The Fight Against Neoliberal Fascism is Anchored in Memory

Fascism today doesn't look exactly as it did when it spread through Germany and Italy in the 30s but the foundational elements are alive and well around the world today, including the United States of America.

Henry Giroux contends the key to beating back modern neo-fascists rests in historical memory.

As Hannah Arendt reminds us, the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political and moral witnessing necessary to successfully counter growing fascism in the United States today. As Richard Evans, the renowned historian of modern Germany, observes, the Trump administration may not replicate all the features of Germany and Italy in the 1930s, but the legacy of fascism is important because it echoes a “warning from history” that cannot be dismissed. What historians such as Evans, Timothy Snyder and others have suggested is that it is crucial to examine history in order to understand what tyranny and authoritarianism look like and how we can use the past to fight against such forces. While the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas, policies, passions and ruthless social practices of fascism, wrapped in the flag and discourses of racial purity, ultra-nationalism and militarism, are at the center of power in the Trump administration.

When selected elements of history are suppressed and historical consciousness and memory no longer provide insights into the workings of repression, exploitation and resistance, people are easily trapped in forms of historical and social amnesia that limit their sense of perspective, their understanding of how power works and the ways in which the elements of fascism sustain themselves in different practices. Fascism is not unvarying and expresses its most fundamental attacks on democracy in different arrangements, which is all the more reason for people to develop what Timothy Snyder calls “an active relationship to history” in order to prevent a normalizing relationship to authoritarian regimes such as the United States under Trump’s rule. Surely, a critical understanding of history would go a long way in enabling the American people to recognize the elements of a fascist discourse in much of Trump’s racist tweets, speeches and policies.

...If there is one thing that the important lessons of history in the work of writers such as George Orwell have taught us, it is that we must refuse to be complicit in the mockery of truth. This is especially crucial in the current historical moment, given the way the Trump administration — along with far-right media giants, such as Infowars, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Fox News and Breitbart News Network — work to aggressively propagate a vast disimagination machine. With the death of historical memory comes the nightmare we had thought was no longer possible to witness again.

The Rise of Civic Illiteracy.

Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. ...At the same time, reason and truth are not simply contested or the subject of informed arguments as they should be, but wrongly vilified — banished to Trump’s poisonous world of “fake news.”

Under the Trump administration, language has been pillaged, truth and reason disparaged, and words and phrases emptied of any substance or turned into their opposite, all via the endless production of Trump’s Twitter storms and the ongoing clown spectacle of Fox News. ...What we are witnessing is not simply a political project to consolidate power in the hands of the corporate and financial elite, but also a reworking of the very meaning of literacy and education as crucial to what it means to create an informed citizenry and democratic society. In an age when literacy and thinking become dangerous to the anti-democratic forces governing all the commanding economic and cultural institutions of the United States, truth is viewed as a liability, ignorance becomes a virtue, and informed judgments and critical thinking are demeaned and turned into rubble and ashes. ...Traces of critical thought appear more and more at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society.

...The culture of manufactured illiteracy is also reproduced through a media apparatus that trades in illusions and the spectacle of violence.  ...In the age of manufactured illiteracy, there is more at work than simply an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can the reign of manufactured illiteracy be solely attributed to the rise of the new social media, a culture of immediacy and a society that thrives on instant gratification. On the contrary, manufactured illiteracy is a political and educational project central to a right-wing corporatist ideology and set of policies that work aggressively to depoliticize people and make them complicitous with the neoliberal and racist political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.

The War on Education.

Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America have waged a major assault on higher education and those faculty and students who view it as crucial to producing the modes of learning and formative cultures necessary in the struggle for a strong and healthy democracy. For instance, in the United States, higher education is being defunded, devalued and privatized while also restricting access to working- and lower-middle-class students. Those underprivileged students who do have access to some form of post-secondary education are too frequently burdened with financial debts. ...The attack on higher education has a long history. Since the 1980s, the democratic principles of the university have been under assault by right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers, a select financial elite and big corporations, “leading to a blurring of the lines between the university and the corporate world.” Increasingly, the object of higher education is the individual consumer rather than the public good.

... One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students and others is the need to address the question of what is the role and mission of education in a time of tyranny. What should it attempt to accomplish in a society at a historical moment when society is slipping over into an abyss of fascism? Central to such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What will it take for higher education not to abandon its role as a democratic public sphere? What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? What kind of language is necessary for higher education to redefine its mission, one that enables faculty and students to work toward a different future than one that echoes the present, to confront the unspeakable, to recognize themselves as agents, not victims, and to muster up the courage to act in the service of a substantive and inclusive democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic values and impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable?

Neoliberalism and Fascism - the Bond.

I bring the two terms together in the phrase “neoliberal fascism,” which I define as both a project and a movement. Neoliberalism is an enabling force that weakens, if not destroys the commanding institutions of a democracy while undermining its most valuable principles. It is part of what Sheldon Wolin called a totalitarian imaginary that constitutes a revolutionary break from democracy. This is a form of fascism in which state rule is replaced by corporate sovereignty and a culture of fear, insecurity and precarity reinvigorates executive power and the rise of the punishing state. Consequently, neoliberalism as a form of gangster capitalism provides a fertile ground for the unleashing of the ideological architecture, poisonous values, and racist social relations sanctioned and produced under fascism. Neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the worst excesses of capitalism with fascist ideals: the veneration of war and a hatred of reason and truth; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles of disparagement and a demonization of the other; a discourse of decline, brutal exploitation and ultimately, state violence in heterogeneous forms. All vestiges of the social are replaced by an idealization of individualism and all forms of responsibility are reduced to individual agents. Neoliberalism creates a failed democracy, and in doing so, opens up the fascists’ use of fear and terror to transform a state of exception into a state of emergency. As a project, it destroys all the commanding institutions of democracy and consolidates power in the hands of a financial elite. 

It is time to repudiate the notion that capitalism and democracy are the same thing, renew faith in the promises of a democratic socialism, create new political formations around an alliance of diverse social movements and take seriously the need to make education central to politics itself. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, fascism is the product often of failed democracies, and under the reign of neoliberalism, we are in the midst of not simply a dysfunctional democracy, but in the grip of an extreme form of gangster capitalism wedded to unbridled forms of corporate power that produce massive inequalities in wealth and power, and aggressively wage war on everything crucial to a vibrant democratic society.

Trump Has Germans Thinking a Lot About Democracy

The German people have not forgotten their past and president-elect Donald J. Trump has them revisiting those painful memories of a darker time.

An article in Der Spiegel asks "How Much Mussolini Is There in Donald Trump?" The writer reviews a number of fascism checklists and the results aren't promising for American democracy. He concludes that Americans should wait - and hope.

The article was obviously written before Trump's latest tweet on protesters who may burn the American flag:


"Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!

"— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016"

Of course, since 1989 the US Supreme Court has held that burning the Stars and Stripes is protected under the First Amendment. Trump, however, has repeatedly shown how little he cares for the First Amendment or dissent generally. 

Which brings us to former justice Robert Jackson's warning:


“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”

Let's Not Be Under any Illusions. Alt.Right Lives and It Will Have a Voice in Trump's White House.

I've been using the word "AmeriKa" to refer to Trumpland. Now it seems I might be infringing on somebody else's intellectual property rights.

Kinsella found this handbill plastered on what appears to be a light post near his neighbourhood.

I was a bit surprised to see the URL for amerika.org. I was drawn to explore the website. I wasn't totally surprised by what I found but it is troubling. We all need to take a hard look at this contagion now that Trump has appointed Breitbart's Steve Bannon as his political strategist. Take a look.

The "Dress Rehearsal for Fascism"

No matter whether you support or despise Donald Trump, you've been changed.
All Canadians are impacted in numerous ways by the body politic of our next door neighbour - our one and only next door neighbour.

What we understood about American politics is, it seems, over. It's been trending in this direction for some time but in this election cycle there has been an abrupt and jarring shift ushering in an era of demagoguery and authoritarianism. The anchor of decency, basic human decency, has been lost. A boastfully self-proclaimed deviant and alleged serial sexual predator has a clear path to the White House. That he's also a severe misogynist, a racist, an all-round bigot and a pathological liar matters not in the least to his followers.

If nothing else this 2-year election campaign has allowed us to unlock the mystery of authoritarianism and, perhaps for the first time for many, including me, grasp the true nature of this dysfunction. It's now possible to make sense of what happened to Germany in the 30s, the failure of Weimar. It is the fulfilment of Sinclair Lewis' warning in his 1935 novel, "It Can't Happen Here."

Chris Hedges writes that, in Donald Trump, we're seeing the "dress rehearsal for Fascism."

The candidate who can provide the best show gets the most coverage. The personal brand is paramount. It takes precedence over ideas, truth, integrity and the common good. This cult of the self, which defines our politics and our culture, contains the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation, and incapacity for remorse or guilt. Donald Trump has these characteristics. So does Hillary Clinton.

Our system of inverted totalitarianism has within it the seeds of an overt or classical fascism. The more that political discourse becomes exclusively bombastic and a form of spectacle, the more that emotional euphoria is substituted for political thought and the more that violence is the primary form of social control, the more we move toward a Christianized fascism.

Last week’s presidential debate in St. Louis was only a few degrees removed from the Jerry Springer TV show—the angry row of women sexually abused or assaulted by Bill Clinton, the fuming Trump pacing the stage with a threatening posture, the sheeplike and carefully selected audience that provided the thin veneer of a democratic debate while four multimillionaires—Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Clinton and Trump—squabbled like spoiled schoolchildren.

...The insurgencies of Trump and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a breakdown of these forms of social control. There is a vague realization among Americans that we have undergone a corporate coup. People are angry about being lied to and fleeced by the elites. They are tired of being impotent. Trump, to many of his most fervent supporters, is a huge middle finger to a corporate establishment that has ruined their lives and the lives of their children. And if Trump, or some other bombastic idiot, is the only vehicle they have to defy the system, they will use him.

The elites, including many in the corporate press, must increasingly give political legitimacy to goons and imbeciles in a desperate battle to salvage their own legitimacy. But the more these elites pillage and loot, and the more they cast citizens aside as human refuse, the more the goons and imbeciles become actual alternatives. The corporate capitalists would prefer the civilized mask of a Hillary Clinton. But they also know that police states and fascist states will not impede their profits; indeed in such a state the capitalists will be more robust in breaking the attempts of the working class to organize for decent wages and working conditions. Citibank, Raytheon and Goldman Sachs will adapt. Capitalism functions very well without democracy.

In the 1990s I watched an impotent, nominally democratic liberal elite in the former Yugoslavia fail to understand and act against the population’s profound economic distress. The fringe demagogues whom the political and educated elites dismissed as buffoons—Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudman—rode an anti-liberal tide to power.

The political elites in Yugoslavia at first thought the nationalist cranks and lunatics, who amassed enough support to be given secondary positions of power, could be contained. This mistake was as misguided as Franz von Papen’s assurances that when the uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was appointed the German chancellor in January 1933 the Nazi leader would be easily manipulated. Any system of prolonged political paralysis and failed liberalism vomits up monsters. And the longer we remain in a state of political paralysis—especially as we stumble toward another financial collapse—the more certain it becomes that these monsters will take power.

Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of which are captured in Trump’s misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must be physically purged to restore the health of nation.

...The Democratic and Republican parties may be able to disappear Trump, but they won’t disappear the phenomena that gave rise to Trump. And unless the downward spiral is reversed—unless the half of the country now living in poverty is lifted out of poverty—the cynical game the elites are playing will backfire. Out of the morass will appear a genuine “Christian” fascist endowed with political skill, intelligence, self-discipline, ruthlessness and charisma. The monster the elites will again unwittingly elevate, as a foil to keep themselves in power, will consume them. There would be some justice in this if we did not all have to pay.

What of Hedges' "genuine Christian fascist endowed with political skill, intelligence, self-discipline, ruthlessness and charisma"? Some have already identified him in Arkansas senator Tom Cotton.

...the perfect candidate for new era Republicans may be the junior senator from Arkansas, 39-year-old Tom Cotton who boasts a dream CV, raised on a family farm and with combat service as lieutenant in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is an extreme ideologue. He helped torpedo immigration reform to the distress of then-Republican speaker John Boehner. He sabotaged criminal justice reform declaring the US suffers not from too many in jail but too few, what he calls "under-incarceration".

In 2015 he tried to sabotage negotiations between the Obama administration and Iran by writing to Iran's Ayatollah saying any anti-nuclear agreement would be dishonoured by a future Republican president, breathtaking in undermining the foreign policy of his own country. He supported a short, sharp war against Iran. He wanted to arm Israel with B-52s to help. He received a campaign donation of nearly $1 million from Bill Kristol's Emergency Committee on Israel in fond appreciation.

His slogans make good bumper stickers. "Let 'em rot," for example, is his stand on Guantanamo prisoners.

He was described on Salon as "Sarah Palin with a Harvard degree; Ted Cruz with a war record."

...His raw inexperience combined with his relish for war elevates him to a level of menace that rivals that of 1964 Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.

Trump might be finished. But another playwright, Bertolt Brecht, warned: "Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."

It Ain't Your Grandfather's Fascism, But It's Still Facism - John Pilger

There's a form of fascism that's flourishing today and it's even considered pretty respectable.  Then again, old school fascism prior to WWII was also considered respectable in some pretty high places.

Journalist, documentary filmmaker, social critic John Pilger sees the face of fascism in much of Western foreign policy.  An important essay published in Asia Times Online.  If what Pilger claims is remotely accurate, we have been well and truly had - by our own governments.

"To initiate a war of aggression…," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."


...Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission.

...The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew ... that if we waited one more day," said President Barack Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.

...The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to Western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" might have been murdered.

Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines".

A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

...The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion … Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation."

He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then president Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers.

Pilger contends that it was progressivism in Afghanistan that the US sought to destroy by launching the mujahadeen against the Kabul government, the first step in the evolution of the Taliban, al Qaeda and today's nemesis, ISIS.  This corner of the Muslim world was thrown to the dogs of brutal Islamist fundamentalism, sacrificed in order to destabilize what was then the Soviet Union.

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and "destabilise" the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, "a few stirred up Muslims". 

His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them.

Pilger contends that the manifestation of modern fascism is the Hellfire missile launched from a drone far overhead, obliterating targets hand picked by Obama himself.

"For goose-steppers," wrote the historian Norman Pollock, "substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception."

This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates Western culture.

...During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens - as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry". If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

No Western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe - with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine.

At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism". It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D Kaplan, a leading "neo-con" luminary of the far-right Center for a New American Security, she was foreign policy advisor to the fascist Dick Cheney.

Nuland's coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea - illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 - voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the Western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion".

...The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly.

"Yet across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established ... If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason."

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack .... In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons."

This speaks to the warning from the leading German financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, last summer that we in the West are being "mentally mobilized" for war.  I agree wholeheartedly with Pilger when he calls on each of us to prevent the final conquest - the conquest of ourselves.

...The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states.

Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.

 

Okay you Liberal Bastards, What Now?

Trudeau the Lesser's Liberals did backflips to support Israel's brutal outrage against Gaza's civilian population this summer.  It was as though no one had ever heard the Israeli military's term, Dahiyeh.  Of course you didn't need any fancy terms to see that Israel was brutally - and quite illegally - targeting Gaza's Palestinian population completely in flagrant violation of human rights laws and the laws of war.  That much is obvious when the side with strike jets takes down the public's water and sewage plants and then moves on to hit schools and hospitals, even clearly designated UN refuge sites.  I was never so disgusted with the Liberal Party, not even under Ignatieff.

The Dippers worked off the same page until Mulcair woke up and realized he was bound to piss off some old school progressives in the NDP ranks.  Then he hemmed and hawed and - waffled.

Well now your boy - and he is your boy - Benny Netanyahu has let his other fascist shoe drop.  This time it's not Palestinians under Israeli occupation but Arab and Christian Israelis who are Netanyahu's target.  The Israeli prime minister and his cabinet by a 2-1 margin have passed a bill that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Critics, including cabinet opponents, say the new law reserved "national rights" for Jews only and also delisted Arabic as Israel's second official language.

So Justin - and Tommy - now you're backing a country that's both fascist and racist.  Is there any principle you won't compromise in your bootlicking pursuit of votes?

It's Like the Noonday Sun to a Vampire - Fascist Governments Cannot Stand the Rule of Law

And by "fascist government" I'm referring to the government of Stephen Harper. Steve doesn't like the rule of law.  I'll bet he figures Magna Carta was a huge mistake. Our federal fuhrer thinks himself the supreme law, above the law of those meddling courts of the land.  The law is His to carve into tablets. The courts are merely to dutifully uphold and apply his law.

Steve is regularly at odds with Canada's judiciary and, as CBC News reports, it's Harper government policy to run afoul of the law.

Edgar Schmidt agrees that something is wrong, and he would know — he was the general counsel for the legislative branch at the Department of Justice, until he became a whistleblower and was suspended without pay in late 2012.

He filed documents in December of that year accusing the department of working under "faint hope" — approving legislation even if it has a "combined likelihood of five per cent or less" of being upheld by the courts.

He argued that Ottawa has a duty to introduce charter-compliant legislation — or, at least, tell the public when legislation doesn't pass the test.

The government disagreed, saying that it only needs to do so if legislation is "manifestly unconstitutional, such that no credible argument exists in support of it."

If a lawyer raises an issue with legislation, and management isn't worried, internal documents instruct government lawyers to "proceed to complete drafting or examination (blue-stamping)."

"Blue-stamping" is bureaucrat lingo for approving.

So, even if a piece of legislation has a 99 per cent chance of being defeated by the courts, government policy is to forge ahead.

That throws some cold water on MacKay's now-infamous refrain that even the government's most controversial pieces of legislation are vetted to be charter-compliant.

In other words, Harper deliberately and constantly tries to engage our courts in a pissing contest for his own perverse, political objectives.  Enacting laws that you know full well offend the Charter is patently vexatious and an abuse of the legislative and judicial processes. It's a behaviour that holds the nation itself in contempt.  It's the product of a troubled personality.

A Greek Tragedy -

Its flag looks eerily like Hitler's swastika.  "It" is the far-right Golden Dawn party that has risen out of the turmoil of Greece's economic collapse.

And another eerie echo from the past is that Greek police, hard hit by government austerity, are reported to be sending crime victims to Golden Dawn for protection.

...Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group, analysts, activists and lawyers say.

In return, a growing number of Greek crime victims have come to see the party, whose symbol bears an uncanny resemblance to the swastika, as a "protector".

One victim of crime, an eloquent US-trained civil servant, told the Guardian of her family's shock at being referred to the party when her mother recently called the police following an incident involving Albanian immigrants in their downtown apartment block.

"They immediately said if it's an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn," said the 38-year-old, who fearing for her job and safety, spoke only on condition of anonymity. "We don't condone Golden Dawn but there is an acute social problem that has come with the breakdown of feeling of security among lower and middle class people in the urban centre," she said. "If the police and official mechanism can't deliver and there is no recourse to justice, then you have to turn to other maverick solutions."

Other Greeks with similar experiences said the far-rightists, catapulted into parliament on a ticket of tackling "immigrant scum" were simply doing the job of a defunct state that had left a growing number feeling overwhelmed by a "sense of powerlessness."

A spreading sense of helplessness, fear of outsiders, loss of confidence in government and its institutions, and the rise of a radical, hard-line movement - just add water and stir.

Fascism On the March in the U.S.A.

Mark Ruffalo knows about America's merger of political and corporate power.  It's what landed him on a terrorist list.

AlterNet reports that the Pennsylvania Department of Home Security has placed Ruffalo on its terrorism watch list.  Why?   How has Ruffalo become a terror threat to the United States?   By promoting the film GasLand, a documentary about gas fracking and the dangers that poses to his country's groundwater supplies.

The marriage of government and corporatism.  It would have made Mussolini proud.

The 14 Steps to Fascism, or, America This Way

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism

because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

- Benito Mussolini

Mussolini's notion of fascism is becoming well and truly implanted in the United States.   America's "bought and paid for" Congress is a manifestation of the merger of state and corporate power.   The Roberts U.S. Supreme Court and, in particular, its ruling in the Citizens United case granted judicial sanction to this marriage of interests.   The recent mid-term elections and the vast amounts of money and muscle thrown in to skew the result by prominent multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers is a plain expression of fascism at work.   So too is America's far right, corporate media that keeps a population befuddled and misled.

But what is fascism really and why should we care?   Professor Laurence Britt analyzed traits common to the notable fascist regimes in 20th century Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile and Indonesia.  He came up with a shortlist of 14 features of modern fascism:

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.  

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.  
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.  
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.  
5. Rampant sexism.  
6. A controlled mass media.  
7. Obsession with national security.  
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. 
9. Power of corporations protected.  
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.  
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.  
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.  
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. 
14. Fraudulent elections. 

That pretty much sums up 21st century America.  You see in today's Tea Partiers the very same sort of maniacal morons that once succumbed to fits of apoplexy at rallies in public squares in Bavaria.   The mindless rage fueled by fear, frustration and bitter anger. 

Missing from the good professor's commentary on fascism is the inevitable devastation it leaves in its wake.   Lord knows it has certainly filled hundreds of graveyards in Afghanistan and Iraq and seems poised to add even more soon in Iran.

On this special day it's good to remember that our fathers and grandfathers fought, and in their droves died, to free the world from the poisoned grip of fascism.  We do them no honour if we become complacent to this same scourge ourselves. 

Defending Tolerance

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destoryed, and tolerance with them. ...We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same was as we should consider incitement tomurder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." - Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies.

From American Fascists, The Christian Right and the War on America, Chris Hedges

Here's Another Surge - the Ku Klux Klan Rides Again

You can blame it on the times, I suppose. Gay marriage, the immigration problem, that thing with the Islamists, globalization, any number of reasons but the outcome is the same - there's a resurgence being staged by the Ku Klux Klan.

According to the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Klan membership is up - somewhere between 5,000 and 8.000 in some 180 chapters. Worse than that, however, is that the Klan is getting much more active and is spreading into new territory with new chapters in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that, "...it is the increase in activity, including rallies, recruitment drives, and distribution of racist literature, and the partnering with skinheads, neo-Nazis, and other kinds of hate groups, that civil rights groups find troubling.

"As it did from its founding, the KKK views itself has having a religious dimension. Members see "lighting" a cross as a symbol of faith. Today, Christian Evangelicals are much more likely than mainstream Protestants or Roman Catholics to believe that "newcomers threaten traditional American customs and values," according to the Pew Research Center.

"It is this trend in attitudes that the Klan hopes to use in recruiting new supporters among those opposed to US immigration policies and practices, according to Klan leaders and expert observers.

"'While we generally think of it as a white supremacist organization, the Klan at its peak was virulently anti-immigrant, particularly with regard to Catholic immigrants, Irish, and southern European,' says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

"But, he adds, 'The whole nature of hate group membership has changed with the advent of the Internet. You can take bits and pieces from whatever group you like without necessarily becoming a card- carrying member.'"

American Fascists

I managed to catch the last few minutes of an interview on CBC yesterday with war correspondent/author Chris Hedges. He was flogging his latest book, American Fascists.

The gist of this book, as I understand it, is that fascism has become a powerful force in today's America. At its core Hedges sees the Christian right, the fundamentalists.

He argues that the Christian fundamentalists have preyed on America's dispossessed in areas hardest hit by globalization, people who once had well-paid manufacturing jobs and now can't find work, people living in the "have not" regions that have spread throughout the United States. Hedges mentioned that there are areas of his country that now resemble the Third World more than the vision of America. It is these people, he claims, who are most vulnerable to the Christian fundamentalist message. They embrace the Christian right's message of intolerance and resentment (a polite word for "hatred") toward specified groups such as gays, the pro-choice movement, Muslims and liberals.

Hedges is clearly concerned at the very real, very powerful political influence gained this way by the Christian right. He fears it continues to expand its power base and it seems he's right.

If you need proof of this just take a look at John McCain's transformation, his embrace of the Christian fundamentalists. In 2000 he called them "evil" and "intolerant" but now he appears as keynote speaker at Jerry Falwell's school and he mouths all the right words, the message the converted expect to hear. McCain realizes that no Republican can win the party's nomination without the support of the Christian right. It's obvious that he's holding his nose but he is definitely talking the talk.

Harper and a lot of the Reform conservatives cleave to this same movement. Canada is not the US and the fundamentalists are less powerful, less influential here so, while our democracy isn't as vulnerable, we do have to realize that the movement here is just as voracious as its big brother in America.

Here are a couple of passages from "War is a force that gives us meaning." I heartily recommend it:

We were humbled in Vietnam, purged, for a while, of a dangerous hubris, offered in our understanding and reflection about the war, a moment of grace. We became a better country.

We often become as deaf and dumb as those we condemn. We too have our terrorists. The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were hailed as "freedom fighters." Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the United States back in Angola's civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that outstripped the Taliban. ...President Ronald Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola although he littered the country with land mines, once bombed a Red Cross-run factory making artificial limbs for the victims of those mines, and pummeled a rival's wife and children to death.

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, used to tell us that we would end our careers fighting an ascendant fundamentalist movement, or, as he liked to say, "the Christian fascists."

If you haven't read Hedge's "War" and if the fundamentalist threat interests you or if you're just interested in how war engages modern society, see if you can get your hands on a copy. Once I've digested "American Fascists" I'll do another post.