Hitler, above all, was a racist. He thought that interbreeding between different races was wrong, but not merely wrong—disastrously wrong. He thought that Darwin’s discovery of the laws of evolution extended to humans and races. He was an intelligent, fanatical and evil man and his dedication to a Fascist world caused the deaths of 50 million people in slightly less than a decade.
In order to do that, he organized a country to build a strong military to expand the space of the Aryan race through military might. He was quite specific. His armies were to conquer territories and his other military forces were to murder the leaders and other individuals of the lesser races in those areas. It became more than theoretical. It became routine.
It was a simple plan if you were one of the favored race but pretty scary if you were not.
Today, Fascism or Neo-Fascism is not so scary. At least not yet. We have a Republican Party that believes–evident from their actions and their votes–that Blacks are inferior, lazy and cannot or will not learn. Creating the inferior minority and dividing the population is a hallmark of Fascism. The inferior group has inadequate social skills. They expect government to take care of them because they are the descendants of slaves. Remembering that a majority is 51% and that there are still 49% who do not accept what the majority thinks of something, this belief in inferiority, is the opinion of the majority in the South and a minority in the North. The Republicans call them “the poor” but we know what they mean. Blacks have been kept poor for a hundred years. In the United States, African-Americans have a median net worth that is ten times lower than Caucasians.
This aspect of Fascism, creating an offending minority, is one of the first uses of propaganda. The targeted group is described as “decadent.” The idea is spread that these inferior, or decadent, human beings are racially incapable of anything other than their lower class lives. Those who fall into that category are, specifically: poor Blacks, gays, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, academicians, climate scientists, Native Americans, virtually everyone in the motion picture industry and elementary school teachers who want to be paid a wage commensurate with their responsibilities and education. Why are these people singled out for this designation? Because it is easy. Many people making the accusations, average Republicans, have no friends or acquaintances who are Black or Hispanic. The Republicans, for all the testimony of their devotion to Jesus and to Christianity, have really developed their own dogma. It is the belief that the way they live, however they live, is the right way. It is not uncommon in the history of Fascism.
The Republicans revere the image of the wealthy White family, with no financial problems, on an upward path towards substantial wealth. Anyone else…Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics and other people who are non-White…may be tolerated if they have become wealthy in spite of the system. Wealthy professional athletes are tolerated as are a selection of physicians and surgeons. Some legal firms who lobby are acceptable. But trial lawyers for those abused by corporate neglect are not. The poor, including veterans, generally considered an underclass simply because they could not make it out of poverty, are told to work their way out of their problems.
Racism drives many issues within the party and it is open and obvious for anyone to see. The fact that there are some Blacks within the Republican Party has nothing to do with the Party and much to do with the character of the Blacks who choose to refer to themselves as Republican and vote that way. One important fact to remember is the solidarity of racists. From Virginian, states bordering on the Atlantic around to those bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, all the way over to and including Texas, all formerly Confederate states, are now Republican. They are called the Red States and they are majority racist.
Think about it for a minute. If someone comes into your little county in the hills of Appalachia, or the swamps of Mississippi or the hard scrabble, dust little corners of Texas and says to you: “I’m going to cut taxes on the rich, go to war with Iran, lower or eliminate Social Security, end Medicaid and provide virtually no way for your children to get a college education.” Would you, an impoverished Appalachian, a destitute Mississippian, or a Texan scrambling to find food stamps consider being a Republican?
No. You would not. But if you were a racist and used your religion (though not attending church) to say that Jesus was white and integration was not Christian, you would.
It is the use of Fascist propaganda all over again. It goes something like this. “You are a superior race. Even though you don’t have food, shoes or a vehicle and your roof leaks, you are superior to those other people, the Blacks, the Northerners and the especially the Yankees.” This was the basic Fascist scheme. Divide and conquer. Make some people feel superior and make them resent what other (inferior) people have.
In the early 20th Century, many Blacks fled north where they would not be thrown off sidewalks, beaten until they were crippled or fired from a job, arrested and put on work gang—or lynched. Yes, those Black immigrants to a new Northern society, which was not particularly welcoming, worked hard at every dirty, menial job that was left over, the ones that whites would not do so that their children might become doctors, lawyers, teachers, eventually even governors and a Black President.
Naturally, the Republican Party hates the Black President. It is the obverse of everything they stand for. The message of hate and division comes from Fundamentalists who should be encouraging love and acceptance. The message is often that he, the President, who has amassed broad, general support by welcoming everyone into society, is generating the division, he who is creating resentment and hatred between groups. That’s how Fascists work. Divide society and blame the opponent for what you yourself are doing. The message comes from Republican candidates. It also comes from Fox news, with authoritative white men in suits and blondes in short skirts who keep crossing and re-crossing their legs.
The new Fascist message rolls off the tongue. Others, worth less than White human beings, they say, have more than they deserve and they were given it by the Liberals and the academics, never worked a day for it, the Fascists say. The poor (which includes huge numbers of deluded, propagandized Republicans) the story goes, want to share the income of those who have worked oh-so-hard for it and live off welfare from the government. In some cases, it is true many Republicans haven’t worked hard either or educated themselves. But of course how could they? The “decadent” people have been supported by the Democratic Party. The Democrats and the Liberals and the Progressives want to share your wealth, say the Right Wing Republicans. The Republicans are on the side of the Middle Class, they say, while voting against simple access to lower-cost health care and Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and better schools. It is all part of one Big Lie.
It started with Reagan. Exactly the same way that Fascism started. Make the people believe one big lie and then move on to others. Reagan’s big lie was that we could lower taxes below the amounts needed to run the country without eventually bankrupting the country. It is over 30 years later and every Republican administration has adhered to Reagan’s policies and we have $18 trillion more debt than we had the day he walked through the White House door.
In the South, the Democratic Party for 100 years was merely a group of racists who wanted to separate from the national Democratic Party and, for the most part, never did anything for the people. Black or White. But when Democrats like Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson began to give Southern Blacks their long-overdue Civil Rights, the Segregationist politicians switched to the Republican Party, where they have formed the nucleus of a Neo-Fascist political philosophy marching towards a totalitarian society.
Are we saying that the Republicans are Nazis? No. The term “Nazi” refers to a German political party of the 1930s and 40s, under Hitler. It no longer exists. Nazis were evil. They were dedicated to the eradication of whole societies, of the entire Jewish race in any location or country that the Fascists could control. The old Nazi Party is not even remotely close to the current Republican “Fascists.”
Comparatively, Republican aims are petty. They want to establish one-party rule, to control the country by controlling the vote and they are well on their way. The mechanics are pretty much the same as any Fascist organization. Rig the elections, spread propaganda and lies about opposing candidates; obstruct government and then claim that the existing government is incompetent. Currently, we have added one new twist in American politics. The Fascist-Republican appointed Supreme Court has agreed to allow rich Americans and wealthy corporations to buy candidates. They are now allowed to spend as much money as it takes to hire politicians who will do their bidding to run the country. That is the new Fascism.
The Republican Party today does have characteristics of original Fascism. Many call it the new Fascism, therefore, “Neo-Fascism.” The new Fascism does play on race, as we said, but it plays on poverty, on ignorance or despair and uses propaganda to twist the facts. During the period after the “9/11” disaster, it used all of its media influence to create a strong hostility towards Iraq. It used government-generated lies, just as Hitler and Mussolini did, to start a war. There were manufactured stories of infanticide and declarations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that they intended to use against the United States, both of which were lies…propaganda, similar to the propaganda about the Germans in Belgium in the First World War bayoneting babies, which never existed. But many American boys enlisted as a result. Some died as a result.
We know Fascism mainly from old film motion pictures of jack-booted soldiers marching in strict lines, turning their heads to face their leader, the maniacal Furhrer or Duce, and then marching on, apparently to dominance and victory. Free men proved that this dominance was merely a superiority of arms and men. Other countries would eventually build forces with greater superiority in arms and men.
Nolte, Linz, Griffin and Payne, the principal academic experts on Fascism as a doctrine, have all suggested a set of criteria for Fascism as it existed in the 1920s and 1930s. 1. It was anti-liberal, anti-communist, and anti-conservative. 2. It created a new type of authoritarian state that was corporatist and expansionist and had its own set of ideals, or rules. 3. It emphasized aesthetics, mass mobilization, militarization, violence, masculine domination of society and an unbending adherence to the will of the leader of the party and therefore the party itself.
Currently, American Neo-Fascism has some of the same attributes. It is anti-liberal, anti-communist. It is authoritarian to the point of attempting to restrict the vote of the opposition. It is corporatist and violent, (encouraging gun ownership) militaristic and somewhat expansionist. It is a male dominated party and a white-dominated party. In Congress, the authoritarian side of the Republican Party comes to the surface when they vote as one person, punishing those that do not vote with the group. No one is allowed to vote against the party in either the House or the Senate. Even as a minority of the Senate, they blocked progressive legislation from being passed, using a filibuster loophole over 400 times. Then they propagandized the Democrats and took the Senate in the 2014 elections by blaming the Democrats for what they, the Fascist-Republicans, had actually done and by using hundreds of millions of dollars provided by billionaires and corporations to buy commercials to spread more lies.
The philosopher Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” had a strong influence on American industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner to create a style of unbridled and unrepentant capitalism that was abandoned after the era of the Robber Barons and the New Deal. But Ronald Reagan and the Conservative Republicans resurrected a modified version that attempts to drive all unions out of the marketplace. It has been able to use propaganda to spread the New Fascist idea that, if the poor, unaided by collective bargaining or even a minimal public education cannot raise themselves from the mire, then the government should not help them.
The election of 2014 was a direct result of the Neo-Fascist movement. The Republicans, thanks to a constant barrage of lies to the American people, and their obstruction of all legislation that would help the people, used hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes as much as ten times the amounts that the Democrats could raise to dominate and rig the elections and win both House and Senate. Did they then sign any of the bills creating jobs? No. They did, as their first piece of legislation, introduce another bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which, if it passed, would deny health care to 30 million people in another favor for the health insurance industry.
Reagan advanced a version of conservative economics. It was an adaptation of what had been called in the early 1900s, “Classical” or “Neo-Liberal” economics. Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman, both at the University of Chicago, were influential in developing it here in the United States. Hayek, raised and educated in Austria during the development of both Fascist governments and Communist governments into totalitarian societies, thus feared the transformation of large central governments into totalitarian societies. Friedman, having worked in the New Deal feared the growth of large government also, but his main concern was what he feared was the harmful intrusion of large government into and interrupting the flow of regular economy. He felt that government, including regulators, should become involved in the economy as little as possible. This, and monetary policy replacing fiscal policy in most situations where there was an option, became a sizeable part of what today is called the Chicago School of economics. That idea basically is that the people need only a bare minimum of government and should pay only the minimal amount in taxes necessary to maintain that simplified system. Reagan did cut taxes, particularly on the very wealthy. And some of those very wealthy people—now much, much wealthier—decided to spend that extra money to take over the government of the United States.
These were the beginnings of what has become our current problem with Neo-Fascism. Some very wealthy people, billionaires, began by purchasing the loyalty of those who controlled the Republican Party. Through gradual adaptation, these Neo-Conservatives became Neo-Fascists, using the money supplied by people like the Koch Brothers and the corporations that made up the lobbying group ALEC to buy votes on a grand scale and creating hundreds of organizations to provide propaganda against the legislation that they wanted to overturn, like the State Policy Network, a Conservative think tank that often publishes distorted views of issues. They will raise average wages of public employees to the level of only the few top earning executives and then use aggregates of those exaggerated numbers in reports of problems with labor or unions that, in fact, do not exist. They create background, using false figures, to support ALEC’s attacks on environmental organizations. These organizations are supported by Right Wing Fundamentalists as well as giant international corporations. All these people, prior to Reagan, were on the fringe of political organizations because of their bizarre ideas. Allying themselves with the Fundamentalists, they took up the fight against abortion, funding strange groups who would stand outside abortion clinics and chant and tried to prevent women from entering clinics. They even bombed clinics and murdered physicians. In anti-abortion and anti-contraception the Right Wing found issues on which they had common ground with the Catholic Church’s conservative Bishops. The result was an active support of the Right Wing by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. With the Catholic Church, about 26% of U.S. population, on their side they had developed considerable clout. Soon only the wildest, craziest and most radical were speaking out, many of them members of the House and Senate with preposterous messages, often provided by the Fascist-Republican propaganda machine, to attract more fringe elements and to distract from the severe problems they were creating for women.
The point of outrageous statements, like the challenges over whether President Obama had a legal birth certificate or whether we should attack Iran (or that our military was planning to attack Texas) are merely to attract the attention of these “low information” voters. The Fascist-Republicans control about 90% of the subject matter of AM radio, which is primarily talk radio. Paid propagandists like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, plus dozens and dozens more, harangue the Democrats and the President on a daily basis. It has been demonstrated that the Republican Party actually provides talking points so that all these paid propagandists can coordinate their attacks on the President. For example, they might attack on behalf of their large oil company sponsors by claiming that the President is doing too little to help the people of Louisiana and New Orleans to recover from Katrina. Then they will use their Senate filibuster to prevent any funds from going to New Orleans. Then they will attack him again for the same thing. What about his legislation? They are accomplished liars and will spin it—if it is even allowed to get out to the public—to make it sound like bad legislation.
Fascism can come in the guise of supposedly good legislation, as with ALEC, a national corporate lobbying group supported by corporations, that writes legislation for polluters like oil and chemical companies, or on law and order—but really to create more disastrous for-profit private prison corporations—or on charter schools, but really just to create separate private schools in areas where white people live. Or it may be legislation on gun ownership and the right to carry a gun anywhere…legislation written by the NRA to be submitted by one of their purchased state legislators to the legislature with no changes.
Or it can come in the obvious obstruction of legislation to help the people. Such legislation never gets to the floor of the House for a vote, or if it somehow escapes the House Fascists, it is filibustered by the Senate. Be very clear. Your national and state legislatures no longer work for the people. They have now purchased all the Republicans, and support the elections of those Republican candidates with enormous amounts of money.
Sixty percent of the states and the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court are supported by the Fascists. If we don’t over turn it in the next election, it could go the way of Fascism in Germany.
Seven days after he was elected Chancellor, Hitler announced that Germany was now a dictatorship and he made all the rules. And there was no one left who could challenge him.
