Fascism Today in the US and Beyond

Uncle Milton writes:

Bernardio Carpio: I have a gut feel that what you are going through in the USA today is what the Germans were going through during the Weimar Republic in the late 20′s and early 30′s, before Hitler took over. An aggressive, determined, fanatical, irrational right wing. A reactionary middle class.

UM: I doubt it …and this is coming from someone who has several Jewish relatives. If we are sliding towards fascism it is much more likely to be the half-assed Latin American variety wherein the elites are behind walled compounds protected by bodyguards and the masses suffer from mass inflation and economic instability.

Milton is right about most of it except for the inflation. There won’t be any. And I do consider Latin American fascism to be real fascism.

Fascism is simply any far rightwing, anti-democratic movement.

The opposition to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Venezuelan, Bolivian and Ecuadorian opposition, the Honduran ruling elite, all of these are fascists because they hate democracy.

Any violent, murderous, rightwing government is automatically fascist. The Salvadoran right is still fascist. The ruling elite in Haiti is fascist, as is the ruling elite in the Dominican Republic. The Guatemalan and Colombian states are obviously fascist.

Going abroad, the Indonesian and Phillipine states have been fascist forever.

The middle classes in many places are fascist. The “yellow shirt” middle class opposition in Thailand is clearly fascist. The leader of the poor, the “red shirts,” Thakhsin, won the election in 2006, and they refused to accept the results because they boycotted it.

They rioted and demanded another election. Incredibly, he accepted a new election, but then the yellow shirts staged a military coup. The US corporate scum press said he was thrown out because he was corrupt, but all Thai governments are corrupt. The yellow shirt government was just as corrupt as the red shirts or even worse.

The opposition in Belarus is fascist. Lukashenko won the last election fair and square. It was proven by many observers, and exit polls proved it too. He won by a very wide margin. The corporate scum press around the world said he stole the election and that the opposition really won.

Then the opposition, which represents maybe 2

The modern Republican Party in the US is fascist because it is a far rightwing and fiercely anti-democratic party. They refuse to accept the legitimacy of any Democratic President. In that sense, they resemble the middle class yellow shirts of Thailand. It is important to note that it is their hostility to democracy and refusal to recognize the opposition as legitimate that makes the Republicans fascists.

And going by conversations with them, most Republicans are fascists themselves. I realized this when Bush stole the 2000 election. I talked to a lot of Republicans back then. It seemed like most of them recognized that Bush was stealing the election, but they just did not care. At that point, I realized that we were doomed.

The truth is this: the business sector, the capitalists, are almost always fascist when there is a left government in power or threatening to take power. It’s true all over the world. They simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of a left regime.

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0 thoughts on “Fascism Today in the US and Beyond”

  1. In my elaboration on my post I made a distinction between “fascist” used loosely, as in fascists in the Third World, which is totally “libertarian” in its economic worldview (“neo-liberal” as the left would put it), and “fascist” in the European 1930’s context, which is extremely anti-democratic, but somewhat socialistic in actual practice (Hitler and Mussolini):

    “From an extreme right-winger’s viewpoint, there may eventually remain two stark choices: persist in pursuing libertarian economic policies, and prevent the impoverished hordes from revolting by installing a Third World-type “fascist” police state, or provide economic security and some level of prosperity to a majority of the population via a Nazi-type regime implementing some “socialist” measures while largely preserving the privileges of the current economic elite.”

    Libertarian in the Third World context means total untrammeled exploitation by the rich of the poor and the large part of the middle class.

  2. “Fascism is simply any far rightwing, anti-democratic movement.”

    You know the problem with the internet is that every imbecile who knows nothing about the things he speaks about can have a blog.

  3. Whilst fascism doesn´t literally mean ‘any far rightwing, anti-democratic movement’, surely the overlap between ideological fascists, certainly going back as far as the Spanish Falange in the 30s and their often uncomfortable bedfellows in arms, which in this case meant, as it often seems to do, an arch conservative like Franco, (who sought to neutralise the Falangist ideological fervour after the civil war in order to create his own, modern, Catholic reconquista of the country) is surely too close to sensibly deny.
    I lived in Bolivia (as mentioned above) when the opposition was seeking to topple the Morales government a few years back, who they called (here goes): a communist; a murderer (no concrete or serious accusation – pure words); the devil (likewise no evidence that I am aware of); a pervert (again); a peadophile (erm…); corrupt (again no evidence whatsoever of personal corruption even after 6 years in power in the most coup-hungry country on earth though he did cut his own and his cabinet´s salaries upon taking office); atheist (true, that one, I believe, and enough on its own to condemn him in the Catholic East).
    There is footage of him kneeing a footballing opponent in the balls extremely hard after he was fouled and this shows a hard, vicious streak, but some might say that is what allowed him to stand up to the CIA, the DoD and the local fascists and coup plotters they were using to try to access Eastern Bolivias (falsely) rumoured massive gas reserves, and to survive long enough to begin to build democracy in Bolivia, so perhaps that´s a plus….
    Anyone seeking to sneer at the last comment about democracy might do well to consider the fact that I´m writing this from the Bolivian opposition heartland on the day of a wave of municipal and local government elections. Everything is closed for the day (in traditional Bolivian style) – no driving, no drinking (as is so often done together, also in traditional Bolivian style), and voting is mandatory. All the candidates are given free, short TV introductions which go out, it seems to me, on all the channels, and ALL parts of the population are represented, not just the white rich, as was always the case pre-Morales and the MAS. There is corruption here, as there is in the UK and US, but there is also representative democracy (some might say, as I will as a Brit, to a far greater degeree that we have at home, where a super educated elite work to line their own pockets by bending the will of the nation to that of corporate finance).
    The Santa Cruz opposition, who I witnessed screaming to the Bush administration for help (which they got, but fucked up by being too offensively racist and anti-democratic for even mainstream Rightwing tastes in the US and Europe), used to talk obssessively about the introduction of State Socialism and Communism. This is where the relevance to above now asserts itself (finally). What I have seen in Eastern Bolivia (in particular the city of Santa Cruz) is a massive, capitalist, economic boom. This could only have happened under the opening up that morales and the social movements have provided. What has happened is that as the democratic left under Morales was able, as they said they would do all along, to free Bolivia from its post-colonial elite and Bolivians have started to build their country up. It´s perhaps slightly ironic but not surprising that those at the forefront of those benefits are the same capitalist and entepreneurial class who were so opposed to Morales only 5 or so years ago. Now they are quiet and counting their money.
    The MAS said they would nationalise natural assets needed by Bolivian citizens as basics: water, electricity, telephony, hydrocarbons. The rest of the economy was free – capitalist. This they have done, even setting up a scheme for poor people to take out small business loans and start companies.
    For me this outcome, provided no coups were succesful, was inevitable. That this would happen if the MAS could survive the violent attempts at their being derailed was obvious to anyone with a brain. Far from the MAS´accesion to power being a Communist takeover resisted by a politically neutral, pro-democratic populace in the East, quite the reverse was true: this was a push for Social Democracy through the ballot box resisted, as the blog author rightly says, by an anti-democratic, often middle class (from wealthy upper to small shopkeeping lower) and extremely racist constituency. I remember one US educated petrol worker telling me at a barbeque how he had his gun ready for the socialists. How democratic.
    Other internet posts from ex-pats in Bolivia at the time spoke of how they and their English speaking, connected friends (therefore obviously middle class and not poor indigenous, who have no sustained contact with foreigners in the East of the country) had been told, around the time Morales came to power, that he would be gone soon. A coup was widely understood to be in the offing against the upstart ´kolla´(Coon).
    At a later time, especially at the time of the rallies against Morales through 06-09 (not to mention the attacks on the Constiuency drafting sessions in Sucre by Rightwing mobs which left one politician dead – look that one up on Fox News, my speaking-truth-to-power RIghtwing parrot friends), I saw numerous examples of fascist and Nazi insignia worn by young peole, most of whom were in student groups. From T-Shirts with Fasces on them to the odd swastika (this was also reported by the late Lola Almudevar for the BBC). The separatist movement (used by the US in favour to the weak and La Paz based Bolivian opposition) had as its emblem a rather Germanic looking cross, often remarked upon by foreigners – we´ll pass that one over as it is a Catholic country – and an eagle ascendant. This one is a bit more difficult to pass over as it looks very much like the German Eagle used by the Nazis and the Roman Imperial Eagle, intellectual founts of many things, including, obviously, Fascism. It was also the emblemn of the regional fascist group the Nación Camba, who want to ethnically cvleanse Eastern Bolivia of its Andean immigrants. The Nacióm Camba has strong ties with leading businessmen and politicians as well as the Santa Cruz chamber of commerce and billionaire local businessman, Branko Marinkovic, a man of Croatian descent who claimed his father,. a Communist, left Yugoslavia in 1946, when the Communists defeated the fascist Ustashe and took control of the country. Hmmmm. So why would he have left, having just won the war? Unless he was a fascist Ustashe member running away…. Anyway…..2 years ago the Bolivian government found a cell of 3 merccenaries, led by Eduardo Rosza Flores a (you guessed it) Croatian, trying to start an armed putsch in Santa Cruz. The Bolivans shot them all, as the British of US spoecail forces would have had no hesitation in doing. A UK TV reporter, sent to Santa Cruz at the start of the tensions to interview the opposition, encountered the suspicious looking eagle on a mural and was stunned by it. She actually said ´now to me that looks fascist´, as indeed it did. Some of the guys wearing these emblems were Brazilian (Santa Cruz has a sizeable Brazilian and Argentinian business elite who have no intention of letting the ´kolla´ call the shots) and were well off, criving big 4x4s. So it looks like that classic extreme Righwing/ middle class/ fascist nexus still exists.
    Now, they may not be the same thing but the connection seems close and hard to break.

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