A few days ago I received a note from a friend and colleague (in the field of Mental Health) which contained all the favorite memes of the liberal, elite cognoscenti. The e-mail was essentially a copy of a post, titled Fascism Anyone? by Lawrence Britt from the web site of the Council for Secular Humanism. It purports to be a logical disquisition on our ongoing descent into fascism. The starting point is the author’s attempt to draw parallels between past instances of fascism and the current Administration of George W. Bush.
I will briefly summarize the post’s 14 points (with my humble editorial comments as asides):
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.… It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia. [Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, are good examples]
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights…. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation. Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, plus the Palestinians and al Qaeda are good examples]
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause…. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” [This is easy, everyone scapegoats the Jews, and the only ones who need to put “terrorists” in scare quotes are people who have trouble identifying those who specifically target non-combatant innocents as terrorists.]
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. [The last I saw, the military still had civilian leaders; you may not like Bush and Rumsfeld, but they are civilians.]
5. Rampant sexism…. these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses. [Since the Islamists want Shariah law, which is the law of the land in such enlightened places as Saudi Arabia, and Shariah values Muslim women as being worth half a Muslim male, and executes Homosexuals, this one is easy.]
6. A controlled mass media. [Al Jazeera, anyone?]
7. Obsession with national security. [9/11 will do that.]
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together…. A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion. [Again, the goal of al Qaeda, as well as the current status of Iran and Saudi Arabia, is an Islamic state under Shariah law.]
9. Power of corporations protected…. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens. [Most totalitarian states are ruled by small groups of corrupt elites; again see Iran and Saudi Arabia.]
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. [Last I heard strikes were still legal.]
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist. [In this country there is indeed minimal academic freedom; there are almost no Conservative voices in academia.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. [Pre liberation Iraq, perhaps,North Korea, Saudi Arabia.]
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. [Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the names start to repeat after a while, with some variation from time to time.]
14. Fraudulent elections. [Thus far, most election fraud has been linked to counties under Democratic control. Take a look at what has been going on in Washington's state governor’s race. Stefan Sharkansky at Sound Politics has been on top of this, with details.]
While I suggest you read the whole thing for yourself, it does seem to be a pretty good primer for understanding totalitarian states, all of which share some or all of these features. I would suggest that most of these features belong to al Qaeda, the countries in the Axis of Evil, the Palestinian terror groups like Hamas, Fatah (now know as the Yassar Arafat Brigades), Hezballah, and some additions like Saudi Arabia and Cuba. The country that appears to be most threatened with a slide into fascism today is Russia. (The European Union is in danger, admittedly with a much longer horizon, of descending into a bureaucratic erosion of individual rights that may, in time, become indistinguishable from fascism but that is for another day.) Putting the United States in the same company suggests that the writer of the article essentially has no idea what Fascism actually is.
I briefly considered doing a thorough fisking of the note (which is long and semi-detailed, though it lacks any links to sources) but realized that this would be a completely vain attempt (for the Firefly fans out there, it would amount to River’s redacting of Book’s Bible, an attempt to impose rigor and logic to a system that is fundamentally about faith, not reason.) It lead me to ponder how bright, thoughtful people (among them many of my relatives and friends) can see fascism and the forwards march of fascism in the current setting, especially when our enemies are among the most vicious totalitarian nihilists we have ever faced. This doesn’t apply just here at home, but at the moment, the Europeans consider the US and Israel the greatest dangers world peace (I suppose, in a way they are right. If we would only surrender, we would have peace; bin Laden has said just that, explicitly, many times.) This brings me back to my current interests which I am attempting to explore in this blog. I have been trying to explain how people can deny unpleasant pieces of reality. As a Psychiatrist, I see this everyday in my practice, but it is also at work in almost every interaction between human beings. We remain rational creatures, just barely, by constantly reasserting our rationality over our irrationality; civilization depends on the balance of the rational out weighing the irrational; when the balance is upset (for example, when a state is taken over by a pseudo-scientific ideology which is deeply irrational) the state will inevitably fail. Since to the victims of totalitarianism, Fascism and Communism (and Islamism today) are indistinguishable, I thought I would use Communism, last century’s failed BIG IDEA, as my exemplar. Communism was based on a theoretical underpinning that denied human irrationality. Communism could only work if the basic tenet held, ie that men would love their fellow man if only they were not oppressed by the Capitalist overlords. If Communism were correct, then all that followed would have made sense. It would make perfect, rational, sense to remove from society those who were not capable of understanding this fundamental fact, of an innate, essential goodness. The early Communist true believers, to see them at their most idealistic, believed they were freeing people from oppression (and in their language, they persisted in claiming this well after it had become clear that so much of what they were doing was corrupt and oppressive); they were only seeking power over their fellow men because they needed power in order to usher in the Communist Utopia. Even if one could overlook the deaths of millions during the forced collectivizations and the rampant corruption of the body politic and loss of freedoms in the USSR, it became clearer and clearer to the citizens of the USSR and slowly even to the readers of the New York Times, that the USSR was a corrupt failure of a country. Precisely because people are, in ways that they almost always fail to recognize in themselves, irrational under their rational surface, any Utopian system is doomed to fail.
When people do not recognize their own irrationality, their own hidden motivations, there is usually a good reason for this self deception; it is almost always based on poorly perceived threats to the self.
I would argue that only a Democratic system has any hope of finding rational outcomes from the complex interplay of individual and group irrationality. I will return to these topics when time permits.
Recent Comments