Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Newsvine
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiPerhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. history is virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American history. One hopes that a recent BBC documentary titled The Plot Against America and an article of the same name by Columbia Law School professor and longtime human rights activist Scott Horton, on the website of Harper's magazine, will sound an alert.
In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of president Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.
The Congressional committee had discovered that some of the foremost members of the economic elite, many of them household names at the time, had indeed hatched a meticulously detailed and massively funded plot to effect a fascist coup in America. The owners of Bird's Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz, among others, totaling about twenty four major businessmen and Wall Street financiers, planned to assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the armed force behind the coup and defeat any resistance this in-house revolution might generate. The economic elite would provide the material resources required to sustain the new government.
The plotters hoped that widespread working-class discouragement at the stubborn persistence of the Great Depression would have sufficiently disenchanted the masses with FDR's policies to make the coup an easy ride. And they were appalled at Roosevelt's willingness after 1933 to initiate economic policies that economists and businessmen considered dangerously Leftist departures from economic orthodoxy. Only a fascist-style government, they thought, could enforce the kind of economic "discipline" that would reverse the Great Depression and restore profits.
Interestingly, it was a military man, a prominent retired general assigned the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who blew the whistle after pondering the grotesque implications of the undemocratic installation of a fascist dictatorship in Washington. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud.
The president might have used the occasion to alert the public to the anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the capitalist class. But this of course would only have bolstered the fortunes of Communist, Socialist and other anti-capitalist political tendencies here, which were already gaining some ground among artists, intellectuals and a surprising number of working people. It is well known that Hollywood screenwriting in the 1930s was replete with Communist-inspired sentiment.
And of course we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat renegade) member of the very class that would have toppled him. While FDR was open to watered-down Keynesian policies in a way that very few of his class comrades were, his commitment (like Keynes's) to the "free enterprise" system was unconditional. He had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He therefore refused to out the plotters, and sought no punitive measures against them. In the end, class solidarity carried the day for Roosevelt. The Congressional committee cooperated by refusing to reveal the names of many of the key plotters.
Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of the U.S. ruling class were effectively left to develop unhindered by mass political mobilization.
Might this grisly episode have important implications for our understanding of the current political moment? One may be inclined to think so on the basis of the fact that one of the architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government of Chancellor Adolph Hitler, and was designated to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with that government.
While Bush-bashing is highly recommended, the implications of this unsettling piece of history for contemporary politics run deeper than many of us would like to think. There is the temptation to point triumphantly to George W. Bush's commitment to the irrelevance of the Constitution, which he has sneeringly referred to as "a piece of paper", his corresponding contempt for hitherto taken-for-granted fundamental human rights, his Hobbesian notion of unbridled sovereignty, his militarized notion of political power and corresponding bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy - there is the temptation to regard these genuinely fascist elements as the most significant contemporary remnant of the 1934 conspiracy.
But no less important is the utter absence in 1934 of liberal attempts to educate the public to, and mobilize the population against, the fascist threat. FDR stood down.
Although Rooseveltian/New Deal liberalism is dead, contemporary Democrats do sustain one of FDR's least seemly qualities, namely his refusal to encourage effective mass opposition to fascist and imperialist politics. John Kerry boasted of having contributed to the drafting of the Patriot Act. And in the most recent round of crucial legislation regarding the war in Iraq, the Democrats gave Bush everything he wanted. All the major presidentail contenders of both parties support a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. None has repudiated the conceit that Uncle sam is and should ever be the global hegemon. And most importantly, none has repudiated the Neoliberal Consensus, the notion that the market should be left to operate as "freely" as the public can be persuaded to allow it to act, and, crucially, that this is a model that should be imposed globally through the power of the U.S. working in tandem with such powerful global institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.
To the extent that this policy has been successful, inequalities between national classes and between the global North and South have widened dramatically since the decline of the Keynesian consensus in the mid-1970s. Since the Mondale candidacy, no Democrat has had a full-employment plank in his presidential platform. The median wage has been in secular decline since 1973, and the distribution of national income between capital and labor has not been as skewed toward capital since the Great Depression. But no member of either party has made a major issue of this.
One of the most powerful obstacles to appreciating the relevance of the 1934 planned coup to our times is the virtually ubiquitous misconception that the gross inequalities and anti-working-class policies now evident, and the reckless carnage that characterizes U.S. foreign policy, is the result of the "neoconservative revolution" ushered in by George W. Bush. But it was Clinton's cynical jettisoning of his relatively progressive Economic Stimulus Plan, his abolition of "welfare as we know it" without providing a replacement, and his ruthless bombing of Yugoslavia and "sanctions" against Iraq that both foreshadowed and paved the way for Bush's atrocities. The truism that the Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the Republicans since the Carter administration must not be forgotten. Indeed it is an understatement. To fully appreciate the reality of democratic capitulation as an alleged "opposition party" we need only reflect upon the consequences of Clinton's sanctions against Iraq.
Clinton bombed Iraq several times weekly for eight years. Defense Information Agency documents, now available through the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that the strategy of the bombing was to extensively bomb water purification facilities and power generating facilities with the explicit intention to spread diseases that would affect children. The idea was to pressure ordinary Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, with the knowledge that if they did so, the pedicide would cease. But Iraqis blamed Washington for this catastrophe, not Saddam. When Saddam offered to accede to Clinton's requirements for ending the bombing, Clinton abruptly replied that no possible concessions on Saddam's part would lead him to end the bombing/sanctions.
Extensive investigations by widely respected sources, including the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, determined that the number of Iraqi children who died as a direct result of the pedicidal bombardment was 467,000. And it added a fact unreported in the U.S. media, that the U.S. use of depleted uranium in the attacks had resulted in the first known cases of breast cancer afflicting four-year-old girls. When Clinton's Secretary of state Madeline Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl in 1996 on 60 Minutes whether she thought that the removal of Saddam from power was worth killing a half million children, she replied that "Yes, it was worth it."
Is this qualitatively different from the death and destruction that Bush has wrought? Of course not. The British playwright Harold Pinter has characterized both Clinton and Bush as "mass murderers", and the accusation sounds indeed brutal. But is it accurate? How can one deny that it is?
Today's Democrats' abdication of the role of opposition party is far more consequential than Roosevelt's decision to permit our embryonic fascists to continue to gestate. The difference between FDR and his Republican antagonists was far greater than the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats today. Today's Democrats have internalized and identified with the interests of those whom they should be actively mobilizing the population against. The Republocrats are now all of them heir to the fascist instincts inherent in the ruling elite. Republican elites manifest this in their policies as the party in power; Democratic elites evidence their unsavory class heritage by railing ritualistically against the Republicans even as they betray their fed-up constituencies by supporting the fundamental policies of their alleged "opponents".
Effective opposition at the current historical juncture requires the only force capable of defeating the neoliberal and imperialist obsessions of the mainstream parties and their financial masters: street politics, the mobilization and eventual organization of the people against a ruling establishment seen by an increasing number of Americans as terminally corrupt and indifferent to their most pressing needs.
Lest this popular disaffection be siphoned into an impotent and resigned cynicism, it would seem that intense educational efforts regarding the desirability and possibility of a third party, a genuine party of labor, become a priority for serious progressives. MoveOn must yield to MoveBeyond. As harder economic times threaten the not distant future, the economic stagnation and austerity that is fertile soil for the growth of fascist politics poses an unmistakbly clear and present danger. Thinking and acting outside the political box has never been as pressing an impertive as it is now.
Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia Wa. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Monthly Review, Commonweal, Common Dreams and a number of professional journals.
47 Comments so far
Show Allf! I knew Prescott Bush got it under the trading with the enemy act. And I knew about Butler and the coup plot. But I did not know Bush was one of the plotters. Weirdos
Mr. Nasser hits the nail right on the head in this essay. He briefly touches on a point which I hoped as I was reading that he would have expanded on which is this: "The president might have used the occasion to alert the public to the anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the capitalist class."
It is the whole issue of these people which have been referred to as: the "invisible" or "shadow" government, "the international banking elites" such as the Rothschild's and their agents such as the Rockefellers....
One thing that I learned as a college student is that even if you ask a political science or political economy instructor(s)about the subjects that I mentioned in the previous paragraph they must speak vaguely and in broad strokes otherwise the schools (and they personally) that they teach at could receive significantly negative consequences....
I am currently reading the book: "The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR" By Jules Archer which relates directly to Mr. Nasser's essay.
What I see happening (and probably many others) in this country is this: the one world government international bankers have chosen (with their active consent & participation) the Bush family to use the executive branch (along with the corporate media which as we know is so consolidated and CONTROLLED by about five to eight media companies control over 90% of what most of the population BELIEVES to be true) while the banking elites funds both sides which are warring with each other. The primary goal of the banking elites and the their servants the Bush family is to put in place a fascist dictatorship in the United States....
This charade would end next week if all of the secret intelligence budgets of the worlds governments were brought to light as well as where and to whom those budgets past, present, and future were going to and who & whom were behind it and profiting....
It is unfortunate but true.... In John Ralston Saul's magnificent book: "The Unconscious Civilization" he argues that western democracies have adopted the "manageable" elements of fascism.... or what Mussolini referred to as "corporatism". This is true, you see it at alarming levels in our media and corporations.... and now it is accelerating in our government with the "war on terror" being used to continually take away our Bill of Rights and Constitution, the only documents that separate us from warring against each other continually and allows for a peaceful society such as ours (warts and all) to thrive and prosper.
In Jim Marrs' informative and comprehensive book: "Rule by Secrecy" the actual plan if the Confederacy (who was mostly funded by the French Rothschild's) would have prevailed in the Civil War was to set up central banks (controlled by the same group of elite bankers) in every state in the former union and pit one former state of the union against each other as was done all the way until the 20 th century in Europe most prominently between France and England.
What to do about our accelerated pace toward fascism?
It is a challenge organizing citizens in a country when you are never referred to as a "citizen". Instead in a corporatist society we are always referred to as "consumers". This is just the tip of the ice berg…. When there is no logical and critical thinking skills taught in K-12 and these courses are optional in many colleges and universities across our nation it begs the question: How can you be a critical thinking, and reasoning, as well as a responsible citizen when you don't have those tools? Just think of a United States where the majority of citizens saw through the abundance of emotional and logical fallacies masquerading as "truth" on the corporately owned mainstream media? What kind of society would we have? Maybe a society similar to the social democracies in western Europe, only maybe having non profits at the local level running the majority of our: health care, housing, food distribution and other "basic human needs" programs for all…. This would be funded with caps on the amount of yearly income that major shareholders and other wealthy people and corporations can earn (maybe $50 million) with 60% of the wealth over the cap being directed to charities chosen by that particular wealth holder and then the other 40% going to the government to be distributed locally by the government to non profits….
There is a political party that advocates for this and it is the Moderate Party (www.moderatepartyusa.net). But besides getting involved politically focused prayer by spiritual people is going to be needed on a mass human scale to conquer the corporatist/fascist element(s) in not just American society but in the rest of the world….Until we as a human species choose to grow past our separation theologies and belief systems and remember what all of the great spiritual masters (such as Jesus and the Buddha are just two examples) said in one way or another which is: "We are all one." And another key value: "Treat others as you would want to be treated." And what about: "We are all(of us)an important part of the same human family"….
Coming to those realizations as a human collective is possible if each of us makes conscious choice(s) each moment of our life to live as what the ultimate reality really is which is: "we are all one".
And with prayer and positive actions by us all we can have a bright future for humanity which is a Star Trek esque society….
Do you want to help make this a reality?
Adam Haines
Chairman Moderate National Committee
Email: adamhaines@gmail.com
.
"As long as we remain shackled to a system of these two thoroughly corrupt political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, there seems little hope for national salvation." Dave Lindorff.
The key word here is system. We have a legalized system of bribery and self-perpetuating corruption that can't be reformed, and can't be beaten within the existing corrupt laws and cunningly crafted political framework. We simply can't beat the system by operating within the system, because no matter who we vote for, corruption wins.
While Democratic Representatives dazzle us with trivialities, Bush declares himself dictator.
The obvious solution is a third party, but does anyone really think our system rulers will allow that to happen? They have all economic, political, police and military power, and if Iraq is any indication, they won't hesitate to declare Martial Law and kill millions of Americans to keep their wealth and power.
We must find some way to work outside the system, that doesn't provoke violent retaliation.
One way to do that is to support a candidate that the system has shunned. The system and media shun Dennis Kucinich.
Our enemy's, enemy could be our only hope to dismantle the system.
We could form our own Independent party, and ask Dennis Kucinich to lead it.
.
Another from the Washington Post, "Mind Games," published this year (2007):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR200701...
Although this subject may still be too far out in left field for most people to stomach, one commenter at the Washington Post site summarized the issue in the most genuine terms:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/comments/display?contentID=AR20...
"Thank you for perhaps the only mainstream story in recent years that hasnt automatically ridiculed this subject, or the alleged victims. I feel victims of mind control are like victims of rape. Not all who claim to be victims are. But many are, and are not believed. They are the only ones who know it, and proving it is next to impossible. It is equally invasive and traumatic. So rather than laugh or deride these people or assume that they are crazy, I think a heavy dose of compassion is in order. It’s especially sad that the psychiatric profession teaches that voices in the head automatically signals craziness, when there is evidence that such technology is at least possible. Thank you for the work and the sense of respect you gave to these people. Whatever their problems, thank you for not making them worse, and hopefully opening a door for others to investigate.
By lpease | Jan 13, 2007 4:34:33 PM"
--------------
I would just add lastly, one need not necessarily hear voices to be the target of EMF weaponry. In fact, one of the goals of this technology is to alter the mood of the enemy, such that s/he would lay down her arms and not fight. That comes from the Air Force 2025 Visions paper.
Other articles in mainstream to explore are, "Will the Mind Figure Out How the Brain Works?," which I first discovered in 2000.
http://www.time.com/time/reports/v21/science/brain.html
Here's a quote:
"Imagine this scene from the future. You are staring at a screen flickering with snow. Scientists have hidden one of two patterns in the dots, and eventually you spot one. But you don't have to tell the scientists what you are seeing; they already know. They are looking at the electrical signals from one of the billions of cells in your brain. When the cell fires, you see one pattern; when it stops, you see another—your awareness can be read from a single neuron. Now, in an even more unsettling trick, they send an electrical current to the neurons in that part of your brain and, with a push of a button, make you see one pattern or the other.
"These feats of pinpoint mind study are not fantasies. They have already been performed by the Stanford neuroscientist William Newsome. Not with people, of course, but with monkeys. Yet few scientists doubt the trick would work with us."
Other articles in mainstream to explore are, "Will the Mind Figure Out How the Brain Works?," which I first discovered in 2000.
http://www.time.com/time/reports/v21/science/brain.html
Here's a quote:
"Imagine this scene from the future. You are staring at a screen flickering with snow. Scientists have hidden one of two patterns in the dots, and eventually you spot one. But you don't have to tell the scientists what you are seeing; they already know. They are looking at the electrical signals from one of the billions of cells in your brain. When the cell fires, you see one pattern; when it stops, you see another—your awareness can be read from a single neuron. Now, in an even more unsettling trick, they send an electrical current to the neurons in that part of your brain and, with a push of a button, make you see one pattern or the other.
"These feats of pinpoint mind study are not fantasies. They have already been performed by the Stanford neuroscientist William Newsome. Not with people, of course, but with monkeys. Yet few scientists doubt the trick would work with us."
Another from the Washington Post, "Mind Games," published this year (2007):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR200701...
Although this subject may still be too far out in left field for most people to stomach, one commenter at the Washington Post site summarized the issue in the most genuine terms:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/comments/display?contentID=AR20...
"Thank you for perhaps the only mainstream story in recent years that hasnt automatically ridiculed this subject, or the alleged victims. I feel victims of mind control are like victims of rape. Not all who claim to be victims are. But many are, and are not believed. They are the only ones who know it, and proving it is next to impossible. It is equally invasive and traumatic. So rather than laugh or deride these people or assume that they are crazy, I think a heavy dose of compassion is in order. It’s especially sad that the psychiatric profession teaches that voices in the head automatically signals craziness, when there is evidence that such technology is at least possible. Thank you for the work and the sense of respect you gave to these people. Whatever their problems, thank you for not making them worse, and hopefully opening a door for others to investigate.
By lpease | Jan 13, 2007 4:34:33 PM"
--------------
I would just add lastly, one need not necessarily hear voices to be the target of EMF weaponry. In fact, one of the goals of this technology is to alter the mood of the enemy, such that s/he would lay down her arms and not fight. That comes of from the Air Force 2025 Visions paper.
Given that there was such a fascist plot in the U.S. in the 1930's, and also given obvious developments in technology over the past thirty years, perhaps the time is now to take more seriously the potential that Electromagnetic Field (EMF) weapons have been successfully developed that may alter our sense of hope and our determination of will?
Project Censored at Sonoma State University has compiled a report called, "US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights," dated December, 2006.
http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/ElectromegnaticWeapons.pdf
Their closing fits the context of Mr. Nasser's article:
"Research into this subject has shown that... the effects of electromagnetic radiation weapons on human beings are in fact both chilling and dramatic. As reported in 2001, the statement of Dr. Eldon Byrd should be considered with great weight:
'A medical engineer, Eldon Byrd, reported a case that illustrates this point. After working on the Polaris submarine, which carried long-range nuclear weapons, Byrd developed non-lethal weapons with reversible effects. He regarded this as a humanitarian alternative to "punching holes in people and having their blood leak out" in battle. His inventions used magnetic fields at biologically active wave frequencies to affect brain function. Byrd could put animals to sleep at a distance and influence their movements. When the success of his research became evident, suddenly he was pulled off the project and it went "black." H(e) believes the electromagnetic resonance weapons he developed have been used for psychological control of civilians rather than for exigencies in battle. That is, to ensure his participation, he was uninformed about the true nature of the project. Byrd's case also illustrates how morally tolerable operations may transition to morally intolerable operations, or at least rise above the atrocity line.'150
"Power elites who fund and support efforts at supplanting the will of the people do so from on high. Their ability to redirect public attention to ward external threats and away from their own motivations in effect silences opposition to their programs. By controlling the flow of information in society, the power elites provide the public with a limited choice in all matters that pertain to
machinations of government and corporate control. Given more advanced technologies for the control of information unscrupulous individuals who ascribe to a 'might makes right' philosophy may will find the ways and means of employing these technologies against those who would oppose their plans...."
Excellent article, with many important reminders. In the same vein, though the focus is on the economics of fascism, see Gary Alan Scott's article "The Rise of Fascism in America" (April 12, 2006 on this site).
This article marginalizes Kucinich, Gravel, and the congressional progressive caucus by pretending they don't exist; but yes, indeed, there are presidential candidates and people in congress who are against the free market. If you don't know who they are it is because you never bothered to look them up. This article would be even better without that terribly stupid omission.
Also the federal authorities at the time of Lincoln's assassination, hunted down the people and convicted over a half dozen including one woman, whom some pleaded with
Andrew Johnson to spare, but Johnson knew these people were out to get the key officials in Lincoln's administration including himself, and he wouldn't allow any commutation of the death sentence of this woman.
This information which has gone down the memory hole is important, but so is the fact that Abraham Lincoln's assassination was the result of Confederate sympathizers, and publications at the time across the country covered it as such. Why has this been purged, as far as I know since way back and not appeared high school or undergraduate colled US history text books? Are people afraid to deal with the fact that the first documented assassination of US president was the result of a conspiracy which had a political motivation, as well as the temporary concern about the North hating the South and vice versa? How long will it take for the truth to come out this? We've got to stop lying and denying that this kind of thing can't happen? It already did over 130 years ago.
I find it odd that the conclusion is that the coup against FDR failed!
If those who conceived it and tried to execute it failed, were identified and not brought to swift justice, then the coup succeeded!
And now here we are today, with Nazi detention centers set up all over America. Just like the detention centers where hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children were executed in Germany. The military trains are there, the tracks, the large warehouses with concrete floors, the barbed wire, the helicopter socks, the "crow's nest" look out area for the armed guards.
The light of day must be shown on these camps immediately. They must be razed immediately. We have no need for such camps in the United States and never will.
Check this out: This one is in rural Beech Grove, Indiana! I asked my Rep. Jane Harman why these detention camps exist and so far, NO ANSWER.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=277826260716604258&pr=goog-sl
There is ample opportunity today to create a domestic "fascist" army. Blackwater and other such "security" companies will form the elite corps, and disillusioned returning Iraq vets, many of whom will be unemployed, will form the rank and file of the blackshirts.
You want fascism?
Here's the recipe: one part acquisitive instinct, two parts personality disorder -- put in a blender on frappe -- pour over the ice cubes of programmed ideas and behavior in the general population ---
you got enuf to ruin several nations across decades if not eternity --
a global revolution exists only in the aftermath, and perhaps only briefly
personal revolutions are always good and are encouraged --
however, when you really examine how people live in this society and culture, you have to see that we are already past the realm of Orwellian nightmares ---
raw foods, meditation and loving your neighbor still count --
...also... raising hell when you have a spare moment
A dysfunctional corporate fascism is already in place. The oligarchs simply hide their money within corporate structures. The union of government, the military and corporate special interests has buried what is left of our democracy. Welcome to the axis of ignorance comprised of the White House, Congress, the Pentagon and corporate America incompetently organized as one big dumb bully. The picture is completed with a complicit media generating their propaganda. The sad fact is that this system is riding on tax dollars and deficit spending propping up their empty militaristic empire good for little more than bombing undeveloped nations lacking an air defense. Yet as demonstrated in both Afghanistan and Iraq it is a bit more difficult to control the ground against determined people willing to die for the liberation of their nation. We were whipped on the ground in Nam but failed to learn the lessons of history.
Direct democracy is the peaceful way to end totalitarianism for good.
With the Anschluss of Mexico and Canada imminent, a number of private armies (Blackwater and others) receiving government handouts and Pentagon training, and the castration of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Bush is poised to make his granddaddy very proud. As in Germany all those decades ago, most Americans are propaganized into using the performance of the national stock exchange as a yardstick for measuring the wellbeing of the nation.
vielen Glueck, Amerika!
Fascism is the blending of corporations and state, leading the country on racial, xenophobic principles of power and force. The plot may not have come to fruition in 1933, but it was not laid to rest. Thanks to the immortality of the corporation, the enduring wealth of America's most elite, this plot has been working since, at least, 1952. Even President Carter, the last vestige of human dignity the Oval office has known, worked in service of our hawkish foreign policy in the service of the corporate war machine. Since Reagan, we have been on the fast track to an unadulterated form of fascism. When we use the word "fascist" there is a tendency to think we are exaggerating in hatred for those things with which we disagree, but, from a purely technical perspective, it is an accurate term as applied to our current administration. The idea that he is merely fulfilling a family dream makes it all the more obvious and disturbing. The courts he has packed no longer decide on the basis of law, but on the basis of power. They have sided against labor in the most obvious of cases, they have sided with corporations against the environment in every instance, and they have worked to roll back race relations 60 years. We make enemies of gays, and "uppity" Blacks who demand "special" rights before the law (forgetting to include that these special rights are accorded, de facto, to the White, Straight majority). Bush has led the nation in the belief in capital punishment as true justice, killing indiscriminately (and always with the surety of right) in his Texas years. He sneers at democracy (having yet to win an election to the White House), ignoring the Congress completely. And the Congress is complacent. Nancy and Company REFUSE to act on the Will of the People and roll back this extremist regime, because she is in service (as are they all) of the Corporate State.
I love this article. I love that it has come out that Bush has roots in a fascist conspiracy. I love the recognition (if only my own) that these immortal corporations have been slowly doing what they planned to do in one fell swoop in 1933. The institutional memory holds and they push, bribe and sway the nation every day to a state where corporate interests run without even the most basic restraints. We cannot even have consumer safety protections while the global market is proving to be a death trap for consumers. Mark how like this was the Gilded Age when corporations operated on the principle of "you'll take what you're given" with no interest in the protection of the lives of consumers. A fascinating urge to power with a short-sightedness reserved for only the most arrogant, ascendent elite.
www.unknown-arts.org/politics
General Strike 9-10, 9-11.
Fascism Is already here. Remember that Prescott Bush, a wealthy banker was raising money for
Hitler. We could not have gotten into such a mess from bush, chaney, rove etc, without the help
of the media. The difference between communism and fascism is that under communism, the
government owns the corporations. Under fascism, the corporations own the government.
Hitler needed more than fear. He needed desperate poverty to make people angry and then a scapegoat to get them into the street. George Inc. has not quite yet made the poor poor enough to attack any scapegoat they suggest, but they are getting there.
It's good to see Alan Nasser offer up to the public a relevant history to the present fascist mentality of the American elite. I should offer an additional insight to this most heinous group of leaders on the American scene. Our mass media today is not free nor unfettered in it's role as watchdog. The 4th estate has been bought and sold under the banner that news must pay for itself. Our pretty boy and girl lightweight newscasters are a case in point. They are not journalists but presenters. The only real possibility of getting at the truth in today's events has to come from investigative journalism and little of that is being done by mainstream media organizations.
I encourage each and everyone one of us to pick up a video camera, record things nearby, put our best efforts to present stories on events in our areas of the country and begin to piece the puzzle together as to the effects of powers to be on our country! Put this on YouTube! An informed people is essential in bringing to light the dark forces of greed and it's elite puppet masters who suck the nation dry pursuing it's ever increasing desire for power and money! A locally informed people can effectively keep the most basic of political events in perspective. It all adds up!
The only way to stop the likes of this new world order being fostered on America is to take to the streets as the French do! We need the government to fear the people ~ not the other way round!
What in the world make's any one of you on this post think fat assed americans give a damn about anything or anyone else.America is the greatest nation the world has ever know. Everyone else on the planet sould be glad to summit to our will.
Read William Shirer's Berlin Diary ( covers Germany from 1934 through 1940 ) and see the similarities to the USA today. Hitler quite effectively used fear to gain power just to mention one. Same sort of characters, just different names today.
Threat of US Fascism? Maybe if we stopped warning of what "might" happen and instead start telling the truth - that it has already happened, then maybe we could "move beyond."
We already have a massive, well equipped "private army," and it's already had it's deployment dry run in New Orleans. Successful dry run, seeing as how they're still patrolling and no one seems to care. We already have corporations writing most of "our" legislation. Seventy-percent of the CIA's Counterintelligence Field Office is staffed by private contractors, over 50% of their National Clandestine Service is subcontracted. Corporations allow the NSA free access to databases. Laws and executive orders labeling all non-loyalbushies as potential boggymen who can be disappeared forever on a whim. The unprecedented theft of nearly everything by the tiny elite who simultaneously destroyed the economy for everybody else.
Fascism is the merging of corporate and government power in spite of the people's will and against their interests. Good thing that hasn't happened yet...
Baby Bloc,
Good post. What happened to the Bonus Marchers is something that should be included in every public school textbook. Of course it is not for obvious reasons. However, you neglected to mention that Douglas MacArthur was actually in charge, with Majors Patton and Eisenhower working under him.
I wonder why those fascists in 1934 did not approach MacArthur instead of Butler? I doubt that he would have turned them in.
Sorry, my earlier email somehow left out the link to the BBC documentary about this matter:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml
Why did they make "Patton" into a movie and never "BUTLER: the Smedley story!" He was amazing. Dug ditches with his men, won the Congressional Medal of Honor multiple times for putting his life at risk to save his soldiers. They loved him and he came to hate the war-makers he saw throwing his soldiers' lives away for profit. I wish (as a peace activist) this general was taught in all our schools.
I researched this plot a few years ago and found an old biography of Butler; what a life. We may never know how connected or realistic this plot really was. Nobody said it was a very good plot, that would work! Just that the corporate financiers were so paniked by FDR that they were willing to talk about overthrowing him – about treason. Butler blew the lid on them and FDR told them to shut up and let him enact the New Deal. Maybe FDR held documents showing their willingness to overthrow the most-popular president in modern history over their heads if they went too far?
Picking Butler was both the best and worst part of their plan. They couldn't get tens of thousands of soldiers to follow them without a figurehead like him, but they didn't count on the fact that the reason the soldiers trusted him was because he was trustworthy! So he wouldn't betray the ideals people convince our soldiers they fight for.
Butler supported the ideas of the Bonus Marchers who marched on Washington to get WWI Vet benefits during the depression. (A number died when they were attacked and dispersed by the US Army's bayonets and tear-gas under command of young Gens. Patton and Eisenhower). He Refused to join the VFW who he saw as founded by wealthy industrialist veterans to help bust unions like the Industrial Workers of the World. If all our ex-generals were as courageous and fair-hearted as Butler, this country might be a different place.
A political history of veterans in the US would make a great topic for a book or documentary. I'd love to see that.
shane ... debra saunders from the sfchronicle is a delusional bush-loving nut case. She probably pulled that statistic out of some hidden orifice. Ignore it. The vast majority of americans today are against the war. Period.
This article is brilliant and trenchant. We need more wake-up calls like this if we are ever to block the fascist corportocracy's malevolence and mendacity. Education, friends, teach the children and the young people.
My kudos to Mr. Nasser.
Are we there yet?
This page is a collection of news articles dating from the start of the Bush presidency divided into topics relating to each of the 14 points of fascism.
The article makes a convincing case that we are there.
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
From my perspective, the only historical difference between the USA and Nazi Germany has been language and the puppet show called "Government for the people, of the people".
Both operate soley for the benefit of the corporate ruling class on the backs of slaves and/or the working poor, both have been brutally expansionist empire-builders, both extremely genocidal xenophobes, both claim to be the Master Race/Greatest Country on Earth and both pretend to be democracies.
In case no one has noticed, in fascist societies, violence is looked at as the "panacea" towards everything, whether we're talking about shoplifting, going to war to steal oil, making it easier for disgruntled students/workers to shoot at will, allowing big business to easily engage in hostile takeovers, etc ... Let's face it. America has long enslaved itself to Orwell's 1984 model for the past few decades.
skeptical,
It is always a matter of degree. I would agree with observers that the degree to which the US is a fascist-plutocracy is getting more extreme. All you have to do is look at the hard data of income and wealth distribution.
Vern very good question.
http://webster.com/dictionary/Semites
Thought:
Is hatred of Arabs anti-semitism?
If Jews hate Arabs are they anti-semetic?
This article is wrong, talks about a coming US fascism. US has always been a fascist-plutocracy even before 1776
They kept the lid on this and think of what those Hollywood screenwriters went through during the McCarthy hearings.
'Today's Democrats have internalized and identified with the interests of those whom they should be actively mobilizing the population against. The Republocrats are now all of them heir to the fascist instincts inherent in the ruling elite. Republican elites manifest this in their policies as the party in power; Democratic elites evidence their unsavory class heritage by railing ritualistically against the Republicans even as they betray their fed-up constituencies by supporting the fundamental policies of their alleged "opponents".'
Nice.
But the conclusion is always take to the street.
With weakening Labor- which has compromised on all past gains rather than gathering momentum, and the ongoing propaganda campaign waged by both parties targeting Left radicals from the fringe-wackos (while DLC corporate panderers assume the "progressive" identity)or media drumming hatred for scapegoated immigrants, or most politics ignoring the poor and politicians using the red scare tactic transferred to terrorist threats to spread fear or middle class identity paramount as peer pressure conspicuous consumption- while others hide their shame that they are losing their middle-class footing, who will come out to the street?
American politics has been all about money for years. America's political dialog has been schizophrenic for just as many years. There is presently no connection between the public message and the political actions of the majority in the legislative or executive branches. The judiciary are silent until pressed for an opinion, and then the opinion is narrowly defined and as politically ineffective as possible. However the judiciary embodies the last glimmer of light for America as a free society. It is being quickly eroded by fascist political appointments.
Revolution is a public instinct that is extremely difficult to arouse. There has never been a revolution against a future threat – only against extremely well entrenched and blatantly provocative abuses of power. One has to wait for the inevitable excesses and abuses to foment within the ruling elite. As the elite becomes ever more powerful, its members become more certain that they are a race apart, superior and invulnerable to correction. Their own proof of this necessitates progressively more extreme actions that go unchallenged. This pattern provides them with the assurance that they possess absolute power – a psychological obsession characteristic of their particular kind of illness.
The simple truth is that America is already a fascist state. Presently, the actions of the elite are shocking only to those most aware of their historical significance – the educated strata of the public – but they are not yet obvious to the less educated. Technical education doesn't count in this context, and America is primarily a technological society. The elite panders to the indulgences of the politically uneducated middle band of society from which they draw their power. However it is only a matter of time, and the inevitable gathering excesses of the elite, before public awareness spreads beyond the educated classes. But it will certainly take a long time, and serious human damage will continue to be done in the world, and especially to the environment.
So far the excesses have been targeted mainly toward other nations in efforts to plunder their wealth, although these days American wealth is also being more overtly plundered.
Fascism is a cultural disease – a disease that relies heavily on widespread cynicism about the human condition. Promoting cynicism is the most important agenda of the ruling class. It's up to the idealists in society to remedy it.
Huge omission: The military man who blew the whistle in 1934 was none other than Smedley Butler, the former marine general who had made his famous anti-war speech in 1933, in which he explained that "War is just a racket ..." and that the main difference between him and Al Capone was that "The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
The speech is here:
http://www.fas.org/man/smedley.htm
In picking old Smedley, Prescott Bush and his fellow conspirators showed that they must have been as boneheaded as the Current Occupant.
You can listen to the BBC radio documentary about this, here:
disturbing article. nice for CD to print some stuff that goes beyond their usual support for "pressuring the democrats" (choose b/n hitler (rethugs) or mussolini (wimpocrats.))
It's our own doing, not intituting term limits. Don't pols get a little too close to each other after 10 years of "supposed" service? we as a country don't have to re-elect the same people over and over, but I guess were not too bright. We're not bright enough to manage our democracy, but we are bright enough to elect representatives who are? Sorry, the founders were way off on judging the intelligence of the electorate.
Until the US populace gets the courage to take to the streets and follow the example of Gandhi's non-violent marches and demonstrations nothing will change. The people have got to WANT the Constitution restored enough to ACT accordingly. If there is no such desire, there will will be no more US Constitution (except in name only).
What a shame to let cowardice bring down such a noble experiment of human governance!!
Things will change only when the populace is alienated and hopeless.
Then they may :
STAND UP - for what they beleive to be right.
SIT DOWN - in the nearest street to bring transportaion, retail, everything to a standstill.
FIGHT - I hope like Gandhi's Pathan friend Badshar Khan(Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) (check him out)a Pashtun nonviolent Muslim
FIGHT - Even if it means sacrifice to themselves to totally repudiate the oligarchy
FIGHT - As if their lives depend on active resistance - which they do
When people realize that they cannot ignore the actions of the government and relaize they themselves are the governmet, only then is change possible..
Allow me to quote another blogger of my vintage - estebandito:
(I hope he does not mind)
'As an old hippy draft-dodger,who has been out in the streets se'veral hours a week behind my Iraq anti-war signs demanding an end to the madness since this insanity began (how many years now?), I gotta report: very few people of any age give a good goddam. Oh yeah, we "protestors" get a free coffee now an then and lots of happy honking as the cars go by, but the truth is very sad. Old radicals tell me they are afraid of losing their subsidized rents!! " FBI lists! Got no time for it…"
Practically no one can remember that the way a people get new governments and new directions is ancient and simple: you stop up the streets and you go to jail for misdemeanors and then you go back and do it again. respectfully and peacefully. The fact that this is so self evident yet almost completely ignored tells me that our population of united statesians has largely ceased to function as truly caring, conscience-filled people. Reasons are many……but we are losing hope, and we deserve whatever happens to us now. This is not nice talk in front of the children, or at parties.
Nevertheless, I will continue to sally out and attempt to show folks the facts as well as try and get them to laugh at our predicament ( i usually dress as a clown 'cause clowns have more fun…..it seems like the compassionaste thing to do.'
Additional thoughts:
"To me nonviolence has come to represent a panacea for all the evils that surround my people. Therefore I am devoting all my energies toward the establishment of a society that would be based on its principles of truth and peace." – Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
"Today's world is traveling in some strange direction. You see that the world is going toward destruction and violence. And the specialty of violence is to create hatred among people and to create fear. I am a believer in nonviolence and I say that no peace or tranquility will descend upon the people of the world until nonviolence is practiced, because nonviolence is love and it stirs courage in people." – Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan to an interviewer in 1985
It is delightful to see such a clear article posted on CD about the deep complicity of the Democratic Party in everything that is evil about the Bush administration.
The complete failure to name what it is that we face (corporatism, fascism, dictatorship), and to rally popular opposition and resistance, make the Democratic Party almost useless for any positive purpose, despite the sincere intentions of many good people who continue to pin their hopes on it.
That said, history is funny, and the way the future will play out remains unpredictable. Call me a fool, but i'm still pressing my 'representatives' to name the truth, and to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney.
Hopefully that (and blogging) are not all i'm doing!
Required reading for Common Dreamers!!!
When will the 1934 congressional committee results appear on Blitzer's "The Situation Room", CBS's 60 Minutes, PBS's Frontline and other MSM? Who will bring this up in the Presidential debates?
A third party is needed. The current 2 party system is rigged and undemocratic, and NOT "government for the people."
According to the San Fran Chronicle, a recent NYT poll found 42 percent of voters think America was right to go into Iraq, while the percentage of those polled who said that it was wrong to go to war had fallen from 61 percent to 51 percent http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/02/EDC2RB8A7...
I'm starting to think that C-D readers may be the minority, and that the rest of the US are overtly or covertly Bush lovers. It appears that America is repeating Germany's mistakes in the early 1930s, but this time it just may stick. Sigh.
So one more time, GENERAL STRIKE September 11.
What if fascism had no uniforms, symbols, anti-semitism or internal fences -- but was basically fascism in most regards? Would we recognize it as such?
That is, if it was the blending of corporation-state, total authority of power (exemplified/proxied/disguised by money), gradual sell-off or dismantling of anything "public", removal of all democracy from the economy, and gradual removal of all democracy from the public sphere -- to be replaced by the power of money, which is just a facade over the power of power?