In 1946, in one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe, ancient and yet contemporary, with a tradition of culture, music, popular culture and modern art, an old woman, dressed in a ragged coat, with an old woolen bandana wrapped around her head dragged a small cart down the street. The formerly popular neighborhood was filled with piles of rock and dirt, and the skeletons of once proud buildings, torn apart, yet standing like crippled sentinels, gave evidence of the utter devastation of war.
If you looked around, you would have seen that this once glittering cultural capitol was now everywhere in ruins, as if a relic of an ancient empire thousands of years old. All that remained were the partial bombed-out remains of that once sublime architecture that—a mere ten years before–was the glorious and great German capitol of Berlin.
In the 1920s, twenty years before, after a great World War, the people of Germany were faced with gigantic inflation and then crushing Depression. Buffeted by these twin economic disasters, the people looked for leadership. In spite of economic turmoil Berlin reached down and brought up from the depths of their Teutonic souls the energy to create.
And create they did. Music, architecture, modern art, theater, and the new art form…motion pictures. Berlin was an oasis of lively art amidst a citizenry locked in a daily struggle to survive. Struggle they did, with multiple political parties assembling, speaking, writing, and now, with the then new media radio–broadcasting.
Across the Atlantic, the American people found a great leader, one who gave them jobs and hope and a plan for a better future. Franklin D. Roosevelt used the power of government to build roads, bridges, dams, schools, libraries and public buildings and to resurrect the spirit of a people, one out of four of whom had been thrown out of work.
Germany’s eventual leader was also a builder but he was more. His plan was to execute his ideology and that of the followers of his political party. The National Socialists were one of many workers’ parties, including the Communists, who battled for votes in the German parliament with assemblies and speeches and with physical fights in the public square.
The National Socialists were good at assembling and organizing their version of the common thuggery, which they referred to as the Brown Shirts, (SA Sturmabteilung, commonly known as storm troopers.) But they were more. In those days with little electronic media, and only the very early days of radio, assemblies and political rallies demonstrated political strength. The strength of the SA was in beating their opponents and breaking up their rallies. Later, they would turn rallies into an art form and forsake the German people for the German industrialists and the military.
Evolution from Nationalism to Fascism
Ideologies are harmless enough when they have no political power or when they have limited political power or when the ideology itself is harmless. But when a demanding, aggressive political ideology gains complete power, in some instances, it becomes dangerous.
When the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, they held strong views about Jews and about aggressive wars. But they did not immediately begin to murder Jews or declare war on their neighbors. Each step in the restrictive, totalitarian process people hoped would be the final one. But they did not know what we know now. The ultimate objective of the beast is to devour everyone. It cannot stop itself. Once grown to maturity, it is insatiable.
The first parts were less dangerous. First Jews were removed from teaching positions. Then from professional positions and societies. Then Jews were denied the right to own a business or marry a non-Jew. Jewish shops and synagogues were destroyed and burned.
Then Jews began to be imprisoned for no reason at all, to solve “the problem” of apparently merely being Jewish.
Once imprisoned, Jews and others were too costly to maintain, to feed and clothe. Soon, the Nazis were seeking a “final solution,” how to rid German society of Jews altogether, from public and even from prisons. The search for that solution inevitably led to mass murder.
Lies that lead to war
War was the same. Adolph Hitler and other German leaders had every intention of attacking other countries from the beginning. That was part of their philosophy of a great German Empire of nations where Aryan people would dominate Slavs and Russians and others. Only a few Germans understood what this meant. It meant war.
But the Germans were lulled into a sense of security because the first step was not war at all. It was a blatantly illegal takeover of the Rhineland, of Alsace-Lorraine, the Ruhr….the long disputed industrial land between Germany and France.
It was a takeover of another country using propaganda and diversion to cloud the issue. The idea was to make others the villains and Germany the victim. The rest of the world, confused and alarmed—and not used to the kinds of propaganda attacks that today are recognizable as Fascist techniques–stood by as the Germans marched into the Rhineland. No guns were fired. No reprisals were made. The German propaganda said that the occupation of the Rhineland was illegal. It was pure propaganda but they took the Rhineland back.
All throughout the 1930s, the more aggressive posture of the German government was justified, non-stop, with lies and propaganda. Controlling all the media, the German government created elaborate scenarios of Jewish infidelity to the “Fatherland” whereas in fact most Jews had offered their lives to support the government as soldiers in the First World War.
By the late 1930s the unyielding and unbending Nazi philosophy held a grip on everyone. German soldiers no longer gave an oath to their country. They vowed to support their “Fuehrer,” their leader, Adolf Hitler. Citizens or soldiers could protest but you would be removed from the Nazi Party, lose your job and your rights, or worse—be declared a traitor and summarily hanged or shot. Every individual was a potential spy on their fellow citizens, even children.
From there it was simple. Use the mass of German men who had been brainwashed since childhood…ten years of constant indoctrination on the “goodness” of the Nazis and the superiority of the Aryan race…to justify war on Poland and Russia, and the rest of the Slavic race. Use the subsequent declarations of war by the rest of the world to prove what the Nazis had said all along…that the Germans were in danger on all sides from those who wished her ill.
The final results of Fascism
The result was fifty million people dead, around the world and a Germany so devastated that it was hardly recognizable as the same country that existed before the war.
These are the results of Fascism. There are no alternatives. Fascism is a nationalist philosophy, a political philosophy of exclusion, of hatred, of division, of no regard for human life. And Fascism, despite all its lessons, is still alive today.
The Nazis were not the only Fascists. Far from it. They were merely the most militaristically organized. There have been Fascist regimes in Europe, Asia, Latin America…all over the world. They all lead to one thing….mass murder. They will not tolerate objection to the system. Ultimately the only way to stop civilized human beings from objection to an unyielding, dominating system is to kill them.
That’s the eventual outcome of every Fascist society. Whatever the political system is called, it lacks tolerance for others views. It is never really about making a better society. It is really about control of government in order to institute a specific policy.
Fascism disregards the rights of citizens in society for the impersonal goal of making the state adhere to a specific set of rules that the leaders of the ideological system have invented. People lose their importance. They become statistics. They become expendable.
So the higher power that the rank-and-file Fascist follower seeks to assist gives them the moral authority to slight, to injure, even to kill others…in the name of the ultimate authority. Rationality is lost in a fever to follow the dream…one that eventually becomes a nightmare.
Relevance to America today
The one political philosophy that has the potential to become dangerous—some say it already has become very dangerous to our society—is the Conservatism of the Republican Party.
The problem with Conservative values in the Republican Party is that they went from a simple addressing of the size of government a flawed economic theory that would privatize almost everything. That led to a theory that cutting taxes on the wealthiest…at which point truth and reality…the simple fact that it only led to huge government debt…went out the window. And those pathetic results were converted to a phony message that we should pay almost no taxes at all and do away with government altogether.
Worse than that, the current philosophy begins to encroach into those areas that affect people’s lives very seriously. People without health care can die—26,000 last year alone documented by the medical profession. Many millions of people have been bankrupted without the ability to cover their healthcare costs. And the false economic promises have lead to 14 million unemployed and the Second Great Depression. We are in it now.
The very poor have been cut off from many services, resulting in more homeless, resulting in people who cannot exist in the atmosphere of life in the raw elements and sicken and die.
More people are homeless than at any time since the 1930s. There are tent cities from St. Petersburg to Seattle. The Republicans, the Neo-Fascists, have a dispassionate attitude and only one goal—to take over the government for the super-rich. They seem to want a return to the Gilded Age where most people lived in tenements and the super-rich gave parties in castle-like mansions in Newport. Many of these people are richer than they ever imagined in their wildest dreams.
Greed and God and global power dominate their ideology.
And that is the crux of the problem…the very rich, made richer by the Conservative policies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have now decided—some of them—that they want more than just wealth. They want control of American society. Not only do they want control of all the wealth and the legislation—they want control of your daily life.
What’s more they want to substitute insane Fundamentalist Christianity for your religion and bring it right into your living room. They want to tell you how to live your life and if they cannot, they say that you—you—are at fault. You are intruding into their rights to have all others live the way they want them to live. The Catholic Church now says that for others to have the right to birth control impinges upon their religious rights. That is how crazy the Right Wing has become, turning the Constitution on its head.
Of course it is nothing more than a Neo-Fascist approach, pure and simple. This is the attempt by one political party or one group to impose its will and its philosophy upon the entire society. The Neo-Fascists fight against gays to be allowed to marry simply because it does not fit into their harum-scarum, totally illogical, racist and bigoted religious view.
The fact is that only in the last fifty years has society recognized what science tells us about homosexuality. It is a determined thing. It is not a group of hippies going out to have some kind of perverted sex. It is a natural, if uncommon, part of human nature. Most people accept facts and live with others accordingly.
Neo-Fascists, being strong advocates of their beliefs first and rational second—will not accept facts. It is easy to hate and become intolerant when you will not accept facts on anything from homosexuality to global warming. One day homosexuals will be driven out of Provincetown and Key West, not because of their sexual preferences but because Neo-Fascists not accepting environmental science, not accepting rising water levels and clinging to their 19th Century beliefs will allow the seas to flood seaside areas.
This religion is more of a political religion. It is a belief concocted by people who do not believe that others have rights. That is a Neo-Fascist political belief, not a religious one. You could be a Nazi or you could be wrong. And if you were wrong, eventually the state had to do something with you.
Do you think it is a coincidence that ALEC, the legislative action committee for the super-rich and giant global corporations is building private prisons all over the country? It’s part of their legislative agenda. It’s a business. A segment of their friends, the prison corporations, will take care of those who no longer fit into their idea of American Exceptionalism, if it should come to that.
Similar laws from ALEC are strengthening the position of gun sales for the violent members of the National Rifle Association. We must never forget the words of Wayne LaPierre President of the NRA, when he said to his members: “Those who have the guns make the rules.”
Has anyone forgotten the role of Blackwater in setting up private Gestapo-like services for Richard Cheney? How they moved in on New Orleans in black SUVs with automatic weapons and no one to challenge their authority. Has anyone forgotten that Dick Cheney taped your conversations and picked people up off the streets and sent them to be tortured in Egypt?
So what is this new Fascism, this Neo-Fascism? It is the attempt by a group that has a nationalistic attitude to take over the country. It is a collective effort of the military, the government and one political party.
In the United States last year the Republican dominated Supreme Court ruled that the very rich can not only give as much money as they want to political candidates but they can do it anonymously…so you don’t even know you’re being lied to or who is paying for the lies. Scott Walker of Wisconsin got $45 million dollars to keep him in office from unknown sources. It helped him win and to continue to “divide and conquer” the workers of Wisconsin.
Does anyone remember who was the originator of the term “divide and conquer” as a political mantra? Adolph Hitler.
We have arrived at an era when the Rich have gained control. We now know what it looks like. They have purchased one of the political parties and turned it into a new Fascism. They have purchased the Supreme Court. And they now have paid state legislators and Governors of The Republicans that used to be are now the Neo-Fascists. If you want to know what Fascism is, you can simply listen to the propaganda on the Right Wing.
Right Wing propaganda
In the old days, Fascists would hold a street speech. A charismatic speaker would stand up in the city square and arouse the public to a frenzy. Anyone who objected was beaten and carted away. Today, the whole process is more sophisticated. The moneyed interests who support the Neo-Fascist Party, which is composed largely by the old Southern Segregationists, (just so you know who the real core of the Party is) have bought up radio stations all over the country. And on those stations, fully 90% of all talk radio in the country, Right Wing commentators have been given scripts to read.
The most famous is Rush Limbaugh. He rails against anything that would remotely affect the people who pay him. It is a fact that he makes $40,000,000 a year to connect with an audience that is largely uneducated, older, Southern, and heavily racist. But they are a powerful political force in the former Confederate states and in less sophisticated areas of other states, like Nebraska, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio.
Of course some are merely the old white racists. When Rush Limbaugh sang or played the song: “Barack the Magic Negro” this was his audience. And they were delighted. When Rush calls advocates for women’s rights “feminazis” or “sluts” or “whores” they are ecstatic. They are racist and chauvinist and militaristic and gun crazy. And Republican.
But the reason that Rush Limbaugh does what he does is for money. He is the ultimate propaganda whore. He has no personal relationships. He has been married four times. The only way he could have even a casual passing sexual relationship was to go to the Caribbean to pay impoverished teen age girls to have sex with him. He is a fat, disgusting, pill-addicted scumbag.
But the Neo-Fascist approach to bending the truth and creating stereotypes is not limited to Limbaugh. Oh, there is good money in it. Many other multi-millionaires have followed the same path, dozens of them. Hugh Hewitt. Bill O’Reilly. G. Gordon Liddy. Neal Boortz. Michael Reagan. Michael Medved. Sean Hannity. Michael Savage. Laura Ingraham. Michelle Malkin. Matt Drudge. The list of hate mongers who were paid millions to spread lies and bigotry goes on and on.
But is it a conspiracy to force Right Wing values on people like the average American citizens, who do not believe in more tax cuts for the rich and who do want affordable health care, and consequently do like the Affordable Care Act, even though the Right Wing media keep attacking it, while spouting propaganda that the people don’t want it. Surveys repeatedly show that this is false.
Let’s take up the subject of not only Right Wing propaganda, but the funding of it. See if you think it is mere coincidence. Clear Channel radio owns 850 radio stations. Clear Channel was funded by a Texan by the name of Lowrey Mays. He lobbied for the legislation that allowed radio networks to own almost as many radio stations as they wanted. The only limit was basically the number of stations in one market. (about a third was the limit). With legislation loosened under Clinton, Lowrey Mays build a huge network of stations, buying up every local station in sight.
Then, he simply programmed syndicated material, including Rush Limbaugh, which he sent all over the country. Once Limbaugh’s lies were all over the place creating anger an paranoia, Mays set up Premiere programming, adding more rabble rousers to his stable. The result has been the undermining of the truth about government. All these people hear is Right Wing propaganda.
Now, to make things worse. Clear Channel is owned by Bain Capital. Romney’s old firm, one with whom he has close ties, is sending out the Rush Limbaugh lie and hate machine every single day. And Romney, despite several chances, will not disassociate himself from Limbaugh.
Would it make sense for Bain, even if they were trying to be impartial, to do whatever they could to help someone who is clearly on their ultra-conservative wavelength? The answer is obvious. But it might not be to your best advantage, if, for example, Romney’s FCC decided, and Congress somehow passed a law saying that radio networks could own all the radio stations in a community.
Clear Channel has a point of view. That point of view is expressed by their principal radio hosts, who are: Rush Limbaugh, who attacks President Obama every day; Glenn Beck, who is a Right Wing lunatic; Sean Hannity, who attacks everyone who does not fall into line with Conservative Right Wing policies.
The big conspirators against the People
So the first part of the era of Neo-Fascism is in place. The first need is for a group of wealthy industrialists to meet up and strike an alliance with a political party willing to sell out the people for money. The industry was the oil industry an a large array of very wealthy people, some who struck it rich in oil and others who inherited oil companies.
They had the money to buy the radio stations and place advertising on other media to control the message. They connected with the Conservative wing of the Republican Party. People who say, about corrupt political parties…oh, both parties are doing it…are wrong. The Republicans have sold out and the Democrats are fighting a losing battle in many places against a mountain of cash that has fallen on them from the super-rich contributors of the Right Wing.
Conservatives in the Republican Party were the logical group for the Right Wing Rich to capture because they were already behind a message—a false one, but one they found that they could make the people believe, for a while at least. This was the idea of tax cuts to increase the productivity of the economy.
That message was proved wrong in the 1980s, in the 1990s and especially in the 2000s…leading to economic disaster. But by 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President, so many people had been indoctrinated despite $15 trillion in government debt accumulated under those policies that in 2010 more Republicans were elected. Yes, by and large, Americans have become ignorant.
In other words, the idea was that they would cut taxes to grow the economy. They did cut taxes by more than in half…huge cuts at the top. But the economy not only did not grow, huge deficits began to pile up. Then a President came in (Clinton) who did the opposite—raised taxes (because deficits were huge)–and we then had the longest unbroken stretch of economic growth in the history of the country.
So, how can Republicans be elected repeatedly if the very opposite of what people want, which is jobs and a stable government, is the opposite of what Republicans stand for?
The answer is that the leaders of the Conservative movement have now morphed into the next phase. They have learned that money can control influence of state legislatures. Key pieces of legislation can be quietly entered and passed and used to change the conditions that keep these giant corporations from becoming even richer. At your expense.
The urgency of now
The one political philosophy that has the potential to become dangerous—some say it already has become very dangerous to our society—is the Conservatism of the Republican Party.
The problem with Conservative values in the Republican Party is that they went from a simple addressing of the size of government to seeking a way to privatize everything, to a theory that cutting taxes on the wealthiest…at which point truth and reality…the facts…began to be dropped, to a political system which now says that we must do away with government altogether.
Worse than that, the current philosophy begins to encroach into those areas that affect people’s lives very seriously. People without health care can die. Many millions of people have been bankrupted without the ability to cover their healthcare costs.
The very poor have been cut off from many services, resulting in more homeless, resulting in people who cannot sustain themselves in the new harsher realities of American life. Many sicken and die. This is a dispassionate attitude on the part of the Neo-Fascist Republicans not seen since before the 1930s.
And this callous attitude is not from people who are in the Middle Class and Lower Class who are turning away. It is the rich and super-rich multi-millionaires and billionaires, the sponsors of Neo-Fascism, people who are richer than they ever imagined in their wildest dreams. Some of whom have so much money that they don’t even have the faintest idea of how much money they have.
From wealth to power
And that is the crux of the problem…one segment of those very rich, made richer by the Conservative tax policies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have now decided that they want more than just wealth. They want control of American society. Not only do they want control of all the wealth and the legislation—they want control of your daily life. They want to insert insane Fundamentalist Christianity for your religion.
And this year, in the 2012 Republican primary elections for a Presidential candidate, the Republican candidates finally went over into Neo-Fascism. Some of the candidates maintain that contraception and abortion for any reason are policies that the state should make illegal. Morally, they say, according to their religion, they are objectionable.
If society does not prohibit those activities, then according to the Neo-Fascist Republicans, you…the citizen….American society…is intruding into their rights as citizens. So the position of the Republicans is that their religious beliefs should become the law of the land. Many Republicans insist that the United States is a country whose national religion is Christianity and they insist that their version of Christianity—in most cases a belief completely lacking in any theology at all—should be incorporated into legislation.
This is how Fascism has always worked. One segment of society gains control and then shoves its ideology, or religion, into your face. It doesn’t matter if it is imperialism and war or religion and bigotry. This is what they do.
Fascism takes over when one political party or one group imposes its personal moral and political philosophy upon the entire society through intimidation, outright lies and political misdirection.
Today, seventy-seven percent of the American people say that they think abortion should be legal. They don’t say…have an abortion. The American people simply say that is it not their business to intrude their beliefs into your life. But Republican Neo-Fascists want to outlaw abortion in spite of the will of the people.
Here’s the problem. Seventy-seven percent of the people also believe in angels. Angels are of course a myth, like the boatman on the river Styx, or the hydra or Cyclops. But it is a popular myth in a popular religion that offers the ultimate gift…everlasting life. Who could turn that down?
So with Christianity obviously very popular among American citizens, the Neo-Fascists know exactly what to do. They couch every piece of legislation in logic that ultimately leads to a pretended Christian result. In reality, the legislation…for example…to do away with election fraud, which might seem to be based on fairness, which is a Christian principle, is in reality legislation for a problem that does not exist. What does exist is ALEC’s determination to balance the scales for billionaires by reducing the legitimate votes of citizens. So “voter fraud” becomes a straw man and ALEC’s paid legislators get out the vote among their colleagues to pass it.
ALEC, Neo-Fascist Republicans and the Right Wing Billionaires
Is Neo-Fascism a problem? There are 2,000 paid members of the corporate lobby called ALEC across the 50 states, an average of 40 members in each state legislature, working for ALEC’s sponsors, like Peabody Coal, EXXON, Home Depot, Kraft, Pfizer, FEDEX, (and UPS) Coca-Cola, Walmart and hundreds of others.
Corporate sponsors have influenced ALEC, their legislative arm to introduce over 800 pieces of legislation in the last several years. That legislation was not on behalf of the citizens of those states. It was for corporations.
Governors like Scott Walker, even before he was governor, and others of the 29 Republican governors, like Mitch Daniels and John Kasich and Rick Perry and Rick Scott and others…most of whom will be in power until 2015…have introduced bills to privatize education, roll back environmental regulations, eliminate workers rights, deregulate major industries and pass anti-voter laws. A dozen states have already used an ALEC-created resolution to compel the EPA to stop regulating carbon emissions in their states.
The last thing this country needs is Neo-Fascism. We can overcome this enormously powerful organization if we fight as we have not as a country since 1945. It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that this is a fight for our rights and quite possibly a fight for our very lives.
Seemingly rational people, even into the Renaissance, burned their fellow men at the stake, burned them to death because they were accused of not believing that the piece of bread called the Eucharist was actually the body and blood of Christ, but merely a symbol. Radical policies, policies that seem irrational must be put down before they follow to their inevitable conclusion. The ultimate acts of True Believers are always violent and chaotic. They always lead to death and destruction, no matter how benign they may seem at the beginning.
Do not let anything or anyone deter you from fighting this sickness in the body politic. Neo-Fascism may seem like the activities of a bunch of lunatics, like the Tea Party people who said about Obamacare that they would fight a “government takeover” of health care. Then they said that they would fight anyone who would try to take away their (government) Medicare. Americans are sometimes in some places…fools. But if they are, they are heavily influenced these days to be so by Right Wing propaganda which is ubiquitous.
Go to ALEC EXPOSED on the Internet. Learn more. Ignore television commercials on all sides. Read. Study. Tell your friends the truth. This could be the last great battle for American Democracy. The money and the power is on their side. Truth is on ours.
