Fascists?

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Are Progressives and Liberals Fascists? Or Are Conservatives And Republicans The Real Fascists?
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/07/01/are-progressives-and-liberals-fascists-or-are-conservatives-and-republicans-the-real-fascists/

Our country is at war. To anyone who has read a headline or watched a news promo, it should come as no surprise. No, I’m not speaking of the war on terror or the war in Iraq or Libya or any other foreign country. This war is taking place right on our own soil. I’m not talking about the war on drugs. I’m not even talking about the fact that the war on poverty has turned into a war on the poor. We are in a war of words…a war of soundbites, and we are losing.

Conservatives in general and tea partiers in specific love to throw words at us. One day we are socialists or communists, the next we are fascists. Sometimes, we are all three at the same time. Though poorly articulated, their arguments defend a vague idea of freedom against a principle of totalitarianism.

This is where the ideas generally end. To the American extreme right (which is most of the current Republican party), freedom seems to mean the freedom to hire their own cops and firefighters. Freedom to the left means an agreement that there is a public good, that if our neighbor’s house catches on fire, a fire department will make sure that ours isn’t ignited by a spark, that if there’s an epidemic, everyone can afford to go to the doctor so it doesn’t spread further. Freedom means the ability to achieve greatness because there is a safety net that makes a fall slightly less painful.

Like many progressives, it doesn’t bother me when I am called ‘socialist.’ In fact, I wear the badge with honor. A socialist is against oppression. A socialist is for rule by the people, not by a dictator or by for profit corporations. A socialist believes in democracy in its purest form. As with any system, when the people put the wrong government in place, totalitarianism can be the result, but totalitarianism is no more inherent in socialism than in democracy.

If the right really wants to call us totalitarian, they are on the right track with the word ‘fascism,’ or are they? Are they really just projecting?

In 2004, Dr. Laurence Britt, a political scientist, studied the fascist regimes of: Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile). He compiled a list called “The 14 Points of Fascism.” Next time Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh trots out the word ‘fascism’ in reference to President Obama or the progressive movement, perhaps they should consult the following:

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism

    From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

    This one speaks for itself. As an American, there is no greater sin than to criticize the symbols of America.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights

    The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population 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.

    Denial of basic human rights is typically hidden in code. These code phrases can be, “playing the race card”, “asking for special rights”, “playing the victim”, “states rights” and “property rights.” While these phrases might sound innocuous, they are all protecting privilege, not rights.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause

    The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

    Muslims, gays, women, the poor, Mexicans, etc.

4. The supremacy of the military/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, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

    Despite a frenzy to cut the budget, almost no one, especially on the right, dares touch the sanctity of the military.

5. Rampant sexism

    Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

    Sexism is becoming slightly less prevalent, but it is still rampant. The growing anti-choice movement is anti-woman. The traditional white male is still trying to hold on to his last vestiges of power. Rush Limbaugh is the perfect example.

6. A controlled mass media

    Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

    Despite the accusation of the left-wing media, the vast majority of news outlets are owned by right leaning, large, for profit corporations. Companies like Comcast are being handed the ability to control what is seen in a viewer’s home as well as what is seen on the internet.

7. Obsession with national security

    Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

    Patriot Act, anyone?

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together

    Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

    Is there one conservative in power who doesn’t call him or herself a Christian conservative?

9. Power of corporations protected

    Although the 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 corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

    This is the Republican platform in a nutshell.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated

    Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

    Need I say more?

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts

    Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment

    Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption

    Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

    Cronyism can mean anything from no-bid contracts for companies like Blackwater and Halliburton to the hiring of unqualified people to head up important agencies such as the CIA and FEMA, as was done during the Bush administration.

14. Fraudulent elections

    Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

    Elections are not stolen through isolated incidents of voter fraud. They are stolen through voter suppression tactics, such as ID laws.

    Unfortunately, a fascist future is not unforeseeable. But these ideals are not progressive ideals. They are the ideals of the corporatists. They are the ideals of the Supreme Court who declares personhood for corporations and in turn, fraction of personhood for those who are not blessed with billions. They are the ideals of those who would bless the highest bidder with the power to control our most basic needs. These are the ideals of those who would require a religious purity test to serve office. They are the ideals of those who would blame those less fortunate for their own hardships. They are the ideals of those who respect power over humanity. They are the ideals of rigid ideologues. While some Democrats admittedly adhere to some these ideals, they are the ideals of today’s Republican party.

Article from; http://progressive-liberal-gluten-free-vegetarian.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/FASCISM_NOT_US.jpg

[vel]

Today’s Conservatives
Are Fascists

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2005/01/03/todays-conservatives-are-fascists/

The idea that today’s conservatives are in any way defenders of individual liberty, the free market, and what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” i.e., the sacred traditions that have accumulated over time to constitute the core of our Judeo-Christian culture, is no longer a defensible proposition. Instead, what used to be called the conservative movement has morphed, almost overnight, into a coterie of moral monsters, whose political program is one of unmitigated evil.

My good friend Lew Rockwell has recently come to this conclusion:

“Year’s end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing. … What this implies for libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear separation between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It also requires that we face the reality of the current threat forthrightly by extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward and less rightward.”

Various libertarian scholars and writers – see here, here, and here – seem to be drawing the same broad conclusions. I might add, for the record, that I reached a similar conclusion a couple of years ago, except that, far from abandoning my efforts to reach out to authentic (i.e., old-style) right-wingers, this merely accelerated my efforts to split off the authentic Remnant from the neoconized conservative movement.

In any case, by this time the evidence for the malevolent transformation of the American Right is all around us – in the ravings of Fox News “commentators,” in the sheer existence of Ann Coulter, in the usurpation of a formerly respectable political tendency by the greasy evasions of the “neo”-conservatives. This change is most starkly dramatized in three disturbing trends: (1) Widespread support on the Right for internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, touting Michelle Malkin’s shoddy-to-nonexistent scholarship, with the implication that we should be contemplating the same treatment for Americans of Arab descent, (2) the justification of torture when utilized by the American military in the name of the “war on terrorism” by “conservative” legal theorists, and (3) advocacy of a ruthlessly aggressive foreign policy of military expansionism, supposedly in order to spread “democracy” around the world.

Rather than point to instances in which these three stances are taken by separate individuals who might be described as conservatives, and discussing each in turn – a method that would be called for in writing a book on the subject – it is instructive, if not conclusive, to take one very extreme example and show how it is becoming much more than a fringe element on an otherwise sane and well-adjusted Right. And what better example of fringe nuttiness made “respectable” and even mainstream by the neoconservative ascendancy exists than self-described “Trotsky-con” Stephen Schwartz?

The author of The Two Faces of Islam, formerly known as “Comrade Sandalio” to his Trotskyist compadres, who converted from New Age-y secularism to Sufi cultism and now calls himself a “Muslim,” is hardly representative of American conservatism in the present – but the point is that he may very well represent the future of the American Right, if present trends continue.

Take, for example, the Schwartzian position on the internment controversy: writing in the Weekly Standard, Schwartz does Michelle Malkin one better by citing the internment, arrest, and evacuation of Germans and Italian-Americans during World War II as “the right way to lock up aliens.” Schwartz cites the activities of the serio-comic German-American Bund, and goes on to write:

“The Italian stalwarts of Mussolini in this country had a longer and even more vicious history. They mounted a strident public defense of the dictator from the beginning of his regime, terrorizing antifascists in the Italian-American community and even murdering enemies on American soil. The dictator’s line was purveyed to Italian Americans through newspapers like the infamous Il Progresso Italo-Americano, a daily printed in New York by Generoso Pope, who would go on to publish the National Enquirer. The propaganda worked, as it often does: In 1935, when Mussolini’s armies invaded Ethiopia, committing widespread atrocities, 10,000 Italian-American housewives in California donated their wedding rings to the Italian war effort, and San Francisco garbage collectors of Sicilian origin amassed scrap iron for the same cause.”

All by way of justifying the massive round-up: but the historical reality is quite different from Schwartz’s imaginative fulminations, which bear a close resemblance to the editorial banshee screams of the Daily Worker at the time. If Il Progresso had a few good words to say about Mussolini, at least in the beginning, then so did Herbert Croly writing in The New Republic, George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill. (By the way, Schwartz, with his usual disdain for facts, is wrong about Generoso Pope founding the National Enquirer: that was his son, Generoso Pope, Jr. But, hey, details, details….)

Aside from the praises of Il Duce from prominent liberals of the time, however, Schwartz is here just regurgitating the old Communist Party-Popular Front wartime calumnies against a nonexistent Italian “fifth column,” and recycling them for his own sinister purposes. Most of the Italian internees were San Francisco members of the Ex-Combattenti (Federation of Italian War Veterans in America), who were veterans of World War I – a war, one hastens to remind Schwartz, in which Italy and the U.S. were allies. That didn’t stop the FBI from putting the Italian vets on the list of “dangerous” organizations for the “crime” of collecting funds to help out war widows and orphans in Italy. The government’s decision to begin clandestine surveillance was based on a determination that the Italian war veterans had violated the rarely enforced Neutrality Act – although, oddly, “Bundles for Britain” hardly provoked the same sort of response.

As Sarah Goodyear points out in a piece in the Village Voice on the persecution of her grandfather, Metropolitian Opera basso Ezio Pinza, the “evidence” the FBI used to arrest and detain Americans of Italian descent was dubious in the extreme:

“Informants, whom my grandmother believes to have been jealous fellow singers eager to see his career derailed, stepped up once again. They told tales of his enthusiasm for the Italian war in Ethiopia, his support for the Italian Red Cross, his participation in the collection of gold rings for the Italian war effort in the ’30s. According to the FBI files, several who spoke against him were women with whom he had been involved years earlier, when he had quite a reputation as a ladies’ man. His case was reopened. Unbeknownst to him and my grandmother, the FBI was making plans for his arrest several weeks before they ever walked through the door into my family’s home.”

What Schwartz considers “the right way to lock up aliens” is exemplified by this cache of documents compiled by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the time: a slimier bit of police-state snitching could hardly be imagined.

But snitching is what Schwartz specializes in: as a “former” Commie (of the Trotskyist variety), he has made it his business to “expose” the methods of his former comrades. As a militant member of the Sufi “Naqshbandi” cult, he has carved out a niche for himself as a schismatic critic of mainstream Muslim beliefs. And as the most visible and vocal champion and defender of the atrocious regime of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Schwartz holds up a system based on an extensive secret police network of spies as a model for the “war on terrorism.”

Could a more unappetizing – and telling – combination of ideological poisons be imagined, except by some Dostoevskyian psychological study of political psychoses?

Lest there be any doubt as to the political uses to which Schwartz wants to use the historical example of the persecution of Italian-Americans, here he is putting it into the most explicit terms:

“Interning such individuals is safer, more effective, and saves more lives than waiting for them to commit their crimes. The argument for waiting until they commit the crimes on the argument that ‘we have laws to deal with people who commit such acts’ may make some people happy, but it doesn’t do much for the victims. Preventing them from committing the acts in question seems more than fair, just, and noble.”

Interning people because of their political beliefs – real, or imagined – on the basis of a system of snitches, i.e., Stephen Schwartzes, put into place nationwide: that isn’t just rough justice, it’s “noble”!

Yeah, in Bizarro World, that is.

The Right hailed Michelle Malkin’s widely discredited cut-and-paste “history” of the Japanese internment, and the evil Daniel Pipes has drawn a lesson from the Malkin screed and applied it to our own Muslim “problem.” Schwartz is not alone in his ideologically-driven insanity: the totalitarian sickness is gnawing away at the very vitals of the American conservative movement. This cancer germinated as a result of the Right’s lockstep support for the worldwide “war on terrorism,” which they take to mean not just the ongoing conflict in Iraq, but a perpetual war for perpetual “peace.”

The real kicker is that Schwartz, the former “Comrade Sandalio” and self-professed “Trotsky-con” is becoming quite well-known as a professional apologist for one of the ugliest, most grotesquely repressive regimes on God’s green earth: the government of U.S. ally Islam Karimov, “president” and absolute ruler of Uzbekistan.

In the Karimov regime, what we are talking about is a government that boils its political opponents alive. What else do we need to know about Karimov’s “anti-terrorist” utopia, except it is where Schwartz’s brand of Muslim “Sufi” mysticism receives state support as a supposed antidote to Islamist radicalism? Writing in a piece posted on Tech Central Station – a site that apparently serves as a public relations agency and lobbying front for big drug companies and other corporate sponsors – Schwartz hails the recent Uzbek “elections” as models of “democracy,” neocon-style:

“Two and a half millennia have passed since the Greek armies of Alexander the Great penetrated Central Asia, and the wave of democratic reforms visible in the post-Soviet and Muslim countries is now reaching Uzbekistan. On December 26, the same day Ukraine held the second round of its highly-contested vote, citizens of this Muslim-majority former Soviet republic went to the polls to elect a bicameral parliament.”

The results of an election in which all “opposition” parties were founded and vetted by the government, freedom of speech and assembly are severely restricted, and that was little more than a Potemkin Village erected to satisfy the “democratic” pretensions of dictator Karimov’s American sponsors, were, for some reason, deemed “controversial” by European watchdogs. But never mind them, avers Schwartz, because “ordinary Uzbeks lined up enthusiastically to cast their votes on a multipage paper ballot” – perhaps because, in a totalitarian society, not lining up and showing the proper enthusiasm could wind one up at the bottom of a boiling kettle.

Oh, but these are mere details, according to our nut-job Naqshbandi, who writes:

“One might compare Uzbekistan favorably with Russia, a former superpower – but also with Saudi Arabia, which has ambitions to supreme leadership of the Muslim world. While Russia moves further away from democracy, Uzbekistan has taken steps that, however flawed, represent forward movement. In Uzbekistan, at least, voting takes place, with women included on the voters’ registers, and 30 percent of the candidates are female. By contrast, Saudi Arabia has promised limited municipal elections for February 10, but women will be barred from participation. Meanwhile, Saudi clerics, as preachers of Wahhabism, the state religion in the kingdom, continue to incite jihadists to wreak terror in Iraq, in what we must hope is a futile attempt to disrupt that country’s new electoral process.”

But why not compare Uzbekistan’s elections to those held much closer, geographically and culturally, namely those held in Iran – which, notwithstanding the repressive hardline faction of Tehran’s mullahs, are much freer than any election ever held by Karimov? Or what about Turkey, which permits a diverse range of political parties to openly compete for power – and even allows for a real change in government now and then, albeit under the watchful eyes of the Turkish generals? Compared to Uzbekistan, Turkey is a paragon of democratic liberalism.

According to Schwartz, Russian President Vladimir Putin is “liquidating the democratic process” – although he doesn’t get too specific as to how. It is relatively easy to register a political party in Putin’s Russia, and actually get on the ballot, in spite of a recent tightening of the rules – unlike in Karimov’s Uzbekistan, where membership in a proscribed political movement is bound to get you thrown into jail and horribly tortured.

Widespread torture, fixed elections in the Stalinist tradition, and professed admiration for Uzbekistan’s police state, which routinely engages in “preventive detention” of political “criminals” – this is the Schwartzian brand of “conservatism” that has infected the American Right like a plague and called forth all sorts of demons – Daniel Pipes, Michelle Malkin, Richard Perle, and David Frum (writing in An End to Evil, the neocon manifesto) – to rally ’round its banner.

It is the banner of a thoroughly degenerated and corrupt “conservatism” that is, in effect, fascism – a blueprint for totalitarianism erected in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Schwartz may be an extreme example of this horrific phenomenon – horrific, that is, to old-style conservatives and libertarians such as myself, who once saw themselves as on the “Right” – but he is far from alone. The “Trotsky-cons” – otherwise known as the neoconservatives – may have started out on the Left, but they have come full circle in their final incarnation, embracing the very worst (i.e., anti-libertarian) aspects of both the Left and the Right. In their celebration of war, the pagan ethos, and the joys of “Big Government conservatism,” Schwartz and his fellow neocons are the very antithesis of what the American Right used to stand for: Professor Claes Ryn has rightly nailed them as “neo-Jacobins,” and the danger from them is far worse than any threat once posed by their fascist intellectual ancestors.

Mussolini never got his thick mitts on nuclear weapons, and for that we ought to be grateful: but today’s neocons do have access to nukes, via their sock puppet in the White House, and thus represent an imminent threat. They are not only waging an immoral and destructive war in Iraq – a war destructive of U.S. interests as well as Iraqi lives – but they are moving on new fronts, from Syria to Russia and the Caucasus, to start new conflicts. This is the main justification and motivating factor behind their political agenda: tyranny on the home front and blood-lust abroad.

Like peanut butter and jelly and Abbott and Costello, war and repression go hand-in-hand: it’s hard to have one without the other. Schwartz and his fellow neocons fully realize this, of course, which is why they’re pushing for both simultaneously. So let’s start calling these people what they are: fascists, pure and simple.

Casting aside all that Frankfurt School Marxist nonsense about fascism as the “enraged bourgeoisie,” and rejecting the terminological prissiness of those who insist on fascism as a very specific mode of economic organization, I would build on the definition of Communism proffered by the late Susan Sontag, who famously called the Soviet system “fascism with a human face.”

Surely “fascism with a ‘democratic’ face” sums up the Bushian “global democratic revolution” just as accurately and succinctly, although admittedly this fails to capture the full horror of what the “liberation” of Iraq actually entails. Perhaps “fascism with a democratic face – and bloodstained hands” is more precise.

[dustup]

.........Mind numbing liberal hate speech........Left Right Paradigm firmly implanted.......

.....Rush and Beck represent the neocons....talking heads to further set in concrete the "Left Right Paradigm" .....Left Hate Right......Right Hate Left......Vis-a-vis.......Randi Rhodes and Ed Schultz.....they serve one purpose......to keep the Left and Right plebes in turmoil and eating from their respective political troughs..........you sheeple are so easy to herd.......

"The term progressivism emerged in reference to a more general response to the vast changes brought by industrialization: an alternative to the traditional conservative response to social and economic issues and, despite being associated with left-wing politics, to the various more radical streams of communism or anarchism.

[vel]

.........Mind numbing liberal hate speech........Left Right Paradigm firmly implanted.......

.....Rush and Beck represent the neocons....talking heads to further set in concrete the "Left Right Paradigm" .....Left Hate Right......Right Hate Left......Vis-a-vis.......Randi Rhodes and Ed Schultz.....they serve one purpose......to keep the Left and Right plebes in turmoil and eating from their respective political troughs..........you sheeple are so easy to herd.......

"The term progressivism emerged in reference to a more general response to the vast changes brought by industrialization: an alternative to the traditional conservative response to social and economic issues and, despite being associated with left-wing politics, to the various more radical streams of communism or anarchism.

You...don't...think...you're...a...fascist...?

Why....not....?

[Case_Closed]

Today’s Conservatives
Are Fascists

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2005/01/03/todays-conservatives-are-fascists/

The idea that today’s conservatives are in any way defenders of individual liberty, the free market, and what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” i.e., the sacred traditions that have accumulated over time to constitute the core of our Judeo-Christian culture, is no longer a defensible proposition. Instead, what used to be called the conservative movement has morphed, almost overnight, into a coterie of moral monsters, whose political program is one of unmitigated evil.

My good friend Lew Rockwell has recently come to this conclusion:

“Year’s end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing. … What this implies for libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear separation between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It also requires that we face the reality of the current threat forthrightly by extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward and less rightward.”

Various libertarian scholars and writers – see here, here, and here – seem to be drawing the same broad conclusions. I might add, for the record, that I reached a similar conclusion a couple of years ago, except that, far from abandoning my efforts to reach out to authentic (i.e., old-style) right-wingers, this merely accelerated my efforts to split off the authentic Remnant from the neoconized conservative movement.

In any case, by this time the evidence for the malevolent transformation of the American Right is all around us – in the ravings of Fox News “commentators,” in the sheer existence of Ann Coulter, in the usurpation of a formerly respectable political tendency by the greasy evasions of the “neo”-conservatives. This change is most starkly dramatized in three disturbing trends: (1) Widespread support on the Right for internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, touting Michelle Malkin’s shoddy-to-nonexistent scholarship, with the implication that we should be contemplating the same treatment for Americans of Arab descent, (2) the justification of torture when utilized by the American military in the name of the “war on terrorism” by “conservative” legal theorists, and (3) advocacy of a ruthlessly aggressive foreign policy of military expansionism, supposedly in order to spread “democracy” around the world.

Rather than point to instances in which these three stances are taken by separate individuals who might be described as conservatives, and discussing each in turn – a method that would be called for in writing a book on the subject – it is instructive, if not conclusive, to take one very extreme example and show how it is becoming much more than a fringe element on an otherwise sane and well-adjusted Right. And what better example of fringe nuttiness made “respectable” and even mainstream by the neoconservative ascendancy exists than self-described “Trotsky-con” Stephen Schwartz?

The author of The Two Faces of Islam, formerly known as “Comrade Sandalio” to his Trotskyist compadres, who converted from New Age-y secularism to Sufi cultism and now calls himself a “Muslim,” is hardly representative of American conservatism in the present – but the point is that he may very well represent the future of the American Right, if present trends continue.

Take, for example, the Schwartzian position on the internment controversy: writing in the Weekly Standard, Schwartz does Michelle Malkin one better by citing the internment, arrest, and evacuation of Germans and Italian-Americans during World War II as “the right way to lock up aliens.” Schwartz cites the activities of the serio-comic German-American Bund, and goes on to write:

“The Italian stalwarts of Mussolini in this country had a longer and even more vicious history. They mounted a strident public defense of the dictator from the beginning of his regime, terrorizing antifascists in the Italian-American community and even murdering enemies on American soil. The dictator’s line was purveyed to Italian Americans through newspapers like the infamous Il Progresso Italo-Americano, a daily printed in New York by Generoso Pope, who would go on to publish the National Enquirer. The propaganda worked, as it often does: In 1935, when Mussolini’s armies invaded Ethiopia, committing widespread atrocities, 10,000 Italian-American housewives in California donated their wedding rings to the Italian war effort, and San Francisco garbage collectors of Sicilian origin amassed scrap iron for the same cause.”

All by way of justifying the massive round-up: but the historical reality is quite different from Schwartz’s imaginative fulminations, which bear a close resemblance to the editorial banshee screams of the Daily Worker at the time. If Il Progresso had a few good words to say about Mussolini, at least in the beginning, then so did Herbert Croly writing in The New Republic, George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill. (By the way, Schwartz, with his usual disdain for facts, is wrong about Generoso Pope founding the National Enquirer: that was his son, Generoso Pope, Jr. But, hey, details, details….)

Aside from the praises of Il Duce from prominent liberals of the time, however, Schwartz is here just regurgitating the old Communist Party-Popular Front wartime calumnies against a nonexistent Italian “fifth column,” and recycling them for his own sinister purposes. Most of the Italian internees were San Francisco members of the Ex-Combattenti (Federation of Italian War Veterans in America), who were veterans of World War I – a war, one hastens to remind Schwartz, in which Italy and the U.S. were allies. That didn’t stop the FBI from putting the Italian vets on the list of “dangerous” organizations for the “crime” of collecting funds to help out war widows and orphans in Italy. The government’s decision to begin clandestine surveillance was based on a determination that the Italian war veterans had violated the rarely enforced Neutrality Act – although, oddly, “Bundles for Britain” hardly provoked the same sort of response.

As Sarah Goodyear points out in a piece in the Village Voice on the persecution of her grandfather, Metropolitian Opera basso Ezio Pinza, the “evidence” the FBI used to arrest and detain Americans of Italian descent was dubious in the extreme:

“Informants, whom my grandmother believes to have been jealous fellow singers eager to see his career derailed, stepped up once again. They told tales of his enthusiasm for the Italian war in Ethiopia, his support for the Italian Red Cross, his participation in the collection of gold rings for the Italian war effort in the ’30s. According to the FBI files, several who spoke against him were women with whom he had been involved years earlier, when he had quite a reputation as a ladies’ man. His case was reopened. Unbeknownst to him and my grandmother, the FBI was making plans for his arrest several weeks before they ever walked through the door into my family’s home.”

What Schwartz considers “the right way to lock up aliens” is exemplified by this cache of documents compiled by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the time: a slimier bit of police-state snitching could hardly be imagined.

But snitching is what Schwartz specializes in: as a “former” Commie (of the Trotskyist variety), he has made it his business to “expose” the methods of his former comrades. As a militant member of the Sufi “Naqshbandi” cult, he has carved out a niche for himself as a schismatic critic of mainstream Muslim beliefs. And as the most visible and vocal champion and defender of the atrocious regime of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Schwartz holds up a system based on an extensive secret police network of spies as a model for the “war on terrorism.”

Could a more unappetizing – and telling – combination of ideological poisons be imagined, except by some Dostoevskyian psychological study of political psychoses?

Lest there be any doubt as to the political uses to which Schwartz wants to use the historical example of the persecution of Italian-Americans, here he is putting it into the most explicit terms:

“Interning such individuals is safer, more effective, and saves more lives than waiting for them to commit their crimes. The argument for waiting until they commit the crimes on the argument that ‘we have laws to deal with people who commit such acts’ may make some people happy, but it doesn’t do much for the victims. Preventing them from committing the acts in question seems more than fair, just, and noble.”

Interning people because of their political beliefs – real, or imagined – on the basis of a system of snitches, i.e., Stephen Schwartzes, put into place nationwide: that isn’t just rough justice, it’s “noble”!

Yeah, in Bizarro World, that is.

The Right hailed Michelle Malkin’s widely discredited cut-and-paste “history” of the Japanese internment, and the evil Daniel Pipes has drawn a lesson from the Malkin screed and applied it to our own Muslim “problem.” Schwartz is not alone in his ideologically-driven insanity: the totalitarian sickness is gnawing away at the very vitals of the American conservative movement. This cancer germinated as a result of the Right’s lockstep support for the worldwide “war on terrorism,” which they take to mean not just the ongoing conflict in Iraq, but a perpetual war for perpetual “peace.”

The real kicker is that Schwartz, the former “Comrade Sandalio” and self-professed “Trotsky-con” is becoming quite well-known as a professional apologist for one of the ugliest, most grotesquely repressive regimes on God’s green earth: the government of U.S. ally Islam Karimov, “president” and absolute ruler of Uzbekistan.

In the Karimov regime, what we are talking about is a government that boils its political opponents alive. What else do we need to know about Karimov’s “anti-terrorist” utopia, except it is where Schwartz’s brand of Muslim “Sufi” mysticism receives state support as a supposed antidote to Islamist radicalism? Writing in a piece posted on Tech Central Station – a site that apparently serves as a public relations agency and lobbying front for big drug companies and other corporate sponsors – Schwartz hails the recent Uzbek “elections” as models of “democracy,” neocon-style:

“Two and a half millennia have passed since the Greek armies of Alexander the Great penetrated Central Asia, and the wave of democratic reforms visible in the post-Soviet and Muslim countries is now reaching Uzbekistan. On December 26, the same day Ukraine held the second round of its highly-contested vote, citizens of this Muslim-majority former Soviet republic went to the polls to elect a bicameral parliament.”

The results of an election in which all “opposition” parties were founded and vetted by the government, freedom of speech and assembly are severely restricted, and that was little more than a Potemkin Village erected to satisfy the “democratic” pretensions of dictator Karimov’s American sponsors, were, for some reason, deemed “controversial” by European watchdogs. But never mind them, avers Schwartz, because “ordinary Uzbeks lined up enthusiastically to cast their votes on a multipage paper ballot” – perhaps because, in a totalitarian society, not lining up and showing the proper enthusiasm could wind one up at the bottom of a boiling kettle.

Oh, but these are mere details, according to our nut-job Naqshbandi, who writes:

“One might compare Uzbekistan favorably with Russia, a former superpower – but also with Saudi Arabia, which has ambitions to supreme leadership of the Muslim world. While Russia moves further away from democracy, Uzbekistan has taken steps that, however flawed, represent forward movement. In Uzbekistan, at least, voting takes place, with women included on the voters’ registers, and 30 percent of the candidates are female. By contrast, Saudi Arabia has promised limited municipal elections for February 10, but women will be barred from participation. Meanwhile, Saudi clerics, as preachers of Wahhabism, the state religion in the kingdom, continue to incite jihadists to wreak terror in Iraq, in what we must hope is a futile attempt to disrupt that country’s new electoral process.”

But why not compare Uzbekistan’s elections to those held much closer, geographically and culturally, namely those held in Iran – which, notwithstanding the repressive hardline faction of Tehran’s mullahs, are much freer than any election ever held by Karimov? Or what about Turkey, which permits a diverse range of political parties to openly compete for power – and even allows for a real change in government now and then, albeit under the watchful eyes of the Turkish generals? Compared to Uzbekistan, Turkey is a paragon of democratic liberalism.

According to Schwartz, Russian President Vladimir Putin is “liquidating the democratic process” – although he doesn’t get too specific as to how. It is relatively easy to register a political party in Putin’s Russia, and actually get on the ballot, in spite of a recent tightening of the rules – unlike in Karimov’s Uzbekistan, where membership in a proscribed political movement is bound to get you thrown into jail and horribly tortured.

Widespread torture, fixed elections in the Stalinist tradition, and professed admiration for Uzbekistan’s police state, which routinely engages in “preventive detention” of political “criminals” – this is the Schwartzian brand of “conservatism” that has infected the American Right like a plague and called forth all sorts of demons – Daniel Pipes, Michelle Malkin, Richard Perle, and David Frum (writing in An End to Evil, the neocon manifesto) – to rally ’round its banner.

It is the banner of a thoroughly degenerated and corrupt “conservatism” that is, in effect, fascism – a blueprint for totalitarianism erected in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Schwartz may be an extreme example of this horrific phenomenon – horrific, that is, to old-style conservatives and libertarians such as myself, who once saw themselves as on the “Right” – but he is far from alone. The “Trotsky-cons” – otherwise known as the neoconservatives – may have started out on the Left, but they have come full circle in their final incarnation, embracing the very worst (i.e., anti-libertarian) aspects of both the Left and the Right. In their celebration of war, the pagan ethos, and the joys of “Big Government conservatism,” Schwartz and his fellow neocons are the very antithesis of what the American Right used to stand for: Professor Claes Ryn has rightly nailed them as “neo-Jacobins,” and the danger from them is far worse than any threat once posed by their fascist intellectual ancestors.

Mussolini never got his thick mitts on nuclear weapons, and for that we ought to be grateful: but today’s neocons do have access to nukes, via their sock puppet in the White House, and thus represent an imminent threat. They are not only waging an immoral and destructive war in Iraq – a war destructive of U.S. interests as well as Iraqi lives – but they are moving on new fronts, from Syria to Russia and the Caucasus, to start new conflicts. This is the main justification and motivating factor behind their political agenda: tyranny on the home front and blood-lust abroad.

Like peanut butter and jelly and Abbott and Costello, war and repression go hand-in-hand: it’s hard to have one without the other. Schwartz and his fellow neocons fully realize this, of course, which is why they’re pushing for both simultaneously. So let’s start calling these people what they are: fascists, pure and simple.

Casting aside all that Frankfurt School Marxist nonsense about fascism as the “enraged bourgeoisie,” and rejecting the terminological prissiness of those who insist on fascism as a very specific mode of economic organization, I would build on the definition of Communism proffered by the late Susan Sontag, who famously called the Soviet system “fascism with a human face.”

Surely “fascism with a ‘democratic’ face” sums up the Bushian “global democratic revolution” just as accurately and succinctly, although admittedly this fails to capture the full horror of what the “liberation” of Iraq actually entails. Perhaps “fascism with a democratic face – and bloodstained hands” is more precise.

tl;dr.

[vel]

tl;dr.

You...don't...think...you're...a...fascist...Huh?

Why....not....?

[Case_Closed]

You...don't...think...you're...a...fascist...Huh?

Why....not....?

I have no idea what this thread is about.  As I stated, tl;dr.

No way I'm gonna read that enormous wall of fucking text and have my eyes start bleeding.

I did copy and paste it, though.  I'll read it later...and soon.

[vel]

I have no idea what this thread is about.  As I stated, tl;dr.

No way I'm gonna read that enormous wall of fucking text and have my eyes start bleeding.

I did copy and paste it, though.  I'll read it later...and soon.

It's about you and yours being fascists.

[Case_Closed]

It's about you and yours being fascists.

Whatever it takes to dethrone The Kenyan.

[Pepsi]

There are only a handful of morons in the world who actually believe fascism is a liberal trait.   The vast majority of people of course understand fascism is by definition "right wing".

[Case_Closed]

There are only a handful of morons in the world who actually believe fascism is a liberal trait.   The vast majority of people of course understand fascism is by definition "right wing".

And blacks actually believe the Democrats weren't the party that kept them in chains for over a hundred years and it was the Republicans who actually freed them.

Biggest fraud committed on a race EVER!!!

[Pepsi]

And blacks actually believe the Democrats weren't the party that kept them in chains for over a hundred years and it was the Republicans who actually freed them.

Biggest fraud committed on a race EVER!!!

The white southern racists switched from democratic party to the republican party in the 1960's as you surely well know.   

[Case_Closed]

The white southern racists switched from democratic party to the republican party in the 1960's as you surely well know.   

What does that have to do with the Republicans unshackling the wrists and ankles of every negro in this country back in the 1800's while the white racist Democrats opposed it?

[Pepsi]

What does that have to do with the Republicans unshackling the wrists and ankles of every negro in this country back in the 1800's while the white racist Democrats opposed it?

Nothing, but lets be clear the white racist democrats of the 1800's would be republicans today. 

[Case_Closed]

Nothing, but lets be clear the white racist democrats of the 1800's would be republicans today.