10 Steps To Fascism

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given that its the LAPD its more surprising that they didn't just shoot a bunch of people (another time-honored American tradition that is not specifically fascist in any way)

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 17:31 (seventeen years ago) link

capn save-a-blackshirt

― and what, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 17:50 (seventeen years ago) link

I prefer cap'n-read-a-history-book

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 17:52 (seventeen years ago) link

WHAT

jesus

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 17:52 (seventeen years ago) link

i prefer cap'n crunch. sweeter, less conflict.

― latebloomer, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:02 (seventeen years ago) link

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/31M3X3T5EBL._SS500_.jpg

― and what, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:03 (seventeen years ago) link

haha, that's the one that's yet to be published, right? the one he's been putting off for 3 years?

― kingfish, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:05 (seventeen years ago) link

he's waiting to see if he has to change it from Hillary to Obama

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:13 (seventeen years ago) link

http://i20.ebayimg.com/01/i/000/8f/92/9645_2.JPG

― and what, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:14 (seventeen years ago) link

At what point does:

- Excessive militarisation of civilian life
- Extremely large military
- Incredible traction of flag-waving patriotism as argument winner
- Extremely closed political class, in terms of recruitment and access
- Media in hands of small coterie of corporate interests
- Media very antipathetic to anything looking left of centre
- Very handy pariahs within state and without with added value of actually having had pariahs having done something with USA (as opposed to being people who might do something)
- general decline of political language and general acceptability of some awful things
- general decline of ability to stop gross violations of human rights by the state

stop being things you can identify as common strands of US political life and start to be worrying?

It seems to me like saying something isn't a bolognese, because although it contains meat, tomatoes, wine, basil, garlic, onion etc, all those things have been seen before in meatloaf, wine bottles, chilli etc, which whilst true, doesn't get around the fact that right now, they've all come together and made, er, bolognese.

PS - this is not a thread for discussing bolognese recipes. There's another thread for that.

― The Boyler, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:38 (seventeen years ago) link

since almost all of your qualifiers for fascism are dependent on modifiers ("extreme", "very", "excessive", "incredible", etc.) seems to me some definite goalposts need to be set by which those measurements can be made. American history provides those goalposts. Compare the past to today.

Its just tiresome to see "fascism" flung around carelessly because people are distressed about the current political situation, without any in-depth understanding of what constituted the political movements that delineated and defined fascism.

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:44 (seventeen years ago) link

Don't forget a burgeoning "cult of masculinity", where all those uptight white guys going on about how "Jesus wasn't a pussy"

― kingfish, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:50 (seventeen years ago) link

most of your qualifiers are so vague I don't even know what they mean. and you leave out several of the key aspects of fascism - its basic ethnic/racial/nationalist character, its populism and appeal to the "lower classes", etc.

and btw fascism was definitely not constituted by a "closed political class, in terms of recruitment and access" - Hitler was a failed painter, Mussolini an journalist, etc.) Nor does the size of the military have anything to do with fascism (America has long had the biggest military in the world - are you implying its been fascist since, oh, WWII?)

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:52 (seventeen years ago) link

Shakey I kind of agree with you insofar as the second the word comes up, the conversation becomes way too heated and it becomes impossible to focus. Let's just agree that whatever America ends up doing is going to require a whole new word and stay alert to the developments.

And I actually think that Wolf article wasn't that bad at tracking those developments -- its concluding point wasn't that we are now actively fascist, but simply that laws and workflows have been implemented and and actively put into practice, and that given a precipitating event (like another moderately successful attack), whatever the government decides to move forward with will _already_ be perfectly legal and it'll be too late to dismantle the machine. Steps need to be taken now.

― Milton Parker, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:56 (seventeen years ago) link

- Very handy pariahs within state and without with added value of actually having had pariahs having done something with USA (as opposed to being people who might do something)

I don't know what you're saying here.

- general decline of political language and general acceptability of some awful things

A decline from what? The lofty political language of the "Know Nothing" party at the turn of the century? This is so vague, and predicated on their being some mythic point in the past when our political language was more high-minded and eloquent. This past does not exist.

general decline of ability to stop gross violations of human rights by the state

This is also super-vague. Decline of whose ability? The "people's"? Reigning in human rights abuses by the state requires the participation of people WITHIN the framework of the state, to reshape it so those things don't happen. Problem is, in the current political climate of the US, the majority of the people are actually A-okay with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and torturing people in the name of stopping terrorism. No excessive legal obstacles have been placed in their way - these laws are open to being challenged by the courts (and they ARE being challenged in the courts), the problem is that the majority of the country DOES NOT CARE.

x-post

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:58 (seventeen years ago) link

laws and workflows have been implemented and and actively put into practice, and that given a precipitating event (like another moderately successful attack), whatever the government decides to move forward with will _already_ be perfectly legal and it'll be too late to dismantle the machine. Steps need to be taken now.

I totally agree with this assessment. I just don't find the deliberate misuse of terminology helpful. Its actually detrimental - cuz it makes the speaker sound like a shrill alarmist (and thus more easily dismissable).

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 19:00 (seventeen years ago) link

another key thing about fascism is its inherent reliance on the cult of personality - the veneration of the leader as the embodiment of the country's ideals. Unless presidential term limits are repealed, its kind of impossible for this to happen in America. Our love affair with Dubya barely lasted 6 years (obviously 6 years WAY TOO LONG but still - its not comparable to the idolization of Hitler, Peron, Mussolini etc.)

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 19:03 (seventeen years ago) link

well that's always been Wolf's problem before, but goin' all LOL at her article seems an overreaction as well. I see your point though, discussing these things in a thread with _that word_ in the title helps things gets lost, I should probably move that domestic-operations-of-military-contractors stuff to a Blackwater thread

x-post

― Milton Parker, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 19:04 (seventeen years ago) link

Blackwater is just the best name ever for that kind of company - so evocative (the River Styx ie the passageway to hell, oil, etc.)

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 19:06 (seventeen years ago) link

Also, it can be true that the current bunch of chuckleheads have been busily putting things into to place that perhaps things aren't a fascist state now, but are certainly setting things up for the next time round. As guys like Chris Hedges write, religious totalitarian types need a moment of crisis to come to power. These guy have just been stacking the deck: attacking the notion of an independent judiciary, discrediting science, journalism, and narrowing everything down to an authoritarian set-up. They've been remarkably competent at this; actual governing, no, but setting up this shit, which was their actual goal since they don't believe in public services or representative government, hell yeah.

― kingfish, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 19:09 (seventeen years ago) link

well they're obviously obsessed with consolidating power in the hands of the executive, which is certainly a move towards fascism. combine that with the handy repeal of a couple of amendments and voila Uberfuhrer Schwarzenegger. You know we're in agreement on the current admin's penchant for totalitarian fantasies.

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 19:13 (seventeen years ago) link

By pariahs, I'm referring to the Islamic other; US politics, like most countries, have a long history of using some vague ill-defined and overblown threat to justify a more repressive set of policies. Unlike previously, these people have more traction with US voters because they've done something in the US. Instead of being a phantom, they're more 'real' and so more durable and more amenable to being a justification for some bad shit.

By failure to stop human rights abuses, I'm saying that regardless of who has failed - the media/supreme court/congress/people, it doesn't really matter. They've happened and continue to happen, indicating a failure of really quite important counterbalances to actually do anything at all about a quite dreadful state of affairs.

As for language, I wasn't positing a golden age back in the day, merely saying that from where we are know, you notice an astonishing vacuity and vapidity of US political discourse. Fights seem to take place over the most inconsequential points of linguistic definition whilst the bigger picture never gets a look in. The normalisation of this weird hybrid of martial language and management textbook shite looks pretty entrenched with no-one seemingly able to challenge this and find a new way of talking about things.

― The Boyler, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 20:33 (seventeen years ago) link

http://www.mises.org/TRTS/18.jpg

― braveclub, Thursday, 3 May 2007 15:40 (seventeen years ago) link

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/3/102322/7962

― M.V., Thursday, 3 May 2007 17:28 (seventeen years ago) link

eight years pass...

Has anti-fascism lost its urgency in the eight years since this was published? I grew up with World War II veterans for relatives. My own father was a WWII buff. "Don't be a fascist" was a big thing in my family. Might seem quaint to a younger generation? My own mother was a big proponent of "never forget". Yet on the Internet, I encounter many people -especially younger people - for whom it is more like "never even considered it". Even with a black man in the White House, I think it's important to "never forget".

― Fake Sam's Club Membership (I M Losted), Tuesday, 7 July 2015 16:54 (eight years ago) link

thread title sounds like the evil self-help shadow of

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/419KZWFeBcL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, 7 July 2015 18:02 (eight years ago) link

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Fascist

― jmm, Tuesday, 7 July 2015 18:03 (eight years ago) link

thread title sounds like the evil self-help shadow of

Seven Steps to Heaven

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 7 July 2015 18:05 (eight years ago) link

modern states' complete fealty to global capitalism makes fascism look p quaint and outdated

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 7 July 2015 18:06 (eight years ago) link

eight years pass...

Our mission statement is the same as it is on the podcast: that people should be able to understand complex ideas and have fun at the same time. All the knowledge. None of the pain.
— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) May 22, 2024

― xyzzzz__, Friday, 24 May 2024 08:57 (five days ago) link

'people should be able to understand complex ideas', muses the man who discovered for the first time only months that neoliberalism is a political ideology and not just a slur leftists attach to people they don't like

― katy perry (prison service) (bizarro gazzara), Friday, 24 May 2024 11:49 (five days ago) link

only months AGO

― katy perry (prison service) (bizarro gazzara), Friday, 24 May 2024 11:49 (five days ago) link

Blimey, the person who wrote the article cited at the top of the thread though...

― your mom goes to limgrave (dog latin), Friday, 24 May 2024 20:04 (five days ago) link

Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

― This is Dance Anthems, have some respect (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Friday, 24 May 2024 20:06 (five days ago) link

never forget

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3GORdkXEAskO9P.jpg

― katy perry (prison service) (bizarro gazzara), Friday, 24 May 2024 20:55 (five days ago) link

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