In 1944 at the height of the war on the Axis powers, George Orwell sought to define the word “Fascism” and had a hard time doing it. We need to be careful whom we call Fascist he said, or pretty soon the word would be debased so as to lose any meaning from its application to anyone people on the Left don’t like. And so it’s been for the last 70 odd years, with of course the reciprocal “Red” or “Commie” (pick your accompanying adjective) from diehard conservatives and traditionalists.
In America today there’s long been a debate on the Left whether the US is already a Fascist state, a crypto-Fascist one, or merely at the proto-Fascist stage? Meantime the religious and Republican Right in the US have somehow managed over the past 30 years to turn the word Liberal into a dirty word and convince many Americans that there is a plot against the Republic, that internal and external threats endanger the very existence of the Nation. Until recently Americans of goodwill, Republican or Democrat could dismiss all this as the ravings of the Loony Left or the paranoia of the Rabid Right. Now I’m not so sure.
Of course the Loony Left is always with us and it doesn’t seem to have much more traction now that it ever did. What is new, is how right wing America has progressively become combined with the spread and politicisation of evangelical Christianity. The worrying aspect of this is how a small number of very rich robber barons and the corporate elite have co-opted, fostered and funded these forces over the past three decades to their own advantage. If not Fascist, America is in real danger of becoming a Corporate State and that shows many of the signs of proto-Fascism.
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The first stage of Fascism”, according to Benito Mussolini, “should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power”.
And he should know. Perhaps we should also ask Silvio Berlusconi about that.
When we see how the current ruling clique in the US have run things over the past four years and how much they have achieved to benefit themselves and perpetuate themselves in power in such a short time, you don’t have to be humming Loony Toons to start wondering.....
Let’s have some fun and take a quick look at some of what have been described as Fascist states over the past 50 years and see what they have in common. Then let’s do a little test to see how the US stacks up. There’s Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the Greece of the colonel’s, Pinochet’s Chile, Suharto’s Indonesia, sundry Latin American states and Middle Eastern Ba’ath states. We’ll omit the totalitarian states of the Left, the USSR and Red China, though they too fit the definition in many ways. Below I list 14 characteristics I see as common to Fascism:
- powerful expressions of nationalism
- disdain for the importance of human rights
- identification of external or internal enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause (i.e. jews, arabs, Islam, communism, terrorism, blacks, hispanics, whatever....)
- militarism
- control of mass media
- obsession with national security
- religion and ruling elite closely identified
- power & interests of corporations & the ruling elite protected
- power of labour controlled, suppressed or eliminated
- disdain for, control & suppression of intellectuals and the arts
- obsession with crime & punishment
- rampant cronyism & corruption
- fraudulent elections & gerrymandering
- control & rigging of the judiciary
Now ask yourself the following two questions on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the least. As a guide, consider the UK as ranking an overall average of 4 and Nazi Germany as a 10.
a) How do you rank the US today?
b) How do you rank the US in 1999?
Returning to what George Orwell said on the subject back in 1944 he maintained that while it was almost impossible to define a Fascist state, most people had a pretty good general idea of what they understood by the phrase. Cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, anti-liberal, and anti-working class, they said. The word ”bully” was what came to mind a lot. Now ask yourself if George W. Bush’s administration resonates with any of these words and to what degree?
While this administration in particular and the US in general may exhibit signs of proto-Fascism most people I think would feel it to be overstating the case to call the US a Fascist state. Now a Corporatist state would certainly be closer to the mark. Or what about a Fascist Democracy?
The closest analogy I can think of is an Athenian oligopoly, writ large. In the US there is a small ruling elite who own most of the wealth and run things their way. They and their nominees control the political system, and are the major shareholders of corporate America. They own most of the influential media and increasingly control debate on social, political and even cultural issues. The chattering classes have long ago been bought off and co-opted by them.
This elite is sustained not by slaves, as was Athens, but by an underclass of wage slaves. America is a tough place to live if you are not comfortably middle class, if not actually wealthy with property and a diversified equity portfolio. The middle class is shrinking. Jobs are being lost, house values are paper not real wealth and medical insurance is becoming prohibitive. Jobs are scarce and millions of Americans are happy to settle for minimum hourly wages, while millions more can’t get a job at all. Americans have to work long and hard. Two weeks holiday is the norm, compared to a month in Europe. There are few employee benefits and what there are, are being cut back. They are watched and regulated to a massive degree. Ordinary Americans complain about outsourcing overseas and about immigration. Despite political window-dressing neither issue is addressed, in fact more immigrants enter the country and more corporations place their plants overseas. It has to be this way if the elite are to maintain their perquisites.
What is curious is how this ruling elite is able to pull the wool over the eyes of so many people. In particular the poor and the lower middle income families. How is it that a majority of Americans support a party that doesn’t serve their interests?
And that is where religion and “values” come in, in what are now being referred to as the “Culture Wars”. There is now in America a whole underclass of indentured laborers. They work long and hard for just enough to feed and house themselves, with the wherewithal to transport themselves to work. Via credit card debt they have can buy the necessary consumer durables needed to function in US society and that’s about it. They struggle hard to educate their children and to keep themselves healthy. Mostly they fail. A few will make it to the precarious heights of the lower middle class.
Wouldn’t you think such people would vote in people who would allow them to earn a decent wage and even prosper and not an elite who taxes them disproportionately on the little they do have? Apparently not. When it comes to electing leaders in America it’s more about whether they believe in God, abortion or guns and who is the most “patriotic”. Well, as Dr Samuel Johnson sagely observed on that subject, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” and more recently Huey Long noted, “When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the American flag”.
So now it’s all about, who shares my values? Who will keep us safe? Very little time or energy is spent on the issues. Just asserting you will reduce taxes, balance the deficit, expand Medicare, create more jobs, fly to Mars, defeat terrorism, capture Osama bin Laden and “leave no child behind” is good enough. You don’t have to follow through on any of it. Americans no longer have the attention span or even know how to tell if you’ve done as promised or not.
All this is just a roundabout way to say that after being here 3 months with barely six weeks to go before the election I’m getting a horrible feeling that Bali Bubba may be right and I’m in danger of losing my Rp.20,000 bet. It seems incredible that Kerry has been unable to skewer the wretched Bush and his masters for their failure to serve the nation on almost any issue
you care to name. What in God’s name is wrong with the man?
If the rest of us are condemned to another four years of America led by Bush and his clique then the world had better go about its business and let the US go hang. To reverse Madeleine Albright, “America is now the dispensable nation”. What a difference four years make!
