What Is Fascism?

by Frank Scott

 

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

 

Giovanni Gentile* "Encyclopedia Italiana"

 

This definition from one of the exponents of the program has far more clarity than the over-used one coming from present day people of mostly liberal persuasion who define fascism as anything they don't like about present reality, without understanding that without capitalist reality there would be no possibility of what can become what is called fascism.

 

When capitalism is in its most critical state, pretense of democracy vanishes and big money power that always ruled from behind the scenes comes forward to publicly bring order to what seems to threaten chaos; democratic power accruing to the great mass of the people, which translates to chaos for the minority rulers who get away with being out numbered not only by employing imperial military forces but keeping majorities under control by use of consciousness controlling mind management techniques creating commercial distractions among them and hiding class behind false human differences like ethnicity, religion and race.

 

Far more important in the suppression of democracy than, say, pain management or anger management for individuals is the social ignorance management practiced by major political media, at the present moment in attempting to destroy a social democratic and even socialist consciousness rising among Americans by doing everything to suppress, misinform, disinform and otherwise bury that threat to fundamentalist, fanatic obsession with our economic private parts. This amounts to a form of masturbatory politics that finds us forced into identity groups reduced to primarily playing with, for, and against ourselves while remaining mostly unconscious of our human connections.

 

The present crisis in the capitalist political economic system, heightened by a tragic and potentially socially devastating if sometimes hysterically over-hyped pandemic, highlights the fact of a system at a severe stage of breakdown and the need for radical transformation that leads to democratic control and ends the bloody farce of a private profit marketplace assuring poverty, unemployment, illness and death to a population innocently financing the economic war killing people here and currently slaughtering thousands across the world. The danger is so great that recent austerity fanatics and fundamentalist public sector destroyers are proposing salvation of the system through methods that would have labeled them socialist-revolutionaries a short while ago.

 

Their hated "big government" has created trillions of previously unavailable dollars, mainly to save corporate business but also to bail out ordinary workers suffering the inability to buy what the businesses sell. This usually social democratic salvation for capital when it nears moving to fascism is coming from sources previously labeled fascist by the comfortable class which is becoming more uncomfortable each day. While label exchanges and ignorance combine to have unfortunates cursing alleged socialism for robbing ordinary workers and other unfortunates cursing alleged fascism for the same thing but from a slightly different perspective, the labeling and identity businesses profit for their minority owners by blaming the as yet unorganized majority suffering in maintenance of minority rule. But every downside creates an up, or at least offers the opportunity to do so, and the present approaching near if not total collapse of the capitalist market of private profit is helping bring about what could be a massive change for humanity.

 

While the American façade for democracy in November will produce the usual billionaire financed struggle in which a minority of the electorate supports a winner to proceed in maintenance of the system with different sectors of the population showing benefit while the majority pays, larger parts of that majority are seeing, feeling and gradually understanding that the system does not serve their interest, by design, and only a social revolution, whatever language it may be covered in by their supposed leaders, can bring about a reality that serves them and not just the nation's incredibly rich owners and their well-to-do professional servant class.

 

The threats to our social and natural environments grow more deadly, with the viral pandemic added on to the profits for those loaning imaginary money to private wealth and charging real debt service to the paying public. But calls for universal health care, public banking and even public ownership and control of the federal reserve system are growing at the same time, and while control remains in the hands of a tiny if most powerful sector of humanity, the opposition to them is not only a budding national movement but even more important a move towards global democracy. All over the world there are rising voices, organizations and demands for radical change in the political economics that bring incredible wealth to some but only by forcing more and more into unpayable debt and poverty, both physical and mental. Strikes among newly organizing workers are hardly featured in major media which is more busy telling people we'll all be killed by the virus if we don't follow often conflicting orders from leaders who follow one another around a circle of ignorance, but they are numerous and further signs that the conditions capital has created are teaching lessons people do not have to attend colleges to learn. And the overwhelming majority of Americans are workers fast becoming educated beyond the teachings of a minority able to expand horizons in higher education but too often having those horizons shrunk by being taught just how to maintain a system that offers them a possibility of some creature comfort only by falling into debt while making misery and deprivation absolutely essential for the great majority.

 

While many fear the intrusions in and control of individual lives by electronic authority created by the pandemic reaction, others see the possibility of a truly democratic system of life enhancing controls when power is removed from minorities and truly performs on behalf of the public good and not simply for private profit. An electronic watchdog to protect and enhance life itself and not simply some life for some people can be the outcome of control falling to majorities instead of the present situation which if allowed to continue will lead to an outcome even worse than the fears expressed by some who see "them" having too much control while "we" are kept from control, mainly by seeing individuals and not systemic forces as our major problem.

 

Capitalist political economics are why the market is near crashing, the pandemic struck, and wars continue in the Middle East and are threatened further in Latin America. And the creation of global socialist democracy is the only counter measure to global capitalist fascism. That creation is a job for an international majority of humanity but it begins in the national cultures we all inhabit and will extend long past any November election. We all need to learn, if not remember, that Trump, Republicans and Democrats are a problem, but capitalism, the system they serve, is the problem that must be solved if humanity is to have a future.

 

Note: This article was first published on April 10, 2020 at Legalienate.

 

 

 

Nine Years On Democrats Still Triggered by "Fascist" Trump

In a CNN forum Wednesday, Kamala Harris called Trump a "fascist," the first time her campaign has used this term in public, though the accusation has been widely employed by Trump opponents and even some staff members for years. In the latter camp is Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly, who recently told the New York Times that the former president once said that he wanted "the type of Generals Hitler had," who, ironically, thought the Nazi leader was a moron and tried to assassinate him on multiple occasions. Of course, that's not what Trump meant, and he in fact stated that he wanted generals who reflexively obey their commander in chief, no surprise there.

In any case, it's worth a look at exactly what those still capable of being triggered by Trump say they object to in his "fascist" behavior.  One concerning episode is Trump's having claimed that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the United States; another is his saying he would be a dictator from day one; a third is the fact that the Supreme Court he appointed three judges to has given him (and U.S. presidents in general) immunity and nearly unlimited executive power when acting as president; a fourth is that he wants to use the U.S. military against "the internal enemy," including the "radical left," by which he means President Biden, vice-president Harris and their supporters, and anyone else he wants to associate with them; a fifth is that he intends to purge the federal government of disloyal members and fire the special prosecutor Jack Smith, who is in charge of two federal criminal cases against Trump. Also deeply concerning is Trump's having inspired the January 6, 2021 coup attempt against certifying the 2020 election results, as well as his current threats to not respect the 2024 election results if he isn't declared the winner. 

Admittedly, these are serious concerns, even for the untriggered. No sane person wants a return to the days when "civilized blood" was taken seriously as the justification for white supremacy, though we should note that many U.S. presidents we are still taught to admire not only accepted such ideas as a matter of course, but acted on them with supreme viciousness, until the U.S. was literally torn in half and nearly collapsed. Nor do we want Trump or any other U.S. president working to establish a personal dictatorship, though we should recognize that the reason Kamala Harris and her backers are worried is not because of any damage he may do the American people, but because he threatens what the late Edward S. Herman called the "dictatorship of money." That dictatorship rules with a savage disregard for democracy that makes Trump look like the merest juvenile delinquent. So we can dismiss the remaining charges against Trump with the restrained observation that purges and loyalty crusades and coup attempts are staple items in Washington's arsenal whether nominally headed up by the Democratic or Republican Parties.

But to return to the "fascist" point - the most glaring omission from the indictment against Trump as an unprecedented evil is the signature feature of fascist rule - the mass murder of a despised minority group. Is the Orange Menace guilty of such? He is not, though it must be conceded that his constant inflaming of sectarian passions could culminate in such a horror in the future. But as of now, he is not guilty.

As we know, however, the current Biden-Harris administration is actively engaged in mass extermination via complete military and economic support for Israel's wholesale murder of Palestinian Arabs, including shooting children in the head, gunning down surgeons at the operating table, hunting down and assassinating journalists, blockading and starving the entire Gazan population while leveling hospitals, schools, and sewage treatment plants, promising its victims a rainy winter of being awash in raw human waste and unretrieved corpses, with no capacity to stop the inevitable epidemics of disease that will ensue, and on and on and on.

If "fascism" is still taken to be the ugliest form of political rule that can exist (the U.S. allied itself with despised Bolshevism to defeat it), current Democratic Party policy in the Middle East would appear to qualify for that designation. Which means that voting against it precludes voting for Harris. On the other hand, a vote for Trump is also out of bounds as he considers Democratic policy in Gaza to not be "fascist" enough. 

Redefining the term to exclude wholesale massacre of a despised minority group would be a pointless task, as this is the heart of what "fascism" is taken to be. Suffice it to say, then, that if one insists on not "helping fascism" then one has to vote for a non-"fascist" candidate - Jill Stein, Cornel West, Claudia De La Cruz, or Chase Oliver.

Or one can try to argue that Trump poses a danger worse than "fascism," as dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky has done.

 

Sources: 

David Brooks and Jim Cason, "Trump Is A Fascist, Ex Staff and Democrats Say," La Jornada, October 25, 2024 (Spanish).

For more on what fascism means historically, see Frank Scott's, "Fascism Should More Appropriately Be Called Corporatism," Legalienate, April 10, 2020.

For Chomsky on Trump, see "Trump is 'undeniably' the worst criminal in history," London Independent, June 24, 2020 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trump Crazy Enough To Start Nuclear War? Yes, But ALL U.S. Presidents Are, And It May Not Even Be Up To Them

David Doel of The Rational National podcast has sounded the alarm that Donald Trump poses a unique danger if he returns to the U.S. presidency, citing a story in The Intercept claiming that he ordered his generals to draw up plans envisioning a U.S. first-use of nuclear weapons against North Korea when the two countries were nearly drawn into direct conflict in 2017.  Doel directly quotes The Intercept article on the allegedly unique danger:

"He didn't merely threaten to attack North Korea if it possessed the ability to strike the United States. He ordered the Pentagon to develop new plans over the resistance of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis, to do so. As Slate columnist Fred Kaplan reports in his book, "The Bomb," the Joint Chiefs of Staff created new war plans 'that assumed the United States would strike the first blow.'" 

Furthermore, the article states, "Mattis had the authority to order the bombing of North Korean launch sites - that is, to start an escalation that could lead to nuclear war, without the approval of Congress or even Trump."

This is all certainly alarming enough, but what makes Doel think the U.S. contemplating a first-strike nuclear attack (or delegating the decision to launch such an attack) is anything new? Forty-two years ago the U.S. Nuclear Freeze movement attracted over a million people to a New York City protest against the U.S. mass production of first-strike nuclear weapons and their deployment minutes from their targets in the then Soviet Union. Similar mass protests rocked Europe. Why does Doel, who follows politics closely and generally intelligently, appear to be completely ignorant of this major event in recent history?

The plain fact of the matter is that the U.S. initiating nuclear war is longstanding U.S. policy supported by both parties and all U.S. presidents going back to and including JFK. The policy is to launch a nuclear strike to knock out an opponent's nuclear retaliatory capacity, then threaten with an overwhelming second strike if said opponent refuses to capitulate to U.S. demands. Furthermore, in order to prevent a nuclear adversary from doing the same to us first, the U.S. has delegated the decision to launch nukes well down the chain of command, so that if Washington is taken out and the Commander in Chief with it, U.S. nuclear weapons can still be fired. 

When he worked for the Pentagon Daniel Ellsberg tried to find out just how far down the chain of command a nuclear launch decision had been authorized, and he was unable to get a clear answer. So Trump is far from our only problem here. The prime risk factor for nuclear war is not who the Commander in Chief is, though that is certainly an important consideration, but a world wired up to explode in atomic fury at a moment's notice, whether by accident or design. Trump's thin skin and erratic temperament are hardly what we need at the top, but the idea that we're necessarily safer with Harris in the presidency is dogma, not fact. The decision to launch a nuclear war needn't include the president at all, and that has been true for a long time.

Trump's lunacy is an upstart political brand threatening to displace the bi-partisan monopoly on crazy that long preceded his appearance on the scene. Neither is worthy of any support. 

Sources:

David Doel, "This Needs More Attention," The Rational National, October 23, 2024

Jon Schwarz, "By Far The Worst Thing Trump Did Was Flirt With Nuclear War With North Korea," The Intercept, January 20, 2021

Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner," (Bloomsbury, 2017)

The Quadrennial Farce Is Almost Over; Israel's Barbarity Isn't and Won't Be Anytime Soon

The interminable lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential elections is finally almost over, with the establishment approved candidates in a virtual statistical tie.  Once again a horrendous choice is offered to  American voters in order to distract them from their problems, which cannot be faced by either the Democratic or Republican parties, much less solved by them.

In the final weeks the empty rhetoric of Kamala Harris and unending insults of Donald Trump seem unable to budge the electorate, which appears to have decided long ago for whom it intends to vote. Neither the crude personal attacks by Trump against Harris nor the efforts of Harris to present herself as the candidate of good sense and the future appear to have convinced anyone of anything.

Trump has been unable to make clear any plans he may have for governing the country he promises to "make great again," and offers nothing convincing on why he will be better in a second term than he was in his first, when 400,000 Americans died of Covid while Trump repeatedly claimed it was on the verge of magically disappearing.  

It never did.

Meanwhile, Harris has warned that "democracy" will be suspended if Trump wins, even as her Democratic Party provides an avalanche of lethal arms to Israel, which it uses to pitilessly exterminate a defenseless civilian population in Palestine while unilaterally igniting a regional war in the Middle East, both policies in flagrant violation of human rights law, supposedly an indispensable working part of said democracy. Back at home, Harris's party works aggressively to deny ballot access to independent parties calling for peace via an arms embargo on Israel, an explicitly anti-democratic stance that is beneath contempt.

This is at the heart of what Harris's vice-presidential candidate Tim Wals claims is a "politics of joy" now uniting Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney and everyone in between, a broad coalition of "truly optimistic people," says Wals. 

Ah, yes, optimistic people, just what we've been lacking.

Isn't it comforting to know that neo-cons who butchered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians a generation ago are now optimistically united in joyful lethality with liberals and neo-liberals, all dedicated to ending Trump's "existential" threat to "democracy," so that they, not he, will get sole credit for enabling Israel's wholesale extermination campaign in the Middle East?

 

Vance Wins Vice-Presidential Debate, American People Lose, As Both Candidates Love Bloodthirsty Israel More Than Them

 J. D. Vance won the vice presidential debate against Governor Wals, while the American people lost, and right from the start.

After a year of watching Israel exterminate Palestinians in Gaza on our live feeds while also seeing it attack Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the West Bank, the first question asked at this "thoughtful and civil" vice-presidential debate (moderator Margaret Brennan) was, "Does Israel have a right to pre-emptively strike Iran?"

Of course, Israel has already attacked Iran by bombing its Embassy in Damascus, followed by an attack inside Iran itself that killed Ismail Haniyeh, while also massively expanding its zone of attack to include by now virtually the entire Middle East, which is increasingly united against the openly rabid Jewish state. Given all of this, one could certainly wonder whether "pre-emption" at such a late date is even a meaningful term.

Nevertheless, Wals said - incredibly - that a further Israeli attack on Iran is justified in "self-defense," while Vance declared abject moral surrender and left the matter entirely "up to Israel." Who says the two official parties are too polarized to come to agreement?

Naturally, the American people come out losers in this bargain, as all they get is to keep paying for Israel's fanatical aggression while risking another 911. Doesn't sound like too good a deal.

Vance won the debate based on his discussion of the economy, always an important factor in determining electoral contests. No matter how much Democrats offer in the form of child tax credits, paid pregnancy leave, and free school lunches, it's not going to mean much if more and more key production is off-shored and an abundant supply of crap jobs and "gigs" is all they offer to replace the industrial era's full-time job with good wages and benefits. That leaves them completely open to a Make America Great Again sales pitch, since many people can remember - or at least know other people who can remember, a time not long past when ordinary people could buy homes and go to the doctor and take a paid vacation every year, which they no longer can. Vance is hampered by the fact that Trump did not deliver on reversing outsourcing when he was president, but at least Vance's diagnosis is right, whereas Wals's very definitely is not.

Also, championing abortion looks more sinister when the Democrats continue to support economic policies that keep average real wages stagnating or declining for a large majority of the population, which induces more and more women to abort rather than start families or enlarge an existing family. Unplanned pregnancies don't have to be an economic disaster, as they are often described, but many of them unnecessarily and inevitably will be if we continue to march under the job-exporting banner enthusiastically favored by Democrats.

Let's have a real "pro-life" culture, with dignified jobs at good wages for all who want them and access to abortion for all who need them.

Palestinian Activist Just Says No To Lesser Evil Gaslighting

"I'm here to send a clear message to the Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates for office this fall that the people will no longer support unconditional aiding and abetting of genocide, and we stand for a complete arms embargo on Israel, sanctions, end of U.S. aid to Israel, and a permanent and immediate ceasefire."

Question: "What do you say to people who say, 'Well, you're gonna get Trump elected?'"

"That's a form of emotional blackmail. This is the rhetoric of abusers, right, that we say, 'Oh, well, you don't like one thing, well, what are you going to think of the other guy?' And I think that this is an unsustainable system and I'm actually looking out for the sustainability of our country in years to come. Because if we continue to tell ourselves that we're stuck between the healthier of Pepsi and Coke, we will only have the healthier between Pepsi and Coke. 

"But if we don't threaten a vote, if we don't say, 'no arms embargo, no vote, no sanctions, no vote,' we will never be able to leverage any real political accountability. And we've seen the effects of this only in just a few months, I mean, Governor Wals got up right after the Minnesota primaries on CNN and he said openly, that was the first time he said the situation in Gaza is intolerable. He hadn't said a word about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and what prompted him to do so was that one in five Minnesota Democrats voted uncommitted. Because of a one week, grassroots movement to get people to vote uncommitted. 

"Now think about how far we will go if we can leverage more civic momentum if it's not just a one week long movement in which voters across the board are rising up and saying, 'We will no longer vote for this just because it's better than the other guy - that is not going to be our standard anymore.' And when we tell ourselves that that is our standard we will only be stuck in this bind between two options and in years and years to come our children and grandchildren will be told that they have to vote Democrat they will have to vote for unconditional Zionism just because it's not as Zionist as the other guy. Slaughter, but better slaughter. Slaughter, but more effective slaughter."

Question: Does the Tim Wals selection as VP make you want to change your mind?

"This is short-sightedness, and actually this is blindness towards Wals's history of policies towards Israel and towards the Palestinian people and his Palestinian constituents. So I am from the state of Minnesota, actually, and I am a leader in the Minnesota community, and I was actually just part of a delegation of Minnesota Palestinian families that had a meeting canceled on the spot (with Wals), like literally two minutes before it was supposed to happen, as we were seated in the room, after ten months of Wals refusing to meet with Palestinian constituents. But, on the flip side, he right away rushed to synagogues and Stand With Israel rallies fight after October 7. So I'm living proof of how Wals treats his Palestinian constituents, and that is that he turns a blind eye to them. He doesn't treat them with respect at all. He treats them as subhuman. But also, if you look at it materially, Wals sits on the Minnesota State Board of Investments, which invests over $157 million  in Israeli companies, and that's just Israeli companies, $157 million of state pensions in Israeli companies. That doesn't include, by the way, weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, like Boeing, like security companies like Elbit, etc. that are also complicit in violence against the people of Gaza. 

"So he is investing Minnesota money in the Military Industrial Complex. He is also funded (sic) a $1.3 million Minnesota state taxpayer subsidized grant, funded by Minnesota taxpayer money, a grant to construct a Lockheed Martin facility in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he called that good news from Minnesota. He has a history of being a friend to war, a friend of slaughter, of the Palestinian people, and we ought to not turn a blind eye to it."

-----Sana Wazwaz, American Muslims For Palestine, Minnesota 

Source:

Due Dissidence, "Ceasefire Activist Gives BRILLIANT Interview at DNC Protest," August 20, 2024

A Tale of Two Apartheids

In a discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent book on apartheid Israel (The Message) Breaking Points commentator Krystal Ball's examples of the persistence of racial horror in the U.S. were pretty under-whelming. Does Trump falsely blaming Haitian immigrants for eating American pets really stand out as worthy of mention in the longstanding U.S. tradition of slavery, lynching, and mass black imprisonment?  Realistically, that has to be far down the list of racial priorities in the U.S., where black people still don't have capital four hundred plus years after being wrested from their homelands and brought to the U.S. as slaves.

 

Forty acres and a mule for all former slaves never happened, and that failure has obvious repercussions down to the present day. Pretending it isn't so solves nothing. 

 

On the other hand, it's easy to give up on Ta-Nehisi Coates, especially after he preposterously claimed that Barack Obama was the only legitimate heir of Malcolm X. Malcolm was a revolutionary, the greatest black revolutionary of the 20th Century, in fact; Obama was what Malcolm called a "House Negro," the Great Half-White Hope of corporate America. Advertising Age gave him an award for the slickness of his 2008 election campaign. When did Malcolm ever win acclaim from corporate America?  Never. 

 

It is certainly a blessing that Coates is now bringing to a mass audience the news that Israel is an apartheid state, which is all to the good, albeit a bit late in the day. 

 

Ball's co-presenter Saagar Enjeti is incensed at Coates for quite another reason, specifically that he paints the U.S. as as much of an apartheid state as Israel is, where segregation is codified in law. That is too much for Enjeti, who vehemently denies it. 

 

Actually, Coates's explicit comparison between the two apartheid states is drawn between the Jim Crow south and Israel, and there the comparison is not far-fetched.  As much as Palestinian Arabs today blacks in the old south had no rights anyone else needed to respect. Both groups were subjugated and terrorized by overwhelming force.

 

Any comparison between Israel and the U.S. in the post civil rights era would be more problematic, though not entirely out of bounds. While one would not want to dismiss the immense civilizing influence of the civil rights movement on American society, especially the end of lynching, at the same time we remain deeply segregated fifty-six years after MLK was gunned down for correctly connecting racism in U.S. foreign policy with racism at home, an analysis that has never been allowed to move us to overcome the deep racial divisions that continue to scar American society. In other words, it's far from a simple matter to assess the gains and losses of the civil rights era, and specifically to what degree legal segregation may have been worse than the de facto segregation that succeeded it.

 

As educator Jonathan Kozol has pointed out for years, photographs of students in American public schools today look remarkably similar to photos taken during the Jim Crow era. Nowhere do large numbers of white children go to school with their black counter-parts, and nowhere do blacks have access to the same level of funding as whites enjoy. Has the U.S. really changed all that much? We may like to think so, but the facts on the ground say we're kidding ourselves.

 

Every inch of the land of Israel is built over destroyed Palestinian villages, and over ninety percent of it is permanently held in trust for the Jewish people. In the United States black-white relations were founded on sexual violence and wills and trusts deliberately excluded blacks from all but a miniscule portion of the national wealth. Purposive striving by individual blacks will not overcome this problem, which is national, not personal.

 

Unlike in Israel where apartheid is backed by law, in the U.S. it is the custom of the country, a force stronger than law. In both cases it is a deep and enduring ugliness that mocks all pretensions to civilized existence.