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The true face of American fascism

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
The true face of American fascism

There are as many definitions of fascism as there are definers of the term. There is no true consensus as the term is dynamic; constantly morphing to encompass any and all positions deemed an anathema to the liberal agenda.

But there are historical precedents that allow us to parse out the fundamental tenets of traditional fascism and apply those tenets to modern liberalism exposing striking similarities.
In the full light of objective scrutiny it becomes obvious that modern Liberalism is more akin to classical fascism, modern Conservatism a close relative of classical Liberalism and that true fascism is a phenomenon owned part and parcel by the modern left. It seems that the titles have remained intact but the paradigm has shifted.

The tools employed by modern fascists have changed little over the decades since first employed by the likes of Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler. They have taken on a more innocuous tenor but lack none of the repressive undertones of their predecessors and in some cases are more insidious for their “populist” appeal. Think along the lines of land mines hidden in playgrounds.

We can draw parallels in many areas but will limit ourselves to these: Religion, “the common good”, “national crisis”, and environmental activism.

Religion:

One of the tenets of classical fascism is to replace God with the state, making the state the source of divine law and rendering its interpretation the ultimate authority. Replacing “accepted” religions with the “religion of the state” removes the impediments of traditional moral codes from the path of the government. What is deemed good for the state (the common good) has precedence over what is good for the individual. No longer are there competing interests among the population, no longer are there competing goals or paths to enlightenment. The state effectively becomes the arbiter of right and wrong, of moral and immoral behaviour.

You can see the parallels between classical fascism and modern liberalism with their crusades to remove God from the government and society at large, their attacks on traditional marriage, conservative values, and an overall contempt on the part of the left for Christians in general.

The political correctness movement has challenged even the most innocuous references to God to match the preconceived notion of a secular society (a necessary precursor to the “state religion”). For example the change from A.D. to C.E. (Year of our Lord to Common Era) and B.C. to B.C.E. (Before Christ to Before Common Era), removing prayer from school and public events, to name a few. The left has taken up where the Jacobins left off. Can anyone argue that the left owns this issue?

The Common Good:

The “common good” is nothing more than a euphemism for fascist ideology. History is replete with examples of how the “common good” was anything but, at least for the commoners. Hitler’s genocide, Stalin’s oppressive regime, Iraq’s mass graves all steeped in the notion of the “common good”. The left’s use of this euphemism makes it particularly easy to draw historical parallels between fascism and modern liberalism.

Look at the undertakings pursued by the left in the interest of the common good. We have the war on smokers, the war on trans fats, the war on pollution (also tied into environmental activism), the war on beef/meat, and wars on everything else deemed “unhealthy” or contrary to the common good. The left has made it their cause to protect us from ourselves, but to what end?
Heinrich Himmler was an animal rights activist as well and an advocate of natural healing. Hitler seriously considered moving Germany to vegetarianism and Hitler youth pamphlets proclaimed “Nutrition is not a private matter”. Where the danger lies is not in advocating a healthy lifestyle, we could all agree that such an action is in a persons best interest, where fascism lies hidden is in mandating a healthy lifestyle for the greater good. This usurps a person’s right to choose, their rights, our rights, become subordinate to the rights and whims of the collective.

National crisis / Environmental Activism:

I combined these two because they are inextricably united in purpose. Crises are the undeniable staples of fascism and environmental activism is simply a subset of crises. The reason that crises are so fundamental to fascism is that most people expect government action to forestall an impending crisis or to mitigate an ongoing one. We as a nation expect our government to protect us from danger and we rarely question the measures taken to do so. If we dare to question the wisdom of an action we are subjugated to the role of “the party of no”.

A shining example is the so called “economic crisis”. The government understands that when acting in an emergency there is little chance for honest and substantive debate on policy issues. “We have to act fast” becomes the mantra and debate or deliberation is labeled as obstructionist and counter to the good of the country. How else could something as bloated and inefficient as the “Stimulus plan” have passed without even having been read?

Take the time to notice how much of the liberal agenda is labeled a crisis or national emergency. Global warming, the economy, the health care crisis, the war on poverty, the war on crime ad infinitum. There is a reason for this; they understand that under the scrutiny of debate and in the full light of public inspection their agenda would fail. No debate means they can pass their agenda whole sale with little to no resistance. This particular facet of fascism is not unique to the left but under their careful rearing it has grown to unprecedented proportions.

One only has to listen to the words of the left to gain clear understanding of their mindset. The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, gave us a look into fascist core of liberalism when he said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste — and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you didn’t think you could do before.” What clearer indictment of the left’s motives could there be than their own words?

The left have adopted fascism and its axiom of “any action of the state is acceptable to achieve the common good”. They have, through slight of hand and projection, successfully labeled the right as fascists. Their adeptness at prestidigitation not withstanding they embody everything that is “fascism” in its truest form.

http://silentmajority09.com/2009/04/10/the-true-face-of-american-fascism/
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
After reading this article, I found a comment on the website, that lead to another great article on Fascism from The Libertarian Alliance. It's quite a long article, so I'll only post one section of it.



Five Facts about Fascism

Over the last 30 years, scholarship has gradually begun to bring us a more accurate appreciation of what Fascism was. (20) The picture that emerges from ongoing research into the origins of Fascism is not yet entirely clear, but it's clear enough to show that the truth cannot be reconciled with the conventional view. We can highlight some of the unsettling conclusions in five facts:

Fascism was a doctrine well elaborated years before it was named. The core of the Fascist movement launched officially in the Piazza San Sepolcro on 23rd March 1919 was an intellectual and organizational tradition called "national syndicalism."

As an intellectual edifice, Fascism was mostly in place by about 1910. Historically, the taproot of Fascism lies in the 1890s--in the "Crisis of Marxism" and in the interaction of nineteenth-century revolutionary socialism with fin de siècle anti-rationalism and anti-liberalism.

Fascism changed dramatically between 1919 and 1922, and again changed dramatically after 1922. This is what we expect of any ideological movement which comes close to power and then attains it. Bolshevism (renamed Communism in 1920) also changed dramatically, several times over.

Many of the older treatments of Fascism are misleading because they cobble together Fascist pronouncements, almost entirely from after 1922, reflecting the pressures on a broad and flexible political movement solidifying its rule by compromises, and suppose that by this method they can isolate the character and motivation of Fascist ideology. It is as if we were to reconstruct the ideas of Bolshevism by collecting the pronouncements of the Soviet government in 1943, which would lead us to conclude that Marxism owed a lot to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Fascism was a movement with its roots primarily in the left. Its leaders and initiators were secular-minded, highly progressive intellectuals, hard-headed haters of existing society and especially of its most bourgeois aspects.

There were also non-leftist currents which fed into Fascism; the most prominent was the nationalism of Enrico Corradini. This anti-liberal, anti-democratic movement was preoccupied with building Italy's strength by accelerated industrialization. Though it was considered rightwing at the time, Corradini called himself a socialist, and similar movements in the Third World would later be warmly supported by the left.

Fascism was intellectually sophisticated. Fascist theory was more subtle and more carefully thought out than Communist doctrine. As with Communism, there was a distinction between the theory itself and the "line" designed for a broad public. Fascists drew upon such thinkers as Henri Bergson, William James, Gabriel Tarde, Ludwig Gumplowicz, Vilfredo Pareto, Gustave Le Bon, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Filippo Marinetti, A.O. Olivetti, Sergio Panunzio, and Giovanni Gentile.

Here we should note a difference between Marxism and Fascism. The leader of a Marxist political movement is always considered by his followers to be a master of theory and a theoretical innovator on the scale of Copernicus. Fascists were less prone to any such delusion. Mussolini was more widely-read than Lenin and a better writer, but Fascist intellectuals did not consider him a major contributor to the body of Fascist theory, more a leader of genius who could distil theory into action.

Fascists were radical modernizers. By temperament they were neither conservative nor reactionary. Fascists despised the status quo and were not attracted by a return to bygone conditions. Even in power, despite all its adaptations to the requirements of the immediate situation, and despite its incorporation of more conservative social elements, Fascism remained a conscious force for modernization. (21)

http://www.la-articles.org.uk/fascism.htm
 
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