Polite Fascism at Home, the Real Stuff Abroad

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/sherwood-ross/47915/polite-fascism-at-home-the-real-stuff-abroad

Polite Fascism at Home, the Real Stuff Abroad
by Sherwood Ross | February 4, 2013 - 9:58am

Polite Fascism has come to America. If this concept sounds preposterous to Americans it may sound otherwise to foreigners who are getting the worst of it. The public judges the White House largely by its conduct of domestic affairs, about what it has done for them, and not by its foreign wars, which is where America’s fascist brutality is largely exercised and of which the U.S. public knows little. Obama has quieted many Leftist critics by taking actions to appease their needs, such as securing passage of Obamacare. He has satisfied gays, by pledging to treat them as human beings. He has indicated he will not let the Republicans eviscerate Social Security, reassuring the elderly. And he is calling for enactment of gun control legislation, long sought by the Left.

What’s more, neither the Pentagon nor the FBI is rounding up large numbers of domestic dissidents and putting them in “detention camps,” as Nixon’s Attorney General Richard Kleindienst once threatened would be the fate of anti-war demonstrators who tied up traffic in Washington, D.C. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security may be a sword hung over the heads of the citizenry but its officers are not smashing store windows and beating Jews on the Hitler model. Suffice it to say the FBI now and then entraps Muslims in dangerous bomb plot “conspiracies,” which are alleged plots, not actions. But it has made no wholesale arrests. The object of Polite Fascism apparently is to keep people in line by making examples of the few rather than mincemeat of the many.

Critics of the Bush and Obama regimes have been, and are, free to speak, write, and demonstrate---even though this last is becoming increasingly hazardous as the Feds militarize the once friendly cop on the beat. Demonstrators these days are in jeopardy of having their First Amendment rights quashed by the promiscuous use of tear gas against them. Overall, though, the Obama regime fits this Webster definition of “fascist”: “A totalitarian governmental system led by a dictator and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism, militarism, and often racism.” However, when it comes to “emphasizing an aggressive nationalism” and “militarism,” Mr. Obama can’t deny those terms don’t fit him. They do. Even though he masquerades as a moderate, left-of-center liberal, he is the most powerful fascist who has ever lived, the commander-in-chief of the largest war machine ever, and he operates with a reckless brutality that is killing innocent people and inspiring fear over vast areas of the world, literally turning life for millions into a living hell and causing their populations to despise America.

Suffice it to say enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) on New Year’s Eve, 2011, gave Mr. Obama more power than any king. As the American Civil Liberties Union put it: “Although President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had ‘serious reservations’ about the NDAA’s detention provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use them, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The provisions – which were negotiated by a small group of members of Congress, in secret, and without proper congressional review – are inconsistent with fundamental American values.” The law, in fact, allows the federal authority to arrest and detain any person indefinitely without trial, effectively giving the president the powers of a king and subverting the Constitution.

[brush]

1. Obama is only the current one, not the only one

Last edited Tue Feb 5, 2013, 01:55 PM - Edit history (3)

All the presidents before him since we started our international military interventions for corporate interests have done the same. I'm sure you know this so please don't make it seem that Obama is doing anything different. You must know also that in 1893, Hawaii's monarchy was overthrown when a group of businessmen and sugar planters forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate. They were backed by a force of Marines and sailors from a U.S. warship docked in the harbor. This was our first overthrow/intervention. Our country is and has been the most rapacious and powerful imperialistic force on the face of the planet since Great Britain or Rome. Even the Soviet Union was no match. Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Iran, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq and on and on followed, all under the guise (for home consumption) of furthering democracy and liberty.

This is a huge part of what the Presidency of the United States is all about, but I surmise it's almost something that the person who occupies the office is expected/forced to do by corporate expectations backed by our military might. Ike, a general himself, knew this well when he warned us about our "military industrial complex." My own feeling is that Obama is the one that may at least establish a template for disentanglement from our military interventions as he's done in Iraq and avoided in Egypt, Libya and Syria if he can figure out how to back out of the Afghanistan/drone debacle — without being assassinated that is. International fascism is serious business about serious profits for our corporations, in the trillions not just billions. There are real economic reasons for us being in Afghanistan — rare earths, oil, gold, iron ore, copper, lithium — and anyone who disrupts this does so at their own peril.