Republican Fascism-
by Thom Hartmann

In the years since George W. Bush first used 9/11 as his own "Reichstag
fire"

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0828-23.htm

Republican Fascism-
by Thom Hartmann


In the years since George W. Bush first used 9/11 as his own "Reichstag
fire" to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his
corporate cronies, many across the political spectrum have accused him and
his Republican support group of being fascists.

On the right,The John Birch Society's website editor recently opined of the
Bush Administration's warrantless wiretap program: "This is to say that from
the administration's perspective, the president is, in effect, our living
constitution. This is, in a specific and unmistakable sense, fascist."

Republican Fascism-
by Thom Hartmann

In the years since George W. Bush first used 9/11 as his own "Reichstag
fire" to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his
corporate cronies, many across the political spectrum have accused him and
his Republican support group of being fascists.

On the right,The John Birch Society's website editor recently opined of the
Bush Administration's warrantless wiretap program: "This is to say that from
the administration's perspective, the president is, in effect, our living
constitution. This is, in a specific and unmistakable sense, fascist."

On the left, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. specifically indicts the Bush
administration for fascistic behavior in his book "Crimes Against Nature:
How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and
Hijacking Our Democracy."

Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival
strategy is to redefine the term "fascism" so it can't be applied to them
any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: "This nation is at war with
Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love
freedom, to hurt our nation."



In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and
other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a fundamentalist
theocracy, not fascism.

But theocracy - the merging of religion and government - is also on the
plate for the new American fascists (just as it was for Hitler, who based
the Nazi death cult on a "new Christianity" that would bring "a thousand
years of peace"), so they don't want to use that term, either.

While the Republicans promote the term "Islamo-fascism," the rest of the
world is pushing back, as the BBC noted in an article by Richard Allen
Greene ("Bush's Language Angers US Muslims" - 12 August 2006):

"Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies agreed that the term [Islamic fascists] was
meaningless.

"'There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was
developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,' he
said. 'This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing
one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their
beliefs.'"

Their beliefs are, quite simply, that governments of the world should be
subservient to religion, a view shared by a small but significant part of
today's Republican party. But that is not fascism - the fascists in the US
want to exploit the fundamentalist theocrats to achieve their own fascistic
goals.

Vice President of the United States Henry Wallace was the first to clearly
and accurately point out who the real American fascists are, and what
they're up to.

In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as Wallace
noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist?
How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in The
New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis
powers of Germany and Japan:

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who
are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger
on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the
United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian
way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to
poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is
never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the
news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money
or more power."

In this, Vice President Wallace was using the classic definition of the word
"fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have
invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who
wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more
appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and
corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and
claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of
government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically
through the merging of state and business leadership, together with
belligerent nationalism." (The US dictionary definition has gotten somewhat
squishier since then, as all the larger dictionary companies have been
bought up by multinational corporations.)

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet
titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells
individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and
for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the
most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he
dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle
Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were
still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to
folks like John Boehner and covertly write legislation, they were openly in
charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out his concern about the same happening
here in America in his 1944 Times article:

" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money
and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million
fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand
if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for
money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time
of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they
follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for
political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was
their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels.
The real problem would come, he believed, when the media was concentrated in
only a few hands:

"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next
paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the
deliberate poisoners of public information..."

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested
that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the
war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative
southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated
"conservative" radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs
his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the
talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as
anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style
detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper
editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new
"patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President. As Lewis
noted in his novel:

"The President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are
two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any
party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The
idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had
more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called
themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname
was generally used."

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by
1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and
powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the
early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business
with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's
thinking when he wrote in The New York Times:

"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to
democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and
the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the
laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American
fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German
counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they
left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."

Thus, the rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and
the middle class, giant corporate behemoths wipe out small and middle sized
businesses, and a corporate iron fist is seizing control of our government
itself. As I detail in my new book "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The
Middle Class," the primary beneficiaries of this new fascism are the
corporatists, while the once-outspoken middle class of the 1950s-1980s is
systematically being replaced by a silent serf-class of the working poor.

As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the
structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added,
"Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it
stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against
small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the
possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice
democracy itself."

But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice
President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write
legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The
People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and
working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the
Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the
harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that
civilization itself is at risk because of gays or Muslims, Wallace
continued:

" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to
immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by
their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and
vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence
that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the
growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to
realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with
Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the
people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the
nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and
broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate
perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and
propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the
common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn
democracy."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the
United States saw rising in America, he added:

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty
guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the
spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward
which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that,
using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously,
they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many
people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the
ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the
budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to
reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate
oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and
cartels."

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses
and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act
(which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions
frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal
(and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his
party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:

"...Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new
dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes
of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for
control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it
in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more
confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost
a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the
institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to
take away their power."

But, he thundered in that speech:

"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind
of power!"

In 2006, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace
confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again
rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism,"
and "the free market" in a "flat" world. The RNC's behavior today eerily
parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said:

"In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their
blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full
circle. Thus it's now critical that we reclaim the word "fascist" to
describe current-day Republican policies, support progressive websites that
spread the good word, and join together this November at the ballot box to
stop fascist election fraud and this most recent incarnation of
Republican-fascism from seizing complete and irretrievable control of our
nation.

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and
host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the
Air America Radio network and Sirius. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent
book, just released, is "Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and
What We Can Do About It." Other books include: "The Last Hours of Ancient
Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," and "What Would Jefferson
Do?"


Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0828-23.htm