Published on Monday, August 28, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Reclaiming The Issues: Islamic Or Republican Fascism?
by Thom Hartmann
In the years since George W. Bush first used 9/11 as his own "Reichstag fire" to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his corporate cronies, many across the political spectrum have accused him and his Republican support group of being fascists.
On the right, The John Birch Society's website editor recently opined of the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretap program: "This is to say that from the administration's perspective, the president is, in effect, our living constitution. This is, in a specific and unmistakable sense, fascist."
On the left, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. specifically indicts the Bush administration for fascistic behavior in his book "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy."
Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival strategy is to redefine the term "fascism" so it can't be applied to them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation."
The relentless BushCo/Republican use of fear to keep the public cowering about some "other" threatening our way of life, hateful of our freedom, & stalking our children, while stripping us of our freedom, is straight from the Musollini/Hitler playbook.
"First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself " Franklin D. Roosevelt
We know how much they hate FDR. Hate hate hate him.
Godwin's law be damned. American Fascism was foretold generations ago. Eternal vigilance, though nerve wracking, is essential.
While the Republicans promote the term "Islamo-fascism," the rest of the world is pushing back, as the BBC noted in an article by Richard Allen Greene ("Bush's Language Angers US Muslims" - 12 August 2006):
"Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that the term [Islamic fascists] was meaningless.
"'There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,' he said. 'This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs.'"
Their beliefs are, quite simply, that governments of the world should be subservient to religion, a view shared by a small but significant part of today's Republican party. But that is not fascism - the fascists in the US want to exploit the fundamentalist theocrats to achieve their own fascistic goals.
The Theocrats just want their particular religious creeds imposed on all & sundry. The fascists want a Corporate monopoly in control of us all. The Fatcat in the sky, or the fatcat in the board room? Either way, they both hate us for our freedom. It's like, who would you choose to be your slavemaster, the guy with the whip or the guy with the bludgeon?
In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "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."
In this, Vice President Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
Do the Republicans know they are American fascists, or are they willfully ignorant, on a slippery slope, unaware of the dangers of their trajectory?
Either way, it is most important to stop this trajectory in its tracks, before they take us all down the crevasse of an ignoble historical disaster that will destroy the American democratic experiment, and have our children's children explaining the failure of our will to defend our freedom against the enemies of our Constitution and principles for generations to come.
BushCo is the marriage of Government & Corporatism. Fascism. Black & White, pure & simple. They are chipping away, one brick at a time.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
I think Americans are tired of the scare scams and will throw the bums out this November.
I hope my faith in the wisdom of my country's people is well placed.
America, land of the free, home of the brave. The fear card is played out, IMHO.
I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
32nd president of US (1882 - 1945)