The Democratic Party could have, and chose not to really take the Koch party down simply by denouncing their policies and candidates for what they actually are instead of pretending they and their policies were actually some sort of reasonable discourse in polite debate... which is absolute rubbish. This may be a moot point, because right now we seeing the GOP destroyed from the inside.
Donald Trump, who has been compared by conventional republican power brokers both to a wrecking ball, and to Samson bringing down the temple of the Philistines on the heads of the tenants has made it all too apparent what the Republican base is all about in reality. Out and out Fascism.
By rights, the GOP ought to be a regional party in the deep South, rural America, and the sparsely populated intermountain West. They must never, ever, be allowed to elect another president again. As such an election would certainly lead to a packed Supreme Court, the busting all remaining unions, impose suicidal budget cuts, and set up a permanent austerity dictatorship in which the right to vote of any possible opponent constituencies would be severely limited.
This is the golden ticket promised by Trump’s outrageous demagogy. The Republican Party today stands as a roadblock on every avenue of American national progress. The very existence of this party is frankly intolerable, and a threat to everyone’s lives, and those of their children and grandchildren.
Frankly, if the Republican Party could undergo even a partial collapse, the political climate of the United States would revert to a more normal ideological pattern.
If the Republican Party were to dwindle into a gaggle of regional racists and bigots, the Wall Street faction of the Democratic Party would soon find itself in increasing conflict with the residual but still quite present New Deal or pro-labor Democrats. If the two factions which are latent but observable inside the Democratic Party today were to break apart, this would be the easiest and most elegant way to get the United States back on track to having a functional economy and a just social-political structure.
Most any observer can see that Trump's atrocious characterizations of Mexicans, saying that he wants to shut down mosques and other Muslim religious centers, that he would create a registry of all Muslims in the United States and would ban all Muslims from entry to the country can be easily compared to Hitler’s Krystalnacht of 1938 and the Nuremberg racist laws. (Regarding Trump’s absurd demand to bar entry to all Muslims. How could this ever be enforced? By a new Spanish Inquisition? Trump's program could only be enforced by a suffocating fascist police state that would oppress all Americans.)
Other aspects of Fascism and Nazism that many people are not aware of include a terrorist dictatorship of banking concerns and financiers. In a representative democracy where there is a Congress or Parliament, the question of fascism has arisen when the demands by the bankers for genocidal austerity against working people have become unbearable and intolerable, leading to forms of political resistance like mass strikes. In Italy, the financiers of the bourgeoisie, were terrified that the Italian Army had gone on strike and refused to fight at Caporetto in 1917, and became even more frightened when Italian workers occupied most of the industrial factories in the country in 1920, leading to a two-year working-class upsurge. So in 1919, the bankers and factory owners recruited desperate and demoralized war veterans (the squadristi) to work as scabs and strikebreakers, and also to attack the party offices and the publications of political rivals. In Germany the Nazis recruited similar goons, calling them the brownshirts, storm troopers, or Sturmabteilungen. We needn't stretch our facilities very hard to see similarities in the Trump campaign, with many documented instances of protesters at his rallies getting beaten up by Trump’s fanatical backers. It is undeniable that Trump explicitly endorsed the violence from his bombastic podium. In the case of Ted Cruz, we have a candidate who eagerly accepts endorsements and support from anti-abortion groups with track records of violence and even murder against physicians working at women’s health clinics, in particular Planned Parenthood. The summer of 2016 is shaping up to become an unprecedented festival of political violence in the U.S.
Nazis, and fascists are also aware of the advantages of pretending to act within the confines of laws. Mussolini became Prime Minister with a March on Rome in October 1922, which had undeniable terrorist potential. It took the Duce several years to consolidate his dictatorship, a time punctuated by numerous political murders like that of Giacomo Matteotti who openly spoke in the Italian Parliament alleging the Fascists committed fraud in the recently held elections, and denounced the violence they used to gain votes. It is often said that Hitler became Chancellor and was given dictatorial power by legal means. This is not accurate, since the vote on setting up a dictatorship had been preceded by the expulsion of the communist (KPD) members of the parliament. In France, the fascist Marshal Petain was elected dictator and the French Republic abolished by the vote of a few hundred senators and deputies in a theater in the resort town of Vichy in the summer of 1941, but there was never the necessary quorum. Mainly, Petain could lean on the German Army which had conquered France in six weeks. The appearance of legitimacy...to a degree.
Fascist Economics- Mussolini and Hitler both did everything possible to drive down the real wages of workers and of the middle class. This corresponds to a policy of primitive accumulation among the wealthiest and extreme austerity which loots and asset strips living standards and the real economy in order to generate monetary profits to prop up masses of insolvent debt. (Not unlike the toxic derivatives and junk bonds of modern Wall Street Investment Banks). For more information about Fascist economics, read about Hitler's economic adviser; Hjalmar Schacht. Along with the reduction in real wages, fascism attempts to destroy labor unions, trade unions, craft unions, industrial unions, and any other organization attempting to protect working people. The early Italian fascists sought to wipe out every existing organization, including sports clubs, book clubs, ladies’ sewing circles, and all others, forcing their members into a gigantic fascist corporation. (Corporation in this sense does not mean the modern American concept of a joint stock company, but rather a medieval guild with master, journeyman, and apprentices all locked together in organic unity, denying any underlying class tensions.) We can say that just about all the Republican candidates are fascists in terms of their intention of driving down real wages and destroying the labor movement. The most aggressive in this regard are the fanatics of the Libertarian Austrian school.
Fascism promotes xenophobia, the hatred of foreigners, and real or imagined territorial claims against other countries. When Fascist promises of economic success don't pan out, they generate enthusiasm through war hysteria. In today’s world, fascism anywhere risks becoming a path to a 3rd World War. Irrationality and the rejection of reason is another tell tale trait of fascism. Hitler relied on the myth that the Germans were a race of supermen and needed to exterminate competing races of subhuman individuals bent on the destruction of the superior species. Hitler told Germans to turn away from reason and think with their blood. Demagogy and hysteria based on these themes are found everywhere in fascism. Closely related to this, is the scapegoating ethnic groups in the wake of national disasters. Hitler’s original agitation at the beginning of his political career was focused on the myth of "the stab in the back", which was a claim that the German army had never been militarily defeated on the field of battle, but rather only betrayed by cliques of liberals, communists, Jews, socialists, and defeatists in Berlin. This was called the Dolchstoßlegende, and it was the staple Nazi argument of the 1920s. Of course the German army had indeed been defeated in the field, specifically by the American Expeditionary Force in the battles of St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. Trump’s stab in the back story is based on his invented account of Muslims in Jersey City cheering when the twin towers came down. This pseudo-incident allows Trump to argue that Muslims have received American hospitality and responded with treachery. This thought process is identical to that of Hitler.
Fascists tend to be superstitious and invoke mythological ideas, ghosts, and spirits, they are inclined towards mysticism. (These aspects of fascist irrationality unfortunately find receptive ears among many Americans who are fooled by waving flags and the mention of popular deities.) Fascism overall has an anti-intellectual tendency. Mussolini once told a journalist that he held educational programs in contempt, and did not want to have one, since the only guarantee of effective government was the power and determination of the individuals involved. Hitler made sure that the Nazi party program remained a neglected relic, and always tried to prevent it from being updated. For the Nazis, there was no difference between propaganda and university teaching.
You can see modern versions of this when Texas removes Thomas Jefferson from it's history text books, demands for creation myths to be taught in the science classroom are made, or the Koch brothers are allowed to choose political science professors at Florida Universities in return for making donations.
Misogyny – fascists of all kinds hate and fear women. Psychologists can spend entire careers on Fascist Dictators and their innumerable "issues". Trump may be the obvious misogynist, with unfiltered insults flowing daily about females in all walks of life, but most all republican rhetors promote the same inequality, maybe not quite as blatantly.
Fascism also appears as the negation of parliaments and legislative processes. Mussolini called the Italian Parliament a cattle pen and pigsty. This is once again like Hitler, who never accepted the Constitution of the Weimar Republic, and got himself appointed dictator as soon as he seized power in January 1933. The way the US legislators have ignored the presidential authority of Barack Obama, pretending it is somehow illegitimate (despite being elected twice by significant margins in uncontested elections...I mean it's not like he lost the popular vote and was appointed by the Supreme Court! :P ) smacks of fascism. Many of the promises of Trump and other Republican presidential candidates are outside constitutional authority. They either are willing to spit on the constitution...or at least the parts they don't like, or have no knowledge of it.
Libertarians-Fascists? A Strange Alliance.
First off we have to understand that Libertarianism was invented by the decadent Viennese Frederich von Hayek and von Mises in the service of greedy landlords and other bloodsucking exploiters.
(Neither of them ever seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor). .Libertarianism was further developed at the London School of Economics by Sir Lionel Robinson. This toxic doctrine was brought to the United States under the auspices of David Rockefeller, who was so stupid that he needed to hire Von Hayek to pass at the London School of Economics. Von Mises was brought over later.
The peculiarity of libertarianism is that, while it is formally distinct from fascism and Nazism, libertarianism, practiced on a sufficient scale eventually destroys a society to such a point that the door opens wide for Fascism and Nazism...they become much easier to impose. The classic example is the German Chancellor Heinrich Bruening, whose austerity policies destroyed the German economic and political system between 1930 and 1932, leaving the country just a few months away from Hitler’s seizure of power when Bruening left office. There is unquestionably an affinity between fascism and libertarianism as seen in this example. Libertarians create the vacuum that sucks in fascism. We are seeing an appalling capitulation to Trump by leading members of the so-called libertarian movement. Republican operatives like Matt Drudge and Roger Stone are evidently attempting to incorporate large parts of the libertarian/conspiracy/fear porn/paranoia alternative media community into a kind of a cheering section for the fascist Trump. But many of that audience have been duped a number of times already, and might now decide to assert a different perspective. Let's hope so.
Is Trump a statesman? Is he the George Washington of our time? Certainly not. Is Ronald Reagan our greatest president? In no way. One would have thought that a libertarian might have come up with something a little more believable than "the Gipper" to usher in Trickle Down & Free Market Trojan Horses, but alas people fell for it . The political landscape is now filled with libertarian orphans who don’t want to go down with Rand Paul, and who may be eyeing the fascism of demagogue Trump.
After all this negativity about Trump, I must confess that I don't think he is any more dangerous than a Ted Cruz. Maybe less. However he is more obvious. He makes no effort to disguise it.
Sources-
The Nazi Hydra in America ... political science text by Glen Yeadon
how-the-money-power-created-libertarianism-and-austrian-economics/
The Rise Of Fascism And Nazism
-http://www.academia.edu/11022950/The_Rise_of_Fascism_and_Nazism
- Venice’s War Against Western Civilization
- Appeared in Fidelio, Summer 1995
No comments:
Post a Comment