Fascist Culture

[Cain]

"When I hear "culture" I release the safety catch on my Browning!"
-Hans Johst

"With a stroke we have now obliterated 1789 from the history books"
- Joseph Goebbels, 1933

"The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own"
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Fascism is the word haunting the minds of everyone who hasn't bought into the "us and them" bullshit of the last 7 years.  And despite what the media would like people to think, its not just the hysterical far-left who are using it, although they do have an annoying tendency to use the word for practically everything they dislike, bearing out Orwell's prophecy in Politics and the English Language. 

That aside, libertarians and progressives alike have commented that there is a growing tendency within the current administration towards "Red-state fascism", which in the words of the Mises Institute President Lew Rockwell "celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth."

Naturally, the concerned scholars of the present have taken to looking to the past in order to elucidate the problem.  A proliferation of books have appeared recently, drawing the connections, sometimes crudely, between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy with present day policies of the USA.  Which, in my opinion is not only the totally wrong way of going about it, but also treating the symptoms, instead of the causes of the disease.  Because the political manifestations of Fascism are only the tip of the iceberg.  Moreover, it ignores the very real sophistication of political manipulation techniques that have come into being since the original Fascist powers were defeated.

You see, Fascism is a very in your face way of going about controlling a country.  You need bodies on the street, making trouble for the opposition, being violent.  You need the punishment for dissidents to be public and bloody, in order to scare the shit out of any possible enemies.  You need control that cannot be questioned, least of all by the representatives of a democratic process.

In short, you need a number of things that, if they happened today, would be very noticeable and would provoke a backlash.  Yes yes, I know, Blackwater are the unofficial military arm of the GOP...get back to me once they actually start beating up protesters and Democratic party members.  A private military force may be unconstitutional and certainly undemocratic, but its not the same as Blackshirts burning your house down in the middle of the night.

And that's the problem with the Fascist political analysis of America today.  Yes, there are some similarities in policy, and these things are not good at all.  In all likelihood, the trend is leading towards Fascism, its true.  But Fascism is not, historically, a gradual process.  It festers, lurks underground, then bursts onto the mainstream, violently taking control.  This is different, a variant of the Fascist virus, that is acting differently in order to prevent activation of the state's autoimmune system of defence.

The failure of all previous approaches is that they concentrate on the political aspects of top down rule, instead of the populist bottom up approach, mixed with the embedding of Fascism within the culture of the USA.  The focus is too narrow, too defined, and that's why the theory wont match up to reality.  In International Relations, we're used to dealing with multiple levels of political analysis, so perhaps it is just obvious to us, but that is what is happening here.  The USA is only developing a Fascist political system in reaction to Fascist cultural view of the world.

What is a Fascist culture?  Its an air of Philistine hatred towards what many of us consider culture, arts, philosophy mixed in with an air of anti-intellectualism.  Its a spirit of "us-and-them", with both being ill-defined.  The Fascist culture is always under assault you see, because real culture is usually found in the avant-garde, whose Bohemianism and irreverence are everything the fascist cannot stand about modernity.  It exhibits a maniacal love for the state, because only through the state can so much blood be shed – the Eternal War giving meaning to the fascists otherwise nihilistic and pointless existence.  It hates the refined and the intellectual, because both require a lack of mental rigidity to have any use.

This culture has many roots, far too many for me to be able to figure out.  There are elements of it within conservative populism.  Of course, some of it is drawn from the Evangelical Dominionist Movement – whose hatred for everything since the writing of the Bible, especially new facts, is well documented.  Part of it arises from a shallow consumerist apathy, where the only meaning becomes sensation and the only sensation that makes one feel truly alive is the act of killing and hate.  There are countless others too.

And this of course, has its promoters.  Naturally, the NeoConservatives, with their roots in the illiberal right, advocate it entirely.  There are advantages for large companies, fanatical religious groups and demagogues of all stripes.

And best of all, there is no legislative or legal remedy to it.  You cannot ban the Zeitgeist.  Fascism becomes part of the very air you breathe, the fabric of a view of the world and everyday life.  Why bother having a messy constitutional coup when you can virtually assure fascist policies for the next 20 years, while keeping the form and ceremony of the republic?  Actually pulling off a Hitler or Mussolini could create a backlash.  To be sure, you are sometimes bound more to those stupid "laws" more than you would be if you had taken the formers route, but the upside is that dissent is minimalized and you can always have another go if you don't quite get your way.

Its the perfect way to inflict the Fascist virus on a country, by operating on the cultural level, infecting the national discourse, warping and mutating public opinion to the level where the wholesale call for the slaughter of innocents can be considered an extreme, but possible, policy.  Where torture is acceptable, along with indefinite detention by a Fuhrer pretending to be President.

That's the trick, you see. A bottom-up Fascist revolution, waged at the cultural level.  That's where it has to be fought, too, if you want any hope of reversing the trend.  The political level is just symptomatic of the condition of the country.  Conspiracies can and do sometimes overthrow the established order to institute something more terrible, but even more often, they are lifted to power on the support of the public and the conditions of the time.

[Adios]

[Xooxe]

Great stuff as always Cain. I appreciate the lack of preachy illustrations.

While the similarities might be superficial it reminds me slightly of reading Wilhelm Reich (not Listen Little Man though, which is probably one of the most personally furious rants I've ever read in book form).

[Cain]

Cheers, both of you.  And Listen Little Man is possibly the true Platonic form of all rants everywhere.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Just a thought...

Could it be that the apparently ubiquitous nature of this fascist culture is itself part of the propaganda? It seems that all media outlets are at least resigned to the eventual demise of the American republic, if not actively egging it on.  Outspoken people everywhere are in favor of higher security, tighter restrictions on everything, and all that.  Of course, it is the media that broadcasts the opinions of these outspoken people.

The only thing that I think is truly ubiquitous is the media. From advertisements to newscasts there is little far-reaching method of mass communication that is not in some way controlled or directed by the various agendas that right now tend to agree that freedom is dangerous to profits. Even the Internet is not immune to this -- independent sites reporting "crazy ideas" like concentration camps in the US are scoffed at precisely because they aren't owned by corporate entities.

I don't believe that everyone, or even a majority of people, in the US or elsewhere in the "West" have been turned into fascists without even knowing it (although many have, to be sure). But nearly unanimous is the beleif that sanctioned and approved news is the only reliable news. People have not completely lost their ability to judge facts, but they have been fooled into accepting facts only from compromised sources.

Nevertheless in talking to people (online, but even IRL), it's clear to me that the broadly pro-fascist beliefs reported by the major media outlets just isn't really there. I live in the reddest state in the union -- and while there are a lot of people who blindly assert the party line like they thought of it themselves, most people will admit that they're uncomfortable with some if not most of the measures taken to "protect" people in America.

At this point it still isn't safe for the assholes in power to switch over to full-scale fascist machinery to wrest control of this country from the republic, regardless of what kind of rhetoric they would wrap such a coup in.

Furthermore, there is a large movement afoot in the US (maybe not large enough to swing the next election without some major events to boost their numbers, but still large and growing) that recognizes the false choice between "Republican" and "Democrat" for the scam it is.

The optimist in me hopes that the move to shut down democracy in America will run out of time. Before it can fully ascend to permanent power, I hope its foundation -- the lie that there is some meaningful difference between the two faces of our single-party system -- will collapse.

Of course, that won't happen without a whole lot of people working to make it happen. But I think those people exist, and in sufficient numbers to have a real chance at stopping the march of totalitarianism or at least putting it off for another generation of slackers to fight. The key I think is recognizing that the hopelessness of working against a culture that is inherently going to fight you is exactly what they want you to feel.

[Cain]

A good question.

I do believe the media certainly have played the most important role, bar voters themselves, in this.  But the question stll arises of why this is bought into, and who decides to start the process.  The Murdoch empire, for example, is quintessentially fascist - Rupert himself being a right-wing "revolutionary" who hates traditional conservativism as much as he does left wing liberalism.  But that still begs the question of sales and popularity.

I also dont think you necessarily need a majority, either.  So long as a few channels of authority are seized and make themselves popular through playing to peoples most base emotions (because that is what it is at the end of the day), the others fall into line in order to "catch up".  By distorting political discourse so far in one direction, all other political discourse is warped around that, invariably shifting it in that direction.  In such a situation, if extended long enough, the culture itself will become the majority, or at least a plurality of the population, the latter seemingly already having happened.

[Cain]

Thought I'd throw this in too, since in some ways we tend to agree on certain aspects of the use of Fascism:


To many people, I am afraid, fascism is just a word to describe things they do not like.

Lately, the American blogosphere has been full of talk about the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. For a while, I though the intention of this event was to tell people that Ahmadinejad is the leader of a totalitarian country, and that his ideology sucks big time. Personally, I had an impression that many people were already aware of these simple facts, but what the heck - at least it could have been a good excuse for drinking beer and walking around with a cowboy hat.

However, the point of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, according guide to hosting the event, is neither to drink beer nor to walk around with cowboy hats. It is not even about telling nasty stories about Iran (there would have been plenty). Nope. The point of the event is to "confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat".

Yep. That's right. Global warming, which could potentially screw up the economy, the climate, the whole friggin' world and Ann Coulters hairdo, is nothing compared to a bunch of reactionary extremists keeping themselves busy with blowing up bombs in Iraq. I have to admit, guys: I wasn't aware of that.

Now, Islamofascism does exist. But that does not mean every single reactionary extremist of the Muslim world is a fascist.

Others talk about income tax as a variant of fascism. This guy, for instance. Has he spent much time studying fascism to reach that conclusion? What about the people who spend their time talking about Environazism - do they actually know much about real-life fascism, about the kind of fascism that killed millions during WWII or even about the kind of fascism which merely involves firebombing the local mosque in the middle of the night?

Did I forget about the tons of blogs claiming that Bush is Hitler, and reposting the same essays over and over and over and over again? Or the guys who keep on comparing 911 with the Reichstag fire? These guys are no better than the "buhu-the-bad-environazi-feminazi-Muslim-gay-activists-are-going-to-kill-us-all-lot".

Having spent some time surfing around on the blogwaves, you can soon come to conclude that in the blogosphere everyone is a fascist.

That is not true. It's quite ridiculous. And it really makes it difficult to use Technorati to do any sensible research into actual fascism around the world. Because, guess what, it does exist. Fascism as a political ideology is alive and in some cases alarmingly well. Although it is mostly hiding away at the fringes of politics it has a lethal potential: hatred, violence, terrorism... it all follows in the footsteps of fascism. Today.

So, here's my prayer: Stop writing nonsense about fascism. Either drop the subject in its' entirety. Or do some proper research.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

And here I thought Fascism just meant "Person I don't like..."

Huh.


"And Now We Know!"

[Suu]

*makes an appearance to flaunt avatar!*