journalists who usually ignore the link between fascism and capitalism, just as they tend to ignore the entire subject of capitalism itself when something unfavorable needs to be said about it. Instead, they dwell on the more bizarre components of fascist ideology: the "nihilist revolt against Western individuality," the mystic yolk attachment, and so forth. Fascism was those things, but along with its irrational appeals it had rational functions. It was a key instrument for the preservation of plutocratic domination.
p347
Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued an agenda not unlike Mussolini's. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. In Germany, as in Italy, the communists endured the severest political repression of all groups.
p348
The Italian and German cartels looked to huge armament contracts and related public works as an expanded source of profitable investment. This also fit with their desire for a more aggressive foreign policy that might open new markets and put them on a better footing with their French and English competitors. So the fascists became a very useful ally against the capitalists' two worst enemies: the workers in their own country, and the capitalists in other countries.
Not all the big industrialists and financiers supported fascism with equal fervor. Some, like Thyssen, were early and enthusiastic backers of Hitler. The aged Emil Kurdoff thanked God that he lived long enough to see the Führer emerge as the savior of Germany. Others contributed money to the Nazis but also to other anti-socialist parties on the right. They backed Hitler only when he appeared to be the most effective force against the left. Many of them remained privately critical of the more extreme expressions of Nazi propaganda and were uneasy about the anti-bourgeois rhetoric enunciated by some of the plebeian brownshirts.
Some business elements were not that enamored with Hitler. Light industry had lower fixed costs and more stable profits than heavy industry, and was more dependent on consumer buying power. Consequently, light industrialists were not that keen about a more aggressive foreign policy and subsidies to heavy industry. But when push came to shove, they may not have been close to the fascists, but they were not about to ally themselves with the proletariat against the business class, of which they were a part. They either sided with the cartels or kept their mouths shut.
There was another element in these two societies that not only tolerated the rise of fascism but supported it: the capitalist state itself. Not the parliament as such, but the instruments of the state
that had a monopoly on the legal use of force and violence, the police, the army, and the courts. In Italy years before Mussolini emerged victorious, the police collaborated with the fascists in attacking labor and peasant organizations. They recruited criminals for the fascist squadristi, promising them immunity from prosecution for past crimes. While applications for gun permits were regularly denied to workers and peasants, police guns and cars were made available to Mussolini's goons.
Likewise in Germany immediately after World War I, the military police and the judiciary tended to favor the rightists while suppressing the leftists, a pattern of collaboration that continued into Hitler's day. In other words, these liberal capitalist democracies-that supposedly were "equally opposed to totalitarianism of the left and right"-were not really equally opposed. They often collaborated with the extreme right, those who were protecting the interests of big capital and the existing class structure. If defeating socialism and communism also entailed destroying democracy, so much the worse for democracy.
p350
In Germany, it was the same story. Between 1933 and 1935 wages were lowered anywhere from z to 40 percent, a harsh cut for ordinary workers trying to make ends meet. Wage taxes were instituted. Municipal poll taxes were doubled and other payroll deductions were imposed. The nonprofit mutual-assistance and insurance associations that had existed before the Nazis were abolished. Their funds were taken over by private insurance companies that charged more while paying out smaller benefits. And in Germany, just as in Italy, inflation substantially added to the workers' hardships.
In both Italy and Germany, perfectly solvent publicly owned enterprises, such as power plants, steel mills, banks, railways, insurance firms, steamship companies, and shipyards, were handed over to private ownership. Corporate taxes were reduced by half in both Italy and Germany. Taxes on luxury items for the rich were cut. Inheritance taxes were either drastically lowered or abolished. In Germany between 1934 and 1940 the average net income of corporate businessmen rose by 46 percent. Enterprises that were floundering were refloated with state bonds, recapitalized out of the state treasury. Once made solvent, they were returned to private owners. With numerous enterprises, the state guaranteed a return on the capital invested and assumed all the risks. The rich investor did not have to worry about any losses; if a business did poorly, the investor would be recompensed from the state treasury.
What the fascist state attempts is a final solution to the problem of class conflict. It obliterates the democratic forms that allow workers some room for an organized defense of their interests.
... a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save corporate business from the troublesome impositions of democracy. Fascism's savage service to big capital remains almost entirely a hidden history.