Storm Clouds from the Right

I wanted to write about American exceptionalism and the recent embrace of empire by our political elites but the news I posted below about the threats from the extreme right require a review of fascism.

The Council for Secular Humanism in their magazine Free Inquiry has an article by Laurence Britt entitled "Fascism Anyone?". I've always found secular humanists to be boring and tedious and somewhat dry and studiously irrelevant to present times. But they do represent a strain in our own democratic thought processes. Laurence Britt warns us all that fascism's principles are wafting in the air today,"surreptiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for." Britt warns his reader that few people remember the characteristics of a fascist regime and that the consciousness that led to Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany have created later protofascist regimes and could again.

Britt analyzes Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopouloa's Greece, Pincohet's Chile and Suharto's Indonesia. He argues that these seven regimes reveal fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, demands for unity coupled with suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. Regimes viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. The population through propaganda was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing , even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/ scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread with all these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert people's attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The regimes would incite "spontaneous" acts aggainst the target scapegoats.

4. The supremacy of the military and avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, when domestic needs were acute.

5. Rampant sexism. These regimes viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and homophobic. They codified their attitudes in draconian laws that enjoyed the support of the orthodox religion of the country.

6. A controlled mass media. Sometimes under direct government control. But there were more subtle pressures out on the media, which included control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism and implied threats. Strangely the predecessor for the official Nazi media was called Fox News, an extreme right-wing media organization.

7. Obsession with national security. The national security apparatus was under the control of the ruling elite, operating in secret and without constraints. Questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic and even treasonous.

8. Religion and the ruling elite tied together. Most of these regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion and chose to portray themselves as the militant defenders of that religion. A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. While personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the coporate structure as a way to ensure military production but also as a means of social control.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Organized labor was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclasss that was disdained. Being poor was considered a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.

14. Fraudulent elections. When elections were held, they were usually perverted by the power elite to get the desired results. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery,intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destorying or disallowing legal votes, and turning to the judiciary beholden to the pwoer elite.

If you spot any of these trends in the United States, please alert your neighbor and under no circumstances report this to authorities. Some one should probably call Bernie Saunders. Laurence Britt does us a service by reminding us what these regimes were really like and what constitutes their basic characteristics. In the past we were protected from these tendencies because repugnant political ideas were not expressed because people knew enough to filter their thoughts. The current outbreak of extreme right-wing rhetoric has led to the mainstreaming of these thoughts and practices.

See Christopher Hitchens' attack on the teabaggers and those that accept them in the Republican Party in this issue of Vanity Fair.