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In reply to the discussion: Making a Killing [View all]Octafish
(55,745 posts)29. Bertram Gross: 'Friendly Fascism'
No concentration camps, just social control through fiscal policy and capitalism, cough, jobs or the lack thereof - war for profit is the same.
Friendly Fascism - The New Face of Power in America
by Bertram Gross
EXCERPT...
Friendly fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called "free world."
The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase "friendly fascism" helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the friendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.
The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises-too often rendered false-of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy-and for this reason is bitterly fought...
These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in "capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world". Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in "humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege" and in spontaneous or organized "reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power...and inequality, injustice or coercion".
A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.
But events soon began to change perceptions.
CONTINUED...
Now, policies like 'Austerity' help move things along...Feudalism for the 21st Century.
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The fascists won. Looking through history, as the Monarchies fell they were replaced
Egalitarian Thug
Feb 2013
#2
1980. Why do we never listen until it's too late. Every single problem in America today was
Egalitarian Thug
Feb 2013
#35
There was an attempt to re-introduce eugenics in the 1990s with The Bell Curve....
LongTomH
Feb 2013
#34
it is reality, and it also highlights how powerless a President like Obama can be
pasto76
Feb 2013
#8
'to suggest that 9/11 involved anything more than a bunch of cave dwellers,...
zappaman
Feb 2013
#12
George W Bush ignored CIA warnings: 'bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.'
Octafish
Feb 2013
#18
What do you think? I'd guess one important point would be to keep the plot secret.
Octafish
Feb 2013
#33
How can anyone disagree? A handful of "cave dwellers" managed to defeat the
rhett o rick
Feb 2013
#28
No wonder all the Fox News people make 1,000,000,000,000 references to the Nazis...
Initech
Feb 2013
#26