Our own opposition people, and the citizens of other lands whose lives are threatened, whose families are immiserated, owe it to themselves to examine the born again Fascism which has replaced liberal democracy in the USA. For this nation and its mendacious and nihilistic misleadership promise humanity catastrophe, war and sufferings beyond the wildest imaginings of the German, Italian or Japanese Fascists of past times.
Fascism is a system of melded corporate and state power. It is based upon the authority of the "Fuehrerprinzip"; The leader principle: The husband is unquestioned head of his household, the boss of his enterprise and the prince, whatever his title, of the whole nation.
Those who don't fit in this hierarchic paradigm: Women, racial or national minorities, and free-thinking artists or intellectuals are to be made subject to ever-tightening social controls.
Workers have no rights their employers are bound to respect and should be grateful for whatever pittance they recieve. Certainly they enjoy no right, and nor do the other excluded grougs, to democratically organise, for such would threaten the basic nature of the State.
Other nations, especially when they are smaller and weaker, are populated by inferior peoples of inferior moral fibre. These should have no expectation other than to labour for or to provide resources to their betters.
We will field the largest possible military, police, propaganda and corporate organisations to enforce this design.
And God is on our side.
In our American society there has always been an irreducible number of individuals who cannot handle freedom. Who fear it, who do really believe such stuff as that first toke will make of one an helpless addict. But only now, in an economically decadent nation, has the number of such persons become so large that authoritiarianism must triumph. And there are other historical convergences which have come together to re-inforce, to guarantee this result.
Foremost of all; the destruction of our once-great middle class -- "the Centre cannot hold" -- by the economic excesses of the past generation. The Warfare State and corporate globalisation. To say nothing of drug wars, colonial war and a stubborn refusal to abandon whatever is the latest manifestation of the gas-guzzler.
This group, cast loose from all their moral and social certainties by their economic orphaning, by inflation or outsourcing votes first conservative, and then as their condition deteriorates still further, Fascist. Their peers did so in Fascist Europe and in Japan they were the salarymen of the zaibatsu, displaced by depression and protectionism, and all sent their children to hopeless war. Today they do so all over the West, but nowhere as yet in such numbers as in the USA. For no other "advanced" nation has yet dared expose its people so cruelly to all the rigours of untrammelled economic liberalism. It is not just the peoples of the Third World whose prospects have been blighted by corporate globalisation.
Other factors converge: In Germany the Jews were despised as the core of liberalism; even of radicalism. For they had never forgotten their liberation at the hands of the invading forces of the French Revolution. But to every German conservative, the mere sight of emancipated Jews was a reminder of defeat and foreign ideology. And in the USA it is the Blacks who occupy this unenviable position.
To mamy a true American, the sight of Blacks not under the tightest of police surveillance and control is disquieting, to say the least. Our modern conservative movement is founded specifically and explicitly by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon to reign in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. And with the criminalisation, under the drug laws, of half the Black male population of Baltimore, the largest city in my State of Maryland, they have certainly succeeded.
What comes next, as American Fascism faces defeat and the possible dismemberment of its homeland, I shudder to contemplate.
We see an historic social stratification. We who have read and studied these matters are all aware that at no time in the past, not during slavery, not in the days of the great monopolies has there been such concentration of wealth at the top. The all-powerful Internal Revenue themselves dare not include incomes above $600,000 in our national data, out of the certain knowledge that this would hopelessly skew all databases.
There is the utter sycophancy of corporate media. A presstitution truly yellow in more ways than one.
And a debased educational and intellectual class. One all too willing, as Chomsky shows us to prostitute itself to the goals of the perverted and ghastly sciences of the warfare state. One willing to train the next generation in full knowledge of the damage done by propagandisation and false interpretations of history.
In 1938, just after the rape of Czechoslovakia, Dr Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, Harvard-trained economist and director of the Reichsbank, sought audience with Hitler.
He told his Leader that within a year Germany would have exhausted all her foreign exchange, and would face national bankruptcy. Years later, at Nuremberg (where he was the only senior Nazi aquitted!) Schacht said he had hoped to persuade Hitler to slow down or abandon his plans for re-armament and war. But whatever, this news did not have that effect upon the Dictator.
Hitler had always wanted war. But in 1944 or 45 when the German Reich would have had hundreds, rather than only a few dozen U-boats. When the Luftwaffe would have been flying jet aircraft. But instead, the spectre of economic collapse caused the acceleration of the war. For Hitler knew that only in a military command economy could he and his irrational followers survive.
The dynamic was much the same in the other Fascist countries of that day. And while we are a corporate oligarchy, rather than a dictatorial state, perhaps more similar to the Japan than to the Germany of those times, do we not face similar economic challenges? Our massive state and federal deficits, our disasterous foreign trade imbalances, and the credit card, educational and mortgage indebtedness of households, which all combine to produce a negative national rate of savings.
Let us not forget the role of religion. Today it is Pastor Niemoeller or Pastor Bonhoeffer, who provided the theological justification of tyranicide who are remembered as the torch-bearers of German Protestantism. But at the time, they were considered as traitorous at worst and criminally insane at best. The one was imprisoned, the other executed. Every Nazi soldier wore on his belt-buckle: "Gott mit uns." Mussolini was the darling of the Pope. And the highest destiny of any good Japanese soldier was to guard the Emperor or to become a kami in the eternal Yasukuni Shrine.
For such people and their state, war is perhaps the only option presenting itself to the conventional wisdom. Certainly it was so in those past times. For in each of the Axis partners war was waged right down to the very end with the full participation and support of their populations.
I believe that those classes at home, and those peoples abroad who will face their shared destruction at the hands of this born-again Corporate State must arm themselves. Morally, economically and, yes, perhaps even militarily, to face the gathering storm. Perhaps above all else, to know the Opponant; his strengths and his weaknesses.
For Fascism loses, not wins, the world war it starts. For what can it offer anyone not of its favored few? Only blood, sweat, toil and tears.
From the Imperial Capital
Chris Herz
