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Friends-
I'm trying to start a DU Journal called Fascist Papers. So far I've been unable to post directly to the journal itself. Apparently you must post comments to someone else's post and then transfer it to your own journal. I may be entirely wrong on this, but so far this is the best I've been able to figure out; let's face it - DU is a complicated site.
I intended to post the following as my 1st entry, so , with your permission, since you have opened questions about Bush and fascism, I'll post it here.
I've edited it down a bit, because it's pretty substantial, so I'll present it in 2 seperate entries. I hope this is what you're looking for.
I've been archiving Bush-Fascism material - let's call it Neocon or Corpo-fascist material for the last 3 years. I hope to present the best of it as soon as I can figure out an effective presentation.
________
Is this how fascism is coming to America?
It started when the government, in the midst of a
worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an
imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had
launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but
the media largely ignored his relatively small
efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that
the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians
are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the
intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most
recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the
highest levels,in part because the government was
distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's
leader had not been elected by a majority vote and
the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to
the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said,
a cartoon character of a man who saw things in
black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to
understand the subtleties of running a nation in a
complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of
language -reflecting his political roots in a
southernmost state - and his simplistic and often
inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the
aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated
elite in the government and media. And, as a young
man, he'd joined a secret society with an
occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals
that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike
(although he didn't know where or when), and he had
already considered his response. When an aide brought
him word that the nation's most prestigious building
was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who
had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a
press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch
in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the
burned-out building, surrounded by national media.
"This fire," he said, his voice trembling with
emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a
sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out
war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a
people, he said, who traced their origins to the
Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds
in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for
terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first
suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a
national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag
was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers
suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the
nation's now-popular leader had pushed through
legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and
fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that
suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech,
privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept
mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be
imprisoned without specific charges and without access
to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's
homes without warrants if the cases involved
terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of
People and State" passed over the objections of
concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he
agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if
the national emergency provoked by the terrorist
attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would
be returned to the people, and the police agencies
would be re-restrained. Legislators would later
say they hadn't had time to read the bill before
voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act,
his federal police agencies stepped up their program
of arresting suspicious persons and holding them
without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year
only a few hundred were interred, and those who
objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press,
which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a
leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who
protested the leader in public - and there were many -
quickly found themselves confronting the newly
empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or
fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of
the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was
taking almost daily lessons in public speaking,
learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial
expressions. He became a very competent orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack,
at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a
formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to
stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so,
instead of referring to the nation by its name, he
began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase
publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech
recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie
"Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's
hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an
us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the"
homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply
foreign lands. We are the "true people," he
suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's
concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are
violated in other nations and it makes our lives
better, it's of little concern to us.
Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a
disagreement with the French over his increasing
militarism, he argued that any international body that
didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of
his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He
thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in
October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval
armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United
Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to
ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man
and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity.
He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the
Christian faith across his nation, what he called
a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing
army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" -
God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed
it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's
leader determined that the various local police and
federal agencies around the nation were lacking the
clear communication and overall coordinated
administration necessary to deal with the terrorist
threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens
who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably
terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various
troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He
proposed a single new national agency to protect the
security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of
dozens of previously independent police, border, and
investigative agencies under a single leader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be
leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office
for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government
equal to the other major departments.
His assistant who dealt with the press noted that,
since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at
our disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of
their nation's leader, or raising questions about his
checkered past, had by now faded from the public's
recollection as his central security office began
advertising a program encouraging people to phone in
tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so
successful that the names of some of the people
"denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio
stations. Those denounced often included opposition
politicians and celebrities who dared speak out - a
favorite target of his regime and the media he now
controlled through intimidation and ownership by
corporate allies.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government
alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and
forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the
nation's largest corporations into high
government positions. A flood of government money
poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against
the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within
the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He
encouraged large corporations friendly to him to
acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns
across the nation, particularly those previously owned
by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He
built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate
ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to
build the first large-scale detention center for enemies
of the state. Soon more would follow.
Industry flourished.
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist
attack, voices of dissent again arose within and
without the government. Students had started an active
program opposing him (later known as the White
Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were
speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed
a diversion, something to direct people away from the
corporate cronyism being exposed in his own
government, questions of his possibly illegitimate
rise to power, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil
libertarians about the people being held in detention
without due process or access to attorneys or family.
With his number two man - a master at manipulating the
media - he began a campaign to convince the people of
the nation that a small, limited war was necessary.
Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious
Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection
with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most
important building was tenuous at best, it held
resources their nation badly needed if they were to
have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He
called a press conference and publicly delivered an
ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking
an international uproar. He claimed the right to
strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations
across Europe - at first - denounced him for it,
pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in
the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like
Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.
_________
This is the 1st half of a piece that Thom Hartmann wrote
comparing Hitler's ascension to power with George Bush's.
Right on the money, isn't it? The full title of the
piece that Thom originally wrote back in August/2003
was : When Democracy Failed.
The concluding portion will be in my next entry
which should follow this one.
Fascist Papers
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