Godwin-going Apres Thanksgiving -- The Trumpen Proletariat Arise

Apparently the meme -- or is it now a trope ?-- about The Donald is that he is as thorough-going a fascist as there has ever been in American politics. Well, in recent memory, anyway. They're calling him a fascist straight out, no filters, among the Republican chatterati, at least from what I've seen on the intertubes. This is said to be unprecedented, and I suppose it is. The media is always reluctant to call out any Republican candidate, and Republican politicians and commentators generally hold their fire in public, but The Donald has caused something of a dilemma for the Big Boys.

At first, they didn't know what to do when he went off on one of his rightist-populist jags. It couldn't be for real, right? But then it got more and more real, especially as polling showed Trump leading the Republican field, despite the fact that Carson was catching him here and there and now and then (that's interesting) and Rubio was clearly the choice of the cognoscenti. After all, a nice clean Hispanic character should be good for the demographics, right? Especially after That Negro in the White House (eeek!)

The problem being that pesky populist billionaire who keeps surging in the polls, keeps drawing large crowds of rabid fanatics, and keeps getting his ugly mug on the teevee because of something outrageous he's said or one of his goons or one of his fans has done.

A "populist billionaire?" Whut? That's a key to understanding what's going on here as I see it. Trump is a famous personality first and foremost. He's been a character on the teevee for years, and he was in the news constantly before he became a television celebrity. He's known for the character he plays on teevee, and it's a character he's honed and perfected on the stump as a self-funded presidential candidate. The character is obnoxious and outrageous, but it touches a certain segment of the population that feels left out of the economic and social changes that have been going on in the nation for many years now. These people identify with Trump and his own outrageousness and so he's doing very well as he stalks the country for votes.

His populism, however, is more likely a mask for his real intent -- to impose Billionaires' Rule directly by capturing the levers of government power. Well, now. It wouldn't be the first time that billionaires or their equivalent have had control of the government, but it might be the first time a genuine billionaire was put in office or rather bought the office of the Presidency, as if it were a hostile take over.

Other billionaires don't seem to be cottoning to Trump's rising, and that seems to be at the root of the current memes (or is it tropes?) about Trump's fascism...

Is he a fascist? Genuinely? I don't know. He uses a lot of fascist-style rhetoric to appeal to the public, and that has given rise to the charge that he is a fascist along the lines of a Mussolini or a Hitler, which means he's no "conservative" (not that anybody seeking high office ever is these days), but he's been tapping something soul-satisfying to his constituency while he tub-thumps away on his racist and exclusionary policy prescriptions.

His approach is so deep-seated American. What he rants about are the things that so many (largely white) Americans have long held dear and want to see preserved for their progeny. They see the racist, sexist and exclusionary pillars of Real Americanism under attack from within and without, and Trump's rhetoric is a means of fighting back, as is his -- apparent -- fascism. In their lights, no one else is showing the fortitude and balls to do it.

Trump is the one. Some have said he's a stalking horse or not a "serious candidate," and they could be right, but I go back to Reagan, both his two terms as governor of California (he first took office in 1967 -- generations ago). He was thought to be a joke or a stalking horse or not a serious candidate too, and he swept into office over and over again, not so much because anybody cared for his policies, but because he was a personality, famous, and he touched the souls and spirit of so many (largely white) Americans who felt left out of the social and political milieus of the times. Reagan brought back their sense of importance, and he gave them much raw meat to chew on as his policies -- which favored the rich and ruined the lives of millions, throwing many into the streets and nearly destroying public education and tattering the social fabric -- were implemented.

Those policies were recognized as socially destructive and economically unsound from the outset, but there was no political will to oppose them sufficiently to prevent their implementation. What Reagan wanted was what the public wanted, so it was thought, therefore strenuous or active opposition was not considered viable.

And so it didn't happen. Democrats went along with Reagan, even praising him from time to time, because they didn't feel institutionally opposed. Or something.

There was much about his policies that were fascistic or precursors. Certainly authoritarian. His determination to use police power to crush the rising of students and blacks and other minorities was well-known and well-documented. To a surprising degree it was successful, too. His determination to dismantle the Progressive social and political system that had become nearly universal was not as well known, but he proceeded with little opposition, and again he was largely successful.

Trump is tapping into all of that and more, and if he were to be elected, I think it would be seen as the Will of the People and strenuous political opposition would evaporate.

So if he's a fascist, what does that make the System itself? What is the fundamental belief that underlies the American Way? Is it by nature fascist as well?

Has this nation's government and social arrangement always been a fascist construct? It's always been authoritarian and imperial. It becomes more so, not less so, as time goes by. If Trump succeeds, will he actually be doing something not in the nation's character, or will he simply be using the racist and exclusionary underpinnings of the national character to advance his personal and class interests at the expense of everyone else?

And if he is so popular, what is to be done about it?

One thing to recall about the interwar years in Europe and the political/economic situation just prior to the outbreak of WWII is that almost all of Europe had gone fascist or fascist-lite; German war-making and domination didn't necessarily interfere with the deep-rooted fascism of much of Europe at the time. The German goal was to unite Europe under its suzerainty to oppose, fight and ultimately conquer ('godless, communist') Russia. Many powerful Americans believe that the US and its allies were on the wrong side in WWII, and it's taken all this time to start correcting the errors made generations ago by well-meaning (some of them) but misguided (all of them) politicians who threw their lot with the commies and the socialists when they should have been supporting the Nazis and fascists...

So here we are.

The Trumpen proletariat are those who fear they don't have a future in the America that's becoming. They can only secure a future for themselves and their progeny through force of will and will to power. Trump appeals to their deepest fears. But then, despite the torrent of insults that have been flying, so do all the rest of the Republican field, and so... when you examine closely... do the Democratic candidates. Sanders is appealing to the fears of a different constituency, to be sure, but it's the same strategy.

Not to go all doom and gloom, but I don't see any easy way out of this mess. We've been down this path before; there seems to be little or no way to change direction...

Institutional Failure and the Rise of the Rebel

I've been pondering the situations in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Bosnia, and so many other places where neo-Fascist uprisings are underway with the full support, let it be said, of the EU and the US Government and its dozens of "democracy" NGOs, as well as the no doubt abundant collaboration of our amazing and ever-so-patriotic black ops and security apparats. Not to forget our ever-eager propaganda media spreading lies and half-truths in order to shape American opinion in favor of these neo-Fascist led crises.

Why is this happening now, I wonder, and why is it so easy to bamboozle the masses to accept this bullshit as the genuine rise of the People? Why is it so easy for the propaganda media to evade the whole issue of the violence inherent in all of these revolts and pretend they are all "peaceful" and "innocent" and that they are being brutally attacked by corrupt, tyrannical governments? Never mind that these governments were, by and large, elected and are not behaving tyrannically in any relative or rational sense at all.

I saw Zbigniew Brzezinski on Charlie Rose last night night before last [this post has been in the hopper for a while, and will continue being edited...] prattling like the bitter old man he is about the Ukrainian Thing and going off into fantasies of Russia as Putin "wants it to be." His imagination is obsessed with Russia and "containing the Soviet Union," for in Putin he sees a reincarnation of Stalin and  the reassembled and reestablished Soviet Union, something that the Free World must prevent or destroy at all costs. The Ukrainian Thing has nothing to do with Ukraine, in other words. It's all about preventing the rise of the New Stalin and his perfidious reestablishment of the Soviet Union and its Empire of yore.

The man is mad. The man is out of his frigging mind. He's old and he's bitter and his hatred for Russia and the Russian people knows no bounds. He won't rest until the Russian state is no longer even a remnant of its Imperial and Soviet extent. He won't rest until it is gone altogether, shattered into a thousand pieces, in ruins and destitute. He is our Cato the Elder, I guess, screaming out: "Russia delenda est!!!" every chance he gets.

The horrible thing is that our remnant governmental institutions and much of the corporate sector that owns them believes this shit even more fundamentally than Brzezinski himself does. He's almost mild and sane compared to them. This is one reason why we have been inundated with such relentless and bloodthirsty propaganda about the the troubles in Ukraine -- but have heard and read so little about the almost identical uprisings elsewhere.

It is yet another instance of institutional failure on a massive scale and yet another instance of how the vacuum is filled with madness, brutality -- and wherever possible, with rebellion.

The insane fantasy that Russia under Putin is somehow seeking to re-create and re-assemble the Soviet Union, and Putin himself is trying to become The New Stalin has been driving much of American foreign policy in the region for as long as Putin has been on the political scene in Russia. Anyone who's not the drunk but compliant Yeltsin, in other words, is seen as a threat to be contained and/or overthrown, the sooner the better. The Global Hegemon will not be content with anything less than submission, abject, full and willing.

Our government has never gotten beyond its fantasies of the Soviet Union, and many of our institutions are similarly locked in combat with something that truly never was -- the great and powerful monster they think it was and believe it still is.

And that's why Ukraine is being torn apart by the EU and US. Rent as fully asunder as, oh, say Yugoslavia was, or as the Soviet Union itself was under Yeltsin, back in the day. Our failed institutions, locked in the past, are still fighting the subversive and hot wars they dreamed about winning during the Cold War.

This can be nothing but insanity.

As insane as the behavior of these failed institutions is, it doesn't mean that the rebellions themselves entirely lack legitimacy. As I've said in other posts, people under oppression have a right and duty to rise up against their oppressors. That should be a given.

The question is, do these rebels represent the genuinely oppressed? And what, ultimately, do they want?

In Venezuela, the fact that the people rising up are not oppressed is starkly obvious. The rebels are almost entirely composed of los ricos or their wannabes. They are often blonde, well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-housed, and well-educated. They are the upper crust of Venezuelan society, and they want their power back. They resent being ruled by the Lower Orders, people they consider to be "salvajes"  and "animales" -- people only fit to be ruled, not to rule over los caballeros themselves. The very idea of it, ptui!

These class and race divisions giving rise to rebellion in Venezuela are very stark and obvious as they have been throughout the Bolivarian Revolutionary period under Chavez and Maduro, and as they have been throughout Venezuela's history since it was settled by German immigrants under Spanish rule. Of course they want their power back. They believe it is their right. Democracy? Piffle!

The anti-Bolivarian propaganda in this country has been strenuous and relentless since the establishment of the Bolivarian Revolution in the late '90s. When there was a coup against Chavez in 2002, American media, led by the New York Times, exploded with joy and rapture. Unfortunately for the celebrators, the coup only lasted a couple of days, and Chavez regained his presidential palace to continue on the path he'd set -- toward ever more democracy and social justice, something populations in Latin America had long yearned for, yearnings long thwarted by institutions established to prevent the rise of the People. Ever. Institutions that were enabled by the Spanish, by the governments that won their independence from Spain, and not much later by the United States government which took charge of the Hemisphere as its own private backyard empire.

The Bolivarian Revolution reversed the power structure of Venezuela, putting the long oppressed majority in charge and curtailing the power of los ricos to rule over them. A rather mild version of social and economic justice was instituted. The rich were not deprived of their wealth -- at least not entirely -- only their power over the state, power which was reserved to The People as a whole.

The uprisings of the rich against that state of affairs have been ongoing for close to two decades, and they have often turned bloody. The state, under Chavez and Maduro, has been remarkably tolerant of the mischief made by the rebels, essentially declaring an amnesty for the rebels time and again, in an apparent effort to include them in the Revolution. The burden the rebels are attempting to throw off does not appear to be that of genuine oppression, for it is difficult to find any significant effort to oppress the rich in Venezuela or to confiscate their wealth, or to silence their voices, or to interfere significantly with their ways of life. The burden the rich in Venezuela seek to throw off is a psychological one, the burden of their own sense of powerlessness -- though they are not truly powerless in the Bolivarian system at all, not any more so than anyone else is truly powerless.

One of the remarkable features of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is the widespread use of direct democratic councils through which Venezuelans of all classes are empowered, and by which the country has been able to progress in the interests of all the people, not just a few.

And it is that very empowerment of the whole people as well as the extensive provision of basic housing, healthcare, education, and justice for all that the rebels seek to eliminate and destroy. When they talk about Maduro's "exit" they're talking about overthrowing the entire Bolivarian system and remaking Venezuela into a version of what it used to be, putting the closed sign on the institution of People's democracy and ending such frivolous nonsense as social and economic justice once and for all.
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Now that the Ukrainian uprising has apparently succeeded in driving out Yanukovych and ending his rule (though it's not entirely certain), rebels in Caracas are no doubt encouraged. If they can only turn the military and police away from Maduro's government, they're home free, yes?

How might they do that?

Money talks, as we've been seeing in almost every corner of the globe, every aspect of life.

The rule of money, the failure of institutions, and the rise of rebels are all tied together. This year may well turn into one for the books.

[Events have intervened to cut short this post, though I'm sure it's quite long enough!]

Are We There Yet?

 In 2003, Lawrence Britt came up with this:

14 Pointers to Fascism

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
(does that sound familiar?)

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections

In 2007, Naomi Wolf offered up her view of how the US would be turned into a Fascist state:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilization". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labor activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasize, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalized. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offenses, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favor of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution.

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbors to spy on neighbors. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state program to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favor of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organizations engaged in peaceful political activities: CIFA is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticized Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
 
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalize or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organizations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalize certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realize that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offense - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialized about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

-----------------------
You see how easily and effectively it's done?

Are we there yet?

From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

Spanish Anti-fascist poster, c. 1938

This is likely to be the last installment of excerpts from "The Peril of Fascism" by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens published in 1938 by International Publishers of New York.

I'm not a historian, but history fascinates me, and I have learned quite a bit from this volume. If you can find a copy of it, I highly recommend it as something of a prism through which to view -- and possibly understand -- the march of Neo-Fascism today.

Among the things I've learned from reading this book is that the same sorts of people and in some cases the descendants of the same people, the same corporations or their successors, and the same kind of financial chicanery (called "free markets" and "capitalism") are involved in today's economic catastrophe and the modern rise of fascism as were involved in the economic catastrophe and the rise of fascism in the 1920's and '30s. Today's forces are the same, but there is no ideological counter to them now while there was one then.

The final chapter of the book, written in 1938, remember, deals with the prelude to war, another world war, which at the time seemed inevitable due to the constant aggression of the Italian, German, and Japanese fascists in their openly declared march to world domination. The fact is, at the time the whole world was falling under fascist domination (except for the Soviet Union) with or without wars of aggression. Fascism was fashionable -- for one reason because it was successful, or at least it appeared to be.  Much of Europe was already fascist-ruled, same with Latin America, same with large swathes of Asia. Fascism was well-established, though not completely ruling, in most of the English-speaking world as well. Yet it wasn't enough for Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito; they would not be satisfied until they had shattered the Soviet Union, destroyed Communism and ruled the entire world either directly or through their puppets.

Surely we don't face anything like that today... or do we?

There is no Soviet Union, for one thing; and "Communist" China is perhaps the most successful and dynamic managed capitalist nation in history.  What is being battled by the neo-fascists of our own time are the pitiful remnants of the social democracies in the West and rival sort-of fascists in the Muslim
East. It doesn't take a global war, nor even more than a handful of aggressive invasions for the Western Neo-Fascist forces to impose their will (if not outright conquer) on targeted nations.

Magil and Stevens argue that fascism -- as they knew it and presumably as it is currently conceived by the modern heirs to the fascist legacy -- is the natural consequence of unbridled capitalism especially when facing an existential crisis as it once again is today. Fascism is the necessary consequence, for it is the means by which otherwise rebellious peoples are to be kept in check.

Today's conditions differ in many ways from those of the 1930's, however. In those days, global war was less than a generation in the past, and part of the consequence of that war was the global financial collapse that began 10 years after the Armistice. It's been almost 70 years since the end of World War II, and it is not likely (at least in my view) that there will be another global war similar to either of the World Wars in the near -- or even distant -- future. Such rivals as there are to the rule of finance capital and neo-fascism are politically and economically weak and rather easily compelled to yield. Governments, by and large, find the fascist operating system to their liking. Iran is not a rival state, no matter the propaganda out of Jerusalem about it. China could one day become a rival, yet on the other hand, it is looking more and more like the Chinese will ultimately be the ones in charge, and China will once again be the Middle Kingdom of lore and legend. There is no need to fight China; China is showing the way forward.

None of this was even imaginable in the 1930's. So we've come a long way. Or have we?

Today's excerpt:

Those isolationists who fear lest sanctions provoke Japan to a military attack against the United States are panicky indeed. It is hardly likely that Japan, either alone or in combination with Germany and Italy, would dare challenge a coalition of the nature described. [The authors proposed that the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union could through their united and collective efforts essentially quarantine the fascist aggressor nations of Germany, Italy and Japan by imposing economic and other sanctions against them. This proposal was based on a speech regarding collective security and quarantining the fascist aggressor nations made by President Roosevelt in Chicago on October 5, 1937.]

The United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France are far stronger in men, military equipment, industry, resources, and financial reserves than the fascist alliance. Not even the megalomaniacs who rule Germany, Italy and Japan would dare to challenge the democracies if they are firm and united. The real danger of today lies in disunity of the democratic nations and in their capitulations to fascism. It is on this disunity and weakness that fascism thrives, and by piecemeal conquests may reach the point where it will be sufficiently strong to wage successful war against the strongest democratic states.

Foreign Commissar Litvinov of the Soviet Union put the matter succinctly in a speech before the League of Nations Assembly in 1936. He warned:

The aggressor who is basing all his policy on superiority in brute material force with only threatening demands, bluffs, and menaces and the tactics of the fait accomplis in the arsenal of his diplomacy is accessible only to a voice no less firm than his own, and to a cold calculation of the relative strength of forces. Any exhortations and entreaties and still more concessions to his illegal and senseless demands and economic bribes offered to him merely produce on him an impression of weakness, confirming his consciousness of his own power and encourage him to further intransigence and illegalities.

Yet the aggregate power of the peace-loving countries, both in the economic and in the military sense, their total resources in manpower and in the war industries, considerably surpass the strength of any possible combination of countries which the aggressor might rally around him. I am deeply convinced that it would be sufficient for these forces in some way to combine, to display merely the possibility of joint action,  for the peril of war to be averted and for the aggressor to be obliged to ask, sooner or later, to be admitted himself to the common system of collective security.

The alternative to collective security is continued chaos and ever more destructive wars. No nation is safe from the fascist firebrands; no one is certain where the war-mad dictatorships will next strike. Hitler seeks to lure his starving people into a crusade against the Soviet Union by promising them that Germany "will swim in prosperity" if he can seize the Urals and the Ukraine; but at the same time Hitler attacks Spain and builds up his military and propaganda machines for possible action against Czechoslovakia, France, and even Britain. Japan threatens to strike northward against the Soviet Union and then swiftly moves into the Yangtse valley, where British and American holdings are concentrated. The fascist threat is in all directions; everywhere where there is territory to be conquered, booty seized and people to be enslaved. And in this lies the logic of collective security, of common action against a common danger.

The obstacles to such a change v[from traditional American isolationism] are great, but by no means insuperable. Open fascists like Hearst and Coughlin, Trotskyist allies of fascism who conceal their reactionary program under pseudo-left jargon, blind and vociferous pacifists of the isolationist school are actively at work perpetuating the illusion that the United States is unaffected by the fascist offensive. But there are signs that increasing numbers of Americans are becoming aware of the reactionary character of "neutrality" and turning towards collective security as a means of strengthening American peace and democracy.

...
The Crisis of American Democracy


American democracy is threatened in as real and as compelling a sense as was German democracy in 1930-32. Whether the United States will succumb, as did Germany, to the black legions of fascism or move ahead toward a broader democracy is the question at stake. The one certain thing is that it cannot stand still. In the life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and fascism, the one or the other must advance. Secretary Ickes indicated the issue in his radio address of December 30, 1937:

Underneath the unchanging words of the Constitution, underneath the unchanging appearance of our public institutions, there is happening here, as truly as in Europe and Asia, a struggle for power, for the control of lives, labor and possessions of whole peoples -- a struggle between the many and the few, a struggle between those who would live and let live and those who want the thrill of the power of ruling others.

Here in America it is the old struggle between the power of money and the power of the democratic instinct. In the last few months this irreconcilable conflict, long growing in our history, has come into the open as never before, has taken on a form and an intensity which makes it clear that it must be fought through to a finish -- until plutocracy or democracy -- until America's 60 families or America's 120,000,000 people win.

This is the nature of the American crisis. It is a crisis which permits of no neutrality, and which increasingly divides the American people into two huge warring camps, progressive and reactionary.

The 1936 elections marked the first large-scale battle between the gathering hosts of progress and reaction. Since then, the struggle has grown in scope and intensity.

For a brief moment after the 1936 elections there was a lull in the struggle. Reactionary organizations momentarily withheld their savage attacks against the Roosevelt administration and suggested that the wounds of the election battle be healed and an "era of good feeling" inaugurated -- suggestions based on the hope that Roosevelt, having won re-election, would abandon his reform policies and veer sharply to the right.

... If reaction is victorious it will move along the fascist path already indicated by the pronunciamentos of the employers' associations and in the writings of big business spokesmen like Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson, who learnedly prove by the inverted logic of reaction that "majority rule" means tyranny and that true liberty lies in the unrestricted right of the monopolists to exploit and plunder as they please. It will annul the right of collective bargaining, slash unemployment and farm relief, reduce wages and living standards, and extend on a national scale the system of corporate overlordship which it long exercised in the company towns. It will further whittle down the scope of democracy until nothing remains but the open terrorist dictatorship of big business. [My emphasis.]

Already the army of incipient fascism has attained enormous proportions.

At its head of course are the economic royalists, the small handful of financial oligarchs who control the means of production upon which depends the livelihood of the American people. Statistics of the Bureau of Internal Revenue reveal that in 1935 less than five percent of the corporations owned 87 percent of all corporate assets in the United States; and this group of giant corporations was controlled in turn by a small clique of financiers. As President Roosevelt clearly recognized in his monopoly message to Congress on April 29, 1938, the monopolists and the oligarchs of finance, maintaining a stranglehold on the American economy, constitute the source of the fascist danger. They have used their vast powers to build up black legions of reaction which penetrate deeply into every sphere of American life.

... The progressive movement, although still largely inchoate and unformed, has been described with considerable reason by Thomas Woodlock of the Wall Street Journal and other discerning reactionaries as an embryonic People's Front movement. The nature of this trend has not been widely understood, however, because it assumes forms completely different from those of the People's Front movements in Europe. These distinct political forms are determined by the peculiarities of party politics in the United States, by the weight of American tradition, and by the size and complexity of the country.

...Here we have no large workers and farmers or other middle-class parties. The Republican and Democratic Parties, both equally dominated in the post-war years by big capital, and both embracing within their ranks the vast majority of the oppressed and exploited, have hitherto practically monopolized American politics. The growing democratic movement cannot, therefore, assume the form of a clear-cut alliance of class parties, but instead develops in the complex form of progressive movements within the old parties and to a lesser degree, in the form or regional independent labor, farmer-labor and progressive parties. A national farmer-labor party, representing an alliance of all progressive strata, appears to be the most likely American form of the People's Front. But this stage of development has not yet been reached. At the moment, the democratic movement consists of scattered progressive groups and tendencies, developing toward greater cohesion and unity. It represents the embryo of a People's Front, but is not yet the People's Front. The coalescence of the scattered progressive groups and currents is, therefore, better described by the term democratic front.

And there we'll leave it for now, because, to all appearances, "progressives" are still scattered, inchoate, and "embryonic."

Isn't that something....

From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

Antifascist poster, Spanish Civil War, c. 1938. "The foreign fascist hordes are trying to invade our territory. Antifascists! Block their road, bar them forever from our soil!"

There are so many parallels and similarities between the situation we face now and the situation faced by Americans during the 1930's and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, but there are also many profound differences. Perhaps the most troubling is the absence of any political ideology to counter a revived fascism that has been taking over the world.

One can say what one will about the merits of Communism, or the lack of them, but it was a coherent ideology opposed to fascism, and at the time the example of the Soviet Union could be and was held up as a model antifascist society. It was deeply -- and ultimately fatally -- flawed, of course, but it was something.

 Now? What is there?

Occupy is self-consciously non-ideological and apolitical. It operates in a space outside the framework of routine civil society -- which is one reason why it has been significantly successful, despite repression by authorities and more than a little internal dissension.

But unless something can stand as a counter to the modern neo-fascists, the fascists win. And hands down, they are winning, spectacularly and consistently. They have been doing so for decades, to the point where their victories are taken pretty much for granted as the way things are, the baseline from which any opposition is expected to arise. In other words, the neo-fascist reality is the one we all live in now.

In 1938, fascism was the political reality through much of Europe -- we forget that most of Europe was, by 1938 or 1939, ruled by fascists and what Magil and Stevens call "semi-fascists." Fascism was the reality in much of Asia and Latin America as well. Colonial Africa could not escape the fascist march.

The United States, as Magil and Stevens amply document, was riddled with overt and covert fascist elements and organizations, found in every aspect of government and throughout what passed for civil society, especially but not exclusively in the South.

I would argue that part of the reason for the pervasiveness of fascism at the time was "fashion." Fascism was new and energized, revolutionary in much the same way that Soviet Communism was, but with the key difference that fascism was the modern mass movement, the modern revolution if you will, that provided crucial support for the very sort of hypercapitalism that had so recently been responsible for crashing economies all over the world.

Fascism is the response of late-stage capitalism to existential crisis. The World War, the Russian Revolution(s), the financial collapse of 1929, and the mortal blow to the peoples of the capitalist democracies delivered by the Great (and at the time seemingly Endless) Depression, was perceived by many, inside and outside the system, as the quintessential Crisis of Capitalism that would quite likely lead to its ultimate demise.

Fascism was demonstrated as a functional alternative to both Communism and Capitalism in Extremis. There are many reasons why it was so successful at the time, chief among them that fascists gave people a common national purpose and it put people back to work. Global Capitalism on its own, as we've seen since the Crash of 2008, cannot do that. "Nations" are simply in the way, and keeping substantial numbers of people unemployed indefinitely is a necessity to ensure profits continue to rise (unemployment works by driving down wages and benefit costs).

Fascism was highly regimented and militarized in the 1930's, aspects which we note are largely absent from the neo-fascism of today.

Imperialism is still very much apparent, but no longer are vast armies assembled to undertake the conquest of foreign lands. According to modern military doctrine, mass armies are no longer necessary for conquest of desirable foreign territory or control of resources. Bribery works very well, and what can't be bought can be rather easily seized and held by a small, mobile, technologically advanced army together with a sufficient number of mercenaries to handle extraneous matters and occasional wet work. And of course remote controlled Death From Above machines take the place of thousands of military personnel.

As targets soon discover, there is no adequate defense against modern warfare.

Civil society and civilian life are largely neglected by the neo-fascist cabal of global rulers we see today. Apart from constant surveillance and sporadic repression of nascent uprisings, the ruling class essentially ignores most of what's going on in "The Street." There is an incessant barrage of propaganda from every corporate outlet.

 Everything the common people are allowed to  have is due to the "gifts" of the elites, and everyone is supposed to be grateful for what little -- or much -- they are given. But nothing comes without a cost.

Because taxes are seen as punishment for failure, only the "lesser people," who by definition are failures, are forced to pay taxes.

 Rent seeking, extraction, gambling, plunder and pillage now constitute the elite "economy" -- if you want to call it that. For man of the rest of us, subsistence has become the New Normal.

This is about where global fascists would have been by now if the unpleasantness of World War II hadn't intervened.


And so we continue with excerpts from "The Peril of Fascism" by A.B. Magil and Henry Stevens, published in 1938 by International Publishers, the American publisher for the Communist Party of the United States.

The Bonus March of 1932 was undoubtedly one of the epoch-making mass struggles in American history. It was initiated in a very modest form by a small, militant veterans' organization, the Workers' Ex-Servicemen's League (later renamed the League of American Ex-Servicemen [Note: the League disbanded in 1935, its members joining the American Legion and other veterans' organizations.] but it grew far beyond the plans of its original sponsors. Members of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Disabled American Veterans disregarded the instructions of their national officialdom and joined with the members of the Workers' Ex-Servicemen's League and with unaffiliated veterans in the great trek to the nation's capitol. All told, about 20,000 of them gathered in Washington and camped for nearly two months in Anacostia Flats.

Hoover blasted the ex-soldiers out of Anacostia with the gun-fire, tear gas and bayonets of the United States Army. But he also helped blast himself out of the Presidency. Bloody Thursday, July 28 [1932], aroused the entire country. The great veterans' struggle broke through the anti-bonus policy of the Legion chiefs and won from the Portland, Oregon, convention in October, 1932, the first endorsement of immediate payment. [Note: the "bonus" was legislation passed in 1924 providing per-capita payment of $1 a day for those engaged in domestic military service during WWI and $1.25 per day for service overseas, payable in 1945. The Bonus March was organized in 1932 to demand immediate payment so as to alleviate some of the suffering caused by the Depression.]

The army of bonus marchers that staggered out of Washington in rout and apparent defeat became the nucleus of a movement which, gathering ever wider popular support, marched forward irresistibly until it culminated in 1936 in the passage by the 74th Congress of the bonus bill over President Roosevelt's veto.

The Bonus March revealed not only the strength of the veterans' movement, but also its weakness. It was only natural that among men who had little experience with rank and file organization and who only yesterday have been ardent patrioteers there should exist considerable political confusion. And there were not lacking at Anacostia Flats buzzard of reaction on the hunt for prey. We have already mentioned the Key Men of America. It was the Key Men, with the collaboration of General Pelham D. Glassford, at the time Washington police chief, that foisted on the marchers the Oregon adventurer, W. W. Waters, as commander-in-chief of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces. Waters surrounded himself with a host of shady characters, among them Harold B. Foulkrod, former manager of the Philadelphia branch of the Burns Detective Agency, who was named "legislative representative." These individuals sedulously used the  Red scare to divide the veterans. They were helped along by Father Coughlin who sent a $5,000 check to the B.E.F. "with absolute instructions that they who benefit by this donation be clear of all Communist leaders and Communist suggestions."

Out of the Bonus March emerged what was one of the country's first openly fascist terrorist organizations, the Khaki Shirts, also known later as the U. S. Fascists. It was launched by Waters, with himself as leader. The shirt idea spread rapidly, and Father J. R. Cox of Pittsburgh attempted to entice veterans into the Blue Shirts.

The passage of the Bonus resolution by the 1932 Legion convention marked the first step toward directing the organization away from the reactionary policies which it had hitherto pursued. But economic issues are inseparably bound up with questions of civil liberties, with the preservation of democracy itself. The leaders of the American Legion had early shown a decidedly pro-fascis bent and a special affection for Mussolini. In January, 1923, only two months after Il Duce has established the world's first fascist dictatorship, National Commander Alvin Owlsley, in an interview with the Newspaper Enterprise Association, expounded on the philosophy of the Legion's royal family in the following candid words:

If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country's institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy... Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.

The history of the Legion during most of the years since its inception certainly indicates that its leaders have attempted to live up to these "ideals." They have sought to suppress meetings of labor and liberal groups through the Legion's well-financed National Americanism Commission, directed by Homer Chaillaux, have incited red-hunts in the colleges and distributed large quantities of red-baiting literature, including that richly imaginative work, Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling's The Red Network, which lists among the country's dangerous Reds Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mayor La Guardia of New York City. In 1934-35 the Legion chiefs actively cooperated in the Chamber of Commerce-Hearst crusade against democracy. At the same time these super-nationalists have not neglected their international contacts. A Paris dispatch of Hearst's Universal Service published in the New York American as of June 25, 1935, stated:

Reports that the Prince of Wales, Colonel de la Rocque, head of French war veterans, and American Legion chiefs are cooperating to unite veterans to force their respective government to present a united front against Communism impressed delegates to the International Chamber of Commerce meeting. [The Prince of Wales, (later King Edward VIII and now the Duke of Winsor) at the time was making overtures to the German fascist war veterans' organization in line with the British Tory government's policy of rapprochement with the Nazi regime.]

But the membership of the Legion were beginning to move in a different direction. Many posts were adopting resolutions condemning strike-breaking and attacks on democratic rights. In San Francisco and Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Legion posts officially participated in parades for slain strikers.The Blissville Post of Queens, Long Island, after placing Paul Crosbie, an avowed Communist, on trial, ruled that "Communist membership is not sufficient reason for expulsion." In New Jersey the state organization of the Legion in 1936 opposed compulsory saluting of the flag for school children. In the same year, the Americanism Committee of the New York County Posts of the Legion adopted and circulated a pamphlet called: "Americanism, What Is It?" which advocated an Americanism that was a far cry from the Hearstized brand that the Legion chiefs had been propounding. In June, 1936, the convention of the New York County Legion voted opposition to teachers' loyalty oaths and urged higher relief allowances.

...

Let it be remembered that ex-servicemen have played an all-important role in the development of fascism in other countries. In Germany, the National Socialist Party was organized in 1919 by army officers who won their first successes among returned soldiers. In Italy, Mussolini formed his first terrorist bands from among former soldiers. In France, the core of the fascist forces has been the veterans' organization, Croix de Feu (now the Social Party) led by Colonel de la Rocque. In the United States, as we have seen, the Legion was groomed by its founders and early leaders to play a similar role. That their dreams are farther from realization today than at any time in the Legion's history is a tribute to the strength of the democratic sentiment among the World War veterans and the American people as a whole and their growing awareness of the social and political forces that are shaping the world today. The fight against professional patriotism and fascism in the American Legion has not yet been won, but recent developments offer hope that the men who went through the blood and muck of the war may yet avoid the tragic mistakes of their comrades in Germany, Italy, and France.

 

From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

Spanish Antifascist Poster, c. 1938

The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, was one of the very few times when the People rose up against the fascist tide prior to World War II, and as we know, the fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco were victorious (not without the help of his good friends, Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler let it be said.)

The interesting thing to me has always been that Franco's fascist Spain endured through WWII and for many decades thereafter, in some respects it endures today. Latin American dictatorships during and after the War were largely modeled on European fascism. And most of the anti-communist dictatorships supported by the United States, wherever they were found, were more or less fundamentally fascist throughout the Cold War era.

In other words, World War II did not actually defeat fascism. Depending on your perspective, it wasn't a war against fascism at all. (Soviets saw it a little differently of course.) Apart from the Soviets, it was a war of one faction of corporatist-imperialists against another for global hegemony. As the Nazi-fascist faction was defeated, the Enemy then became, almost instantaneously, the Global Communist Conspiracy centered in the Soviet Union, the chief enemy of the fascists, and the one the United States had focused on prior to WWII.

All of this long ago convinced me that a faction of the fascists actually won World War II, despite the hoop-lah and propaganda of Allied Victory. I grew up in an era of intense anti-communism and propaganda, a near absence of civil liberties (such as freedom of speech, assembly and association), and an ongoing civil crusade against "subversion." In the background was the constant drumbeat of immanent nuclear war of annihilation between the stalwart USofA and the perfidious Soviet Russians. It was many years before I understood that had it been up to the Soviets, none of this would have happened. There would have been no Cold War, no arms race, threat of instant incineration. It was all a fever dream and fantasy in a way.

So as I read "The Peril of Fascism" by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, the parallels between their view of what was going on in the USA c. 1938 and what we know today is more and more striking. The book is mostly contemporaneous reporting and an interweaving of various threads of knowledge. We see much the same kind of thing in the many news aggregators of today, each of which operates with a certain point of view and political bias, but each of which, if you apply critical thinking to them, can provide excellent insight into what's really going on.

The chapter called "Terror, Incorporated" seems to me to be particularly germane given recent events:

On May 22, 1936, the lifeless body of Charles Poole, an employee of the Works Progress Administration, was found lying in a ditch on the outskirts of Detroit. It seemed like another murder story. But before many days had passed, there grew out of that tale of death the ominous outlines of a far-reaching conspiracy whose victim was to be not that pitiful bullet-ridden body found in a ditch, but the rights and liberties of thousands of Americans. The Black Legion, flinging its shadow across the American scene, jolted the unwary and incredulous into a realization that it could happen here.

The Black Legion may appear in retrospect a bit fantastic and unreal, but no more so than Hitler's rowdies in the Munich beer hall days. The full truth about this brotherhood of hate and murder will perhaps never been known. Too many higher-ups of the industrial and political world were involved for complete candor. But enough has been revealed to indicate that while this terrorist organization may have been born in more or less spontaneous fashion, it was suckled and reared by the great automobile corporations of Detroit and Michigan. Of course, even the so-called spontaneous birth of such movements is possible only in a society which breeds fascism as filth breeds germs.

The two chief weapons of fascism are demagogy and terror. And in both, amateurdom gives way to science, the sporadic and haphazard are supplanted by system and organization. The lynch mobs of the South which spring up suddenly, live briefly and as suddenly melt away, the vigilante bands which function only during specific labor disputes, are the Black Legion in embryo -- but only in embryo. In the period of mounting disintegration and decay, when capitalism is beset by chronic ills it never knew before, these primitive forms of mob violence no longer suffice. Organizations of a more permanent kind, with a more stable membership and a more elaborate program are required. Hence, the modern Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts -- groups for whom terror is a profession and murder an art.

It is an omen of what can happen here that this country gave birth to one of the earliest semi-fascist terrorist organizations in the world, the modern Ku Klux Klan. Launched in November, 1915, it antedated the Fascisti of Mussolini and the Storm Troops of Hitler. It is significant, however, that not until after the World War, in the wake of the social dislocations that followed the conclusion of imperialist bloodshed, did the Ku Klux Klan, like the Fascisti in Italy and the various terror groups in Germany really come into its own. The Klan was, however, in its first stage less pronouncedly fascist than were the Italian and German murder gangs.

....

It will be noted that the period of the Klan's greatest strength coincided with the post-war crisis of capitalism and the first emergence of fascist tendencies throughout the capitalist world including the United States. Furthermore, the Klan, after its eclipse during the years of temporary capitalist stabilization, has been revived in another period of economic and social stress. It is significant, too, that while the Klan's main emphasis in the days of its great efflorescence was on anti-Catholicism, it soft-pedaled the anti-Catholic issue when it re-emerged during the economic crisis and directed its main energies against labor under the guise of combating Communism.

Thus the New York Sun of May 5, 1933, wrote:

The Ku Klux Klan, almost killed off seven years ago by the exposure of a series of flogging cases and other criminal activities attributed to it, has been revived in the South for the announced purpose of "educating" the Negro against Communism and other radical doctrines.

...

The shift in prejudices to which the Klan is appealing is a measure of the growth and deepening of those fascist tendencies which first manifested themselves after the war. The Black Legion, too, while its creed included attacks on Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and the foreign-born, made these subordinate to the fight against labor.

Yet it would be foolhardy to conclude that Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and the foreign-born would find any security should the forces which the Klan and the Black Legion represent gain power. In Germany the Nazi drive on labor merely constituted the hub of the wheel of repression that moved relentlessly against Jews, Catholics, Protestants, liberals and all who by any stretch of the imagination could be regarded as critical of the Nazi regime. The breadth of the orbit of hatred within which the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion moved offers no reason to suppose that fascist dictatorship in this country would be any less ruthless and sweeping.

...

Together with the growth of the Klan grew the trail of blood and terror that it left behind it in state after state. And the KKK learned to combine organized hooliganism with political action. Before long the three great Southwestern states, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, were completely under the thumb of the Klan. Elsewhere, too, the Klan became a power in city and state politics and entrenched itself in the police forces in many parts of the country. This expansion took place despite considerable opposition which the organization met not only from Catholics, Jews, Negroes and the foreign-born, but from many native white Protestants for whom the Klan represented everything reprehensible, stupid and reactionary in American life.

...

On its revival in 1931-32, the Klan left no doubt as to its militant anti-labor character. "The Klan Rides Again -- Communism Must Be Destroyed!" read handbills distributed throughout the South. In an Atlanta dispatch to the New York Post of September 14, 1934, David G. Wittels wrote:

The Ku Klux Klan has entered the strike picture in the South

Primed into new life by money from Anti-New Dealers, it is gathering strength for a battle against organized labor -- and eventually against President Roosevelt.

Rejuvenated three months ago, it has 30,000 members in Georgia, and 100,000 throughout the South.

In a few places in the South the Klan went so far as to adopt the Nazi trick of appearing to be pro-labor. At Columbus, Georgia, where 11,500 mill workers were striking, the KKK participated in a Labor Day parade. And at Griffin, Georgia, it was even instrumental in calling a strike. This will recall the Nazi "support" of the Berlin tramway workers' strike in the fall of 1932 on the eve of Hitler's accession to power.

In the mining town of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the Klan in 1936 distributed printed cards -- with a union label -- listing the following program:

1. Deport illegal aliens
2. Drive out Communism
3. Restore Constitutional government
4. Keep church and state separate
5. Buy American-made products
6. White supremacy

It will be noted that anti-Catholicism has here been relegated to fourth place and euphemized into the inoffensive "Keep church and state separate." Number five shows that the Klan has taken over Hearst's "Buy American" campaign. In fact, the entire program, with the exception of points four and six, is identical with the public pronouncements of Hearst and the other big business reactionaries.

...

The revived Klan has been particularly active in Florida. Under the leadership of Kleagle Fred McLendon Bass, who was also a member of the executive committee of the Orlando, Florida, American Legion post, the Klan kidnapped and murdered Frank Norman, International Labor Defense organizer, in April, 1934. The most flagrant of the revived Klan's acts of violence was the kidnapping and flogging at Tampa, Florida, in November, 1935, of Joseph Shoemaker, Dr. Sam Rogers, and Eugene Poulnot, leaders of a liberal group known as the Modern Democrats. This outrage, which proved fatal to Shoemaker, was perpetrated with the connivance of the Tampa police whose chief, R. G. Tittsworth, was a member of the Klan.

While this excerpt has focused mostly on the violence of the Ku Klux Klan (and there is a great deal more documented than I have excerpted here), there were many other similar and affiliated fascist terrorist groups active in the United States during the period, many with the active complicity of the local authorities. It was not an easy time to be a labor organizer, a Negro, a Catholic, a Jew, or of foreign birth anywhere in the country. All were considered "suspect" by America's good-upstanding-white-christian folk, and many were considered a priori Communists. Terror tactics were commonly employed, much more widely and against a much broader cross-section of Americans than is generally believed. If you were a member of one of the designated and targeted out groups, there was essentially no way to avoid it. But this was one of the great benefits of "small government" back in the day. There was no way to protect people from this sort of constant terror by various groups, especially when the police were part of the terror-forces.

This is something Americans seem to have little collective memory of. Because there is very little collective memory of this domestic terror apparatus that operated as a public-private partnership in service to the financiers and capitalists, it's easy enough to revive it when conditions warrant. We've seen it already in some of the border control and other militias, in aspects of the Tea Party, and in the vast expansion of private mercenary forces at home and abroad. It's not an altogether new phenomenon. And as always, these domestic terror forces are in service to their sponsors and owners, the vaunted 1%.

Always.

From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

More and more, it's becoming clear that the program in operation by Our Government and its Owners and Sponsors is quite simply that of a Fascist amalgam of the State and Corporate interest against the People and the Public Interest. By exploring what was going on during the Great Depression, and the forces at work at that time to assert the dominance of Corporate interest over that of the People -- ie: fascism -- in our country then, we can better understand and ultimately fight what is going on now.

Of course, Government was much smaller then, and one of the ways Corporate interest coped with the inability of smaller government (which they claim to want once again) is by establishing private armies and private espionage activities used against workers and worker-led organizations.

The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee  held hearings in the US Senate from 1936 to 1940 and documented employer violations of the rights of workers to organize and to bargain collectively.

Of course nowadays, unions seem rather quaint, anachronisms from another era. In the 1930's they were the mainstays against the total victory of corporatist-fascist rule in the United States. Given the low estate that worker unions have fallen to, and the rampant resurgence of fascism as a consequence, it might be wise to explore the benefits of some kind of worker/citizen organization.

From "The Peril of Fascism," by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, published by International Publishers, 1938:

"Big Business: Fountainhead of Fascism"

The LaFollette Committee uncovered many othere instances of close co-operation beterrn public authorities and labor espionage agencies and munitions companies. These activities bear an ominous resemblance to the assistance which the Italian police and carabineers rendered to the blackshirts on the eve of Mussolini's assumption of power.

The extent of big business armament, like the size of the corporation armies, is not exactly known; but the clue to its enormous proportions is contained in the revelation that three companies -- the Lake
Erie Chemical Company, Federal Laboratories, and the Manville Manufacturing Company -- sold $606,572 of tear and nauseating gas from 1933 to 1937.* (*Among the largest purchasers were Firestone Rubber Company, Bethelhem Steel, Carnegie Steel, Jones and Laughlin Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber. In addition to enormous quantities of gas, the large corporations laid in supplies of machine guns, sub-machine guns, rifles, revolvers, and other instruments of "collective bargaining.")

The munitions companies, besides arming corporations, engage, like the private detective agencies, in extensive provocation in order to drum up business. The LaFollette Committee revealed that Federal Laboratories sent out hair-raising descriptions of wholly fictitious Communist "activities" in an effort to frighten their clients into increasing their armament orders.**(**One committee witness, a motion picture cameraman, testified that during the San Francisco marine strike, an agent for Federal Laboratories, J. M. Roush, had fired a gas projectile at James Engle, a striking longshoreman, "for the benefit of the motion picture cameramen." Engle was severely wounded. In his report to B. H. Barker, vice-president of Federal Laboratories, Roush laconically reported the incident: "I might mention that during one of the riots, I shot a long range projectile into a group, a shell hitting one man and causing a fracture of the skull from which he has since died. [Roush's report was somewhat too sanguine. Actually, Engle recovered from his injuries.][Ché's note: cf. Scott Olsen and others injured in Oakland during police violence against Occupy.] As he was a Communist, I have had no feeling in the matter and I am sorry that I did not get more." Vice-President Barker, in his reply, commended Roush for his "spendid report." (From Associated Press, March 5, 1937.)

"Demagogues of Fascism"

"The German has not the slightest notion of how a people must be misled if the adherence of the masses is to be sought," wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. (this statement has been deleted since the 12th edition published in 1932.)

The misleading of the people is part of the normal practice of capitalism. The whole bourgeois political edifice, with its formal and legal democracy concealing the economic and political domination of a small number of wealthy men, is based on a fundamental class deception. The existence of certain civil and labor rights -- most of which have been wrested from the ruling class only after determined struggle -- modifies but does not basically alter the class character of the political superstructure. So long as it rests on the economic foundation of the private ownership of the means of production by a small wealthy class, democracy, even in the freest of capitalist republics is necessarily maimed and limited, and in the present period is under constant threat of extinction. under such conditions complete democracy is never more than a promissory note which cannot be redeemed under the profit system.

With the development of monopoly capitalism the area of social deception may be said to have expanded as the area of democracy contracted. Deception and demagogy tended to function more and more as an arm of the capitalist state itself. And some of the greatest cultural contributions of capitalism -- the press, universal education, and later the cinema and radio [television was barely available, the internet not even on the horizon at the time this was written] -- have been used as vehicles of this deception.

In the United States, with the rise of the modern political parties and political bosses in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a particularly venal type of demagogy made its appearance. With the campaign of the Whigs to unseat Jackson in 1832 -- a campaign which was financed largely by the Bank of the United States against which Jackson had declared war -- the familiar chicanery and corruption of modern elections emerged for the first time. This took on a more organized form with the march of monopoly after the Civil War, when corrupt political machines in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities  made it a practice to trade on the discontent of the masses, wormed their way into labor unions, themselves took up the banner of "reform," of attack on big business, and by combining systematic deception with bribery and gangsterism, were able to win what appeared to be popular support.

Yet even this type of social demagogy was to a large extent crude and improvised. It is only in the period of extreme decay and degeneration of capitalism, when its very existence is threatened, that there emerges a more "scientific" system of mass deception -- the demagogy of fascism.

It might be said -- writes Palme Dutt -- that if Marxism represented the development of Socialism from Utopia to science, fascism represents the development of capitalist demagogy from amateurism to science. (cf: Bernays and Adam Curtis's "The Century of Self.")

The highly specialized character of fascist demagogy derives not only from the gravity and complexity of the problems facing capitalism in crisis, but also from the fact that in most countries fascism, in its effort to achieve power, is compelled to appear in the guise of opposition to the bourgeois democratic government and times even to the capitalist system itself. The necessity of creating a mass movement that seems to express the deepest needs of the people, but in reality aims to suppress those needs with inexorable brutality, requires an elaborate technique of deception which makes all past capitalist efforts in this respect seem like gospel truth by comparison.

It is important to be clear as to the meaning of the term demagogy. The reactionaries call every revolutionist, every labor leader, every progressive a demagogue. But the essence of demagogy is the deception of the masses. Those who genuinely carry on the struggle to improve the lot of the people play a diametrically opposite role. Demagogy "is the art of playing on the hopes and the fears, the emotions and the ignorance of the poor and suffering for the benefit of the rich and powerful. It is the meanest of the arts. This is the art of fascism."

Fascist demagogy requires its own specialists and virtuosi. The Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Goebbels -- these are the masters of this "meanest of the arts." They had their precursors and teachers; but when these new suns shine, the early stars grow dim. In the United States fascism is still in its swaddling clothes, but has already produced two virtuosi of demagogy: the late Huey P. Long, and Reverent Charles E. Coughlin. Both have played with considerable success on the sufferings, the needs and the prejudices of the poor in the interest of big business reaction. And both have cast their demagogy in the mold of native American traditions. They have exploited not merely the democratic traditions of 1776 and 1861, but those of agrarian radicalism associated with Jefferson and Jackson, and with the Greenback, Farmers Alliance, Populist, and Bryan movements of the seventies, eighties, and nineties (of the 19th Century.)

Though Populism died, its traditions have proved among the most persistent and fertile in American history. They have brought forth varying fruit in the trust-busting and muckraking under Theodore Roosevelt, in the Non-Partisan League during and immediately after the war, in the LaFollette campaign in 1924, in the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in the Farmer-Labor Party movement today. Essentially these are the deep-seated traditions of farmer-labor democracy, whose first great representative was Thomas Jefferson and whose roots go back to the origins of our republic. And it is these traditions which have fertilized practically every progressive movement in our history (and) that have been exploited by the two foremost demagogues of incipient American fascism, Huey Long and Father Coughlin. For them, the ideas of farmer-labor democracuy have served the same purpose as have Socialist and labor traditions for Hitler and Mussolini.

The chapter goes on to explain how these two men used their access to the public to promote fascism in America. We can easily make the comparison between them and Rush Limbaugh and the entire stable of Fox "news" personalities today. The dangers are the same; the difference is that the modern media demagogues have had many years to promote their versions of neo-fascism over the radio and television, whereas Long and Coughlin only had a relatively few years on the air. Times are different, the dangers are the same.