KWhite

(Not mine, but I could not find an author's name. Apologies.)


Are Republicans Fascists?


Conservatives, of course, love to express outrage at such suggestions. They’re especially sensitive to comparisons of George Bush to Hitler and Republican figures to various Nazis. So they dismiss such talk as unworthy of anything but an eye-rolling dismissal.

This reaction is somewhat justified. While the relentless advance of the conservative movement’s agenda is scary, the American right is not genuinely fascist – at least, not yet. And overusing the term in contexts that are only marginally appropriate simply increases the likelihood that liberals who do so will be the contemporary version of the boy who cried wolf: when the real thing appears, no one will believe them.

It’s also popularly believed that fascism could never take root in the good ol’ USA, land of the free. But fascism, according to some scholars, probably originated in America with the Ku Klux Klan, and it has been here, circulating in the system like a persistent virus, all these years since.

In the past half-century it has mostly been relegated to the far fringes of the right: white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, militiamen. Contrary to the popular stereotype, however, these people do not, for the most part, come with horns and pitchforks or looking like skinheads. They look, dress, talk, and act like most ordinary Americans. What separates them from the rest of the body politic is, rather, their extremist worldviews. Certainly, at one time their views were nothing out of the mainstream for most of America. They’re intent on making it that way again. And in the past decade and a half, they’ve been more successful than most people realize.

But then, most people barely understand what fascism really is.

One of the abiding misconceptions about fascism on both right and left sides of the political aisle is the notion that it can be reduced to a core set of ideological principles, much like communism or anarchism. This is why so many people reach for easy dictionary definitions when trying to deal with it.

As Robert O. Paxton has demonstrated authoritatively in his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, the mutative nature of fascism makes such definitions nearly impossible, and almost invariably off the mark.

Probably the closest we’ve come to a singular definition is Oxford scholar Roger Griffin’s “palingenetic ultranationalist populism” (“palingenesis” referring to the centrality of the myth of a Phoenix-like national rebirth from ashes), a definition which represents the traits that remain constant in fascism through all the stages of its development. Paxton himself has noted a similar constant, namely, the fascist insistence that it alone represents the authentic identity of the nation in which it arises. He also describes fascism as “right-wing totalitarian rule imposed by popular acclaim.”

Because fascism is more a political pathology than a single, readily identifiable principle, Paxton (and others like Stanley Payne and Umberto Eco) has come up with a descriptive explanation of the phenomenon. Fascism, he writes, is fuelled by nine “mobilizing passions” that on their own seem innocuous enough, even readily familiar, part of the traditional American political hurly-burly. But taken in combination, they become something lethal.

Of these nine “passions,” fully five of them accurately describe real traits of American movement conservatives:
· the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;
· the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group’s enemies, both internal and external;
· dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
· the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
· the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.

There are other lesser, more stylistic similarities to fascism that have reared their head among American conservatives as well:
· A propensity to view the weak with contempt; to associate weakness with femininity; and to excoriate the feminine and glorify the masculine. “Girlie men” was only the tip of the rhetorical iceberg in this regard.
· A fondness for depicting their enemies and their opposition as objects fit for elimination. In some cases, they are described as animals – typically either vermin or vicious killers. A secondary, but much more common, version of this is to identify them with the nation’s enemies.
· A resulting eliminationist rhetoric advocating the utter exclusion of entire blocs of the electorate, especially immigrants and the gay and lesbian community, as well as, on an even broader scale, liberals generically.

While these similarities show that the American conservative movement has become, in its basic architecture, a kind of precursor to fascism, some important elements are still missing:
· Its agenda, under the guise of representing mainstream conservatism, is not openly revolutionary.
· While increasingly a one-party state, it is not yet a dictatorship.
· It does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition.
· American democracy has not yet reached the genuine stage of crisis required for full-blown fascism to take root.

There’s little doubt that the events of September 11, 2001, created the conditions under which democracy in America could face a crisis. The eternal and limitless “war on terror” created an executive branch with extraordinary powers exceeding those of any previous “wartime president,” if only because the war itself was both universal and endless, strangely amorphous, almost mythical, and yet all too real in the deaths it produces. Moreover, it has occurred at a time when the nation is more bitterly and rancorously divided and politically volatile than any time in the memory of most Americans living today. The levels of distrust and conflict exist both on a national scale and the deeply personal one.

The role of a metastasizing conservative movement in this environment has been profound. Nearly all of the fascist-seeming trends in the national discourse are closely associated with the movement’s rise in the 1990s, particularly under the banner of the propaganda war waged by Rush Limbaugh and his minions, who have shown no hesitation in adopting ideas and memes straight out of the American far right, building ideological and political bridges with real extremists. The effect was a gravitational pull that dragged the movement further rightward almost naturally. It also introduced a level of eliminationist nastiness previously unseen in mass media.

Though the near-monolithic Republican rule imposed on the nation since the 2000 election has taken on a number of traits that legitimately raise the specter of fascism, in the end, we still have not reached an actual state of crisis. Any fair examination of the current state of the American right has to conclude that it is not genuinely fascist.

At least, not yet.

To the extent that the nation finds itself in the throes of a real crisis of governance; that we demand utter fealty to the national identity, even at the expense of civil liberties, democratic institutions, or democracy itself; that we identify liberalism as the root of all evil in America, as a domestic enemy little distinguishable from those from abroad; that we justify acts of monstrousness by pointing to our own victimhood; that we rely on the “strength” and instincts of our leaders instead of their wisdom and powers of reason, and grant them near-totalitarian powers (particularly in “wartime”) in the process; that we allow violence to become part of the political landscape; and that we pursue an insane apocalyptic vision of world domination – then, to that same extent, we put flesh to the fascist bones and make it real.

Can it happen in America? The truth is this: America is one of the nations in which fascism may yet again manifest itself in this, the epoch of mass politics. Preventing this from happening hinges on the extent to which Americans themselves see it, recognize it, and stand up to it. In the end, that will depend not just on liberals but on genuine conservatives as well.

David Neiwert is an author and freelance journalist based in Seattle, editor of the weblog Orcinus, and winner of the National Press Club award for distinguished online journalism. His most recent book is Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.

KWhite

Merchants of death in Iraq

By Dahr Jamail and Ali Fadhil

07/12/06 "IPS" -- -- FALLUJAH - It could be called perhaps just another raid. Early in the morning on Sunday, June 18, US military helicopters landed near the home of Sinan Abdul-Ilah al-Mashadani in the al-Jughaifi district of Fallujah.

Within two minutes the doors of his home were blasted open and "a strange looking group of people" stormed inside, according to Said Walid Ahmed, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in the neighborhood.

"This force is not totally unknown to us here in Fallujah," Ahmed, who witnessed the incident from a nearby house told Inter Press Service (IPS). "They are a special force of Americans that assassinates more people than it arrests."

Ahmed described the force from the helicopters as "big men with

long hair and beards, some wearing earrings, and others with little black caps on the top of their heads at the back".

Sinan Abdul-Ilah al-Mashadani, who was a student at al-Mustansiriya University and the sole supporter of his mother and younger brother and sister, was killed in the raid, apparently by a special operations team supported by the US military, according to witnesses.

"Their [special forces troops'] dogs were biting everybody, including children and women in the neighborhood," Um Amar, a 63-year-old woman who lives three houses away from Sinan told IPS. "They killed the poor boy in cold blood and arrested his little brother." She burst into tears and began to pray.

Another neighbor, Jassim al-Jumaily, said Sinan's father Najim Abdul-Ilah al-Mashhadani was killed during Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004 when his house was bombed by US warplanes.

The US military assault on Fallujah then destroyed most of the city and killed between 4,000 and 6,000 people, according to Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI), an Iraqi non-governmental organization based in Fallujah.

Sinan took responsibility for his family after the death of his father, Jumaily said. "He had to work and study at the same time. We did not notice any abnormality in his behavior at all. When the helicopters came, we never thought Sinan would be the target, because we realize they only come after big personalities from al-Qaeda or leaders in the Iraqi resistance."

Jumaily said the long-haired bearded men from the special force "blasted the doors of Sinan's house open as if they were attacking an army headquarters".

People in the neighborhood said they heard some of what was going on. "The screaming of Sinan's mother and sisters was frightening," Jumaily said. "All we could do was pray for their safety, trying to comfort each other that the worst possibility was that they would arrest Sinan."

After the men had been inside the house for three hours, Jumaily and other witnesses said they heard Sinan's mother wailing, and saw the men leave with Amin, her 13-year-old son who was being beaten by the men and bitten by their dogs as he was taken away.

Many of the neighbors then went to Sinan's home, and found his body, covered with sheets and mattresses. There was a pool of blood on the floor, some was splattered on the walls.

"Three days after his detention, Amin was released," said Muhamad al-Deraji, director of MHRI. "The left hand of this orphaned child was bitten three times, and is now scarred and deformed."

The US forces also raided other homes in the area, Deraji said. "One of the dogs attacked a woman who tried to protect her baby. The dog bit the mother's hand."

Deraji said the forces looted money and jewelry from several of the houses they raided.

IPS sent an email to Major Douglas Powell at the Combined Press Information Center for the Multi-National Force in Iraq to request comment on the incident. There was no reply.

Later, IPS phoned the US military spokesperson in Baghdad to request information on the incident. The spokesman, who declined to give his name, said, "We have no information confirming this event ever took place."

http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle13968.htm

KWhite

Atrocities...
It promises to be a long summer. We're almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It's a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere.

The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.

The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.

People are staying in their homes in the area and no one dares enter it so the wakes for the people who were massacred haven't begun yet. I haven't seen his family yet and I'm not sure I have the courage or the energy to give condolences. I feel like I've given the traditional words of condolences a thousand times these last few months, "Baqiya ib hayatkum… Akhir il ahzan…" or "May this be the last of your sorrows." Except they are empty words because even as we say them, we know that in today's Iraq any sorrow- no matter how great- will not be the last.

There was also an attack yesterday on Ghazaliya though we haven't heard what the casualties are. People are saying it's Sadr's militia, the Mahdi army, behind the killings. The news the world hears about Iraq and the situation in the country itself are wholly different. People are being driven out of their homes and areas by force and killed in the streets, and the Americans, Iranians and the Puppets talk of national conferences and progress.

It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It's gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war… death… killing… bombing… rape…"

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes... Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today. I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.

It's difficult to believe T. is really gone… I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war… And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocents…

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/20...64752348608248

KWhite

Middle Class? You've Been Downlisted by the GOP
Ross M. Levine
Wed Jul 12, 12:11 AM ET

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, depending on your income, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, depending on your gullibility...

With apologies to Chuck Dickens...

Yes, it's bad enough that young Americans are being exploded in Iraq because a cakewalk has turned into a bloodbath; that our national debt is more than $8 trillion and counting; that it's OK for illegal immigrants to wash dishes but not rent apartments; that it takes a Ben Franklin and change to gas up an Escalade; that nearly one in every six Americans lacks medical insurance; that the price of a no-frills home in L.A. County is over half a million bucks; that civil liberties have become an inconvenience to national security; and that if the Earth gets any hotter, the federal government will be building levies in New York as well as New Orleans. All this is pretty unnerving, but these are the symptoms, not the sickness.

So what is the sickness? One could say a lack of leadership but that is not precisely the case. There is leadership, AKA the present government, but it's not exactly of, by and for the people anymore.

Was it ever? That's certainly open to discussion, but in the 21st century, as Rooseveltian socialism becomes more and more the scapegoat for America's ills, our leaders in the White House and on Capitol Hill are taking the American dream and whittling it down to a more manageable size. In other words, it's no longer for everybody.

Think of Bush and the Republican Congress as the captain and crew of the Titanic. They know there's an iceberg out there, but they also know there are enough lifeboats aboard for them and their friends to get off safely. For those of us in steerage, well, we can fend for ourselves. As the great Ayatollah Reagan once said: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Translation -- you're on our own.

Well, sure, fair enough, if only the rules of the game were also fair enough. They're not. The rich get richer, while the rest of us nibble at a smaller and smaller chunk of cheese. This fact of American life today is everywhere.

For instance, with oil prices hovering above 70 bucks a barrel, you'd think the gasoline makers would be hurting, having to pay so much for their dead dinosaur juice. Not so -- profits are through the firmament.

Companies are scaling back, laying off workers, declaring bankruptcy and terminating pensions. Are their CEOs feeling the pinch? Hardly. While unions are told that workers must sacrifice for the good of the firm, company leaders are giving themselves raises that seem more like lotto prizes than compensation.

Let's face it -- the American middle class, endangered species that it is, has been downlisted -- i.e., the government no longer believes it's obligated to protect it.

And why should our President and Congresspersons save the middle class anyway? To the poor, the middles are just rich people who don't know how good they have it. To the rich, they're a bunch of would-be party crashers who should be more than satisfied with what they got.

And to the middle class itself -- what is its self-image like these days? Well, somewhat delusional, I'm afraid. Its rank and file believe they can sustain debt that would give Polonius a coronary and mortgages that exceed the GNPs of developing nations, all the while ignoring the fact that their future is as secure as the life of a Saddam Hussein defense lawyer.

Remember George W. Bush's broadside on Social Security, right after he'd earned his political capital against the Great Obfuscator, "Ichabod" Kerry? Bush felt confident that, denied his "mission accomplished" in Iraq, he could at least go down in history as the president who revamped social security and once and for all made this country the capitalist utopia it was intended to be. By letting ordinary Americans keep their money to invest as they wish, instead of the government guaranteeing them a retirement benefit, the average Joe would be better off (or so the argument went). Social Security, said Bush in the manner of Paul Revere announcing the redcoat advance, was on a downward spiral, and the only answer was letting the people sit on their own nest egg.

Great idea -- so why didn't it hatch? Not because most middle-income Americans realize that 401(k)s, as stated by benefits consultant Brooks Hamilton on PBS's Frontline, may not be all they're cracked up to be:

"The top 20% [of plan participants] always did anywhere between five and six times the annual investment rate of return of the bottom 20%. If the bottom 20%, say, had a 4% return, ... the top 20% might have had a 25 or 26% return. ...

I label this yield disparity. ... We have a yield disparity that is a financial cancer in our great, beautiful 401(k) movement. ... it was everywhere I looked. [A cancer because] it would destroy the opportunity for ordinary workers to retire in dignity. They couldn't get there from here. There is no way."

No, Bush was feeding us his line that the typical American would do better managing retirement money than the government ever could. But the people didn't buy it. They were understandably skeptical of the President after the WMDs failed to materialize, but they were also afraid to give up a known quantity -- a social security check (however endangered it might be) -- for an unknown quantity, earnings based on their own ability to play the financial markets. Most Americans, wisely enough, would rather not bet their futures on their own talent for saving and investing wisely.

In fact, most Americans may expect that their leaders will take better care of them than they will take care of themselves. In this, they are sorely misguided. When it comes to taking care of us, our leaders are utter incompetents. They seem to be fiddling away as the Earth heats to a boil; as the OPEC gang plays us like a marionette; as billions of dollars are siphoned to war profiteers in Iraq; as our environment is eaten away by unchecked growth; as our prisons spill forth an ever-growing graduate class of criminals; as our culture becomes Walmartized; as fewer and fewer media companies disseminate nearly all of our news and entertainment; and as it becomes increasingly harder for us to imagine how we'll ever be able to retire.

But no, our leaders are not fiddling, they're finagling. It may seem like they are oblivious to the plight of the planet and the people, but that is not the case. Do not be so naïve as to consider them Caligulas so heady with power that they cannot figure out how to exercise it. They do have plans, and those plans do not favor working stiffs on fixed, five-figure salaries. Such working stiffs may form the majority of a politician's constituents, but they do not command the majority of his or her attention.

Corporations, along with individuals as rich as corporations, have the money and influence required to make Faustian deals with White House and Congressional souls. And once such arrangements are struck, a politician in hock to Lucifer becomes even more energized and determined to work his boss's will. The war in Iraq rages on not because of some quixotic quest for democracy, but because the military industrial complex and its corporate cohorts are invested too deeply over there -- too profitably -- to allow for a "premature" pullout. Just think of the Pentagon and Halliburton as vampires in the midst of a repast.

Remember the bailout of the airline industry in the aftermath of September 11th? The blue chip flyers were in trouble before the attack, and would probably have gone under without the aid of the U.S. taxpayers. Our Republican President and his Congressional minions harnessed the power of the people to save their corporate pals in direct violation of their supposed faith in the free market. Some of these airlines are still limping along, their loyal employees limping along with them.

But not the folks in the corporate cockpit -- they're making plenty and don't have a care in the world about maintaining their opulent way of life in their golden years.

And what is happening as our robber barons snicker all the way to the bank? One in six Americans better not get sick; the city of New Orleans remains in intensive care nearly a year after Katrina; illegal aliens are vilified for taking backbreaking, carcinogenic jobs in construction and agriculture; billions are being flushed away on Congressional earmarks; the likes of DeLay and Abramoff have turned Washington into a laundromat; prisoners have languished in Gitmo long enough to commit suicide; instead of Bonnie and Clyde, we have Fannie (Mae) and Arthur (Anderson); and Merck, in true Industrial Revolutionary fashion, has been caught putting profits ahead of human life. My, my -- if Willy Lohman were alive today, he'd kill himself all over again.

So, are we describing a rudderless ship with Bush and the Republicans standing at the helm, unable to change course? Not on your life. They are steering the vessel in exactly the way that keeps the powerful powerful and the rest of us staring down the plank. Political spin is the art of committing crimes and making them seem not only legal but noble. When people do good deeds, no spin is required, but when people are corrupt, they can't get enough of their own shameless rhetoric.

Once upon a time, Galileo was put on trial because he was too gung-ho for Copernicus. The Inquisition was not ready to acknowledge that the Earth revolved around the sun. In the same way, our present leaders refuse to admit that we are not winning the global war on terror; that yes, we do use torture; that trashing ANWR is not preferable to regulating the auto industry; that photographing flag-draped coffins is not anti-American; that real education is more than just passing a standardized test; that good governance is about long-, not short-term, results; and that the economy, for a whole lot of people, really and truly sucks.

And one more thing -- that the American dream, for most of us, has become the American pipe dream.

There, I've said it. Let my trial begin.

TheNewGuy

They shouldn't be doing either, they should have thier asses kicked out of our country.

__________________
"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." ~P.J. O'Rourke

dedbr

this one to it, Kelly.....


and this one for you New Guy.....


A fascist state, K? OK, I'll think on it. But on the surface I'd say no. Not that your wrong, but interpretation is everything, so give me a day or two, and I'll
worry it a bit.....

New Guy......


Some Where In Ded Land.......

__________________
Though my soul may set in darkness,
It will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly,
To be fearful of the night." Sarah Williams

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