American Fascism

[Bhaisahab]

Back in 1944, a dude called Henry Wallace defined American fascism in an article reprinted by truthout. i think you should read it. it's as prophetic as Orwell's 1984, which was written around the same time i think...
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Some excerpts:
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The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. 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. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.

SNIP

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.

SNIP

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.

SNIP

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

READ IT AT: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/082103F.shtml

[Cleita]

1. Thanks.

:kick:

[Syrinx]

2. this quote pinpoints 2004

"American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery."

[UL_Approved]

3. Life imitates art

2004. A novel about the overthrow of the United States of America. West Texas businessman, George Bush, gets acquainted with politics. In his course of business and political aspirations, he meets people with fascist ideals and embraces their ideology. A coup d'etat is planned in the year 2000, and the rest, as they say, is history.

[sweetheart]

4. Challenging this glib term "fascism"

If Bush wins," the US writer Barbara Probst
Solomon claimed just before the election, "fascism is possible in
the United States." Blind faith in a leader, she said, a
conservative working class and the use of fear as a political
weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She's wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security
state as "soft fascism" in the Guardian last month. So is the
endless traffic on the internet.

In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it
as "... a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive
preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and
by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity". It is hard to
read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the
elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical
popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush
of provoking.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1346632,00.html

[kentuck]

5. We're finally there...

or mighty damn close!