This entry was posted on
Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 at
9:04 am and is filed
under George W. Bush.

I want to share the following from an exchange in this Fark thread about a New York art exhibition that was closed because one of the works featured a George W. Bush portrait composed of monkeys. GoodDamon’s comments need to be more widely read, IMHO.

cthu1hu kicked it off by providing:

The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.

GoodDamon responded with this:

Here’s my take on how this applies to America at the moment, point by point:

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.

Absolutely describes the current state of affairs. Right now, the neoconservative movement has successfully associated disagreement with the government with hatred for America, and prods the Republican masses (most of whom are far more liberal than they realize, on an issue-by-issue basis) into frenzied shows of nationalism.

Point one: Check

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.

The disregard of the jingoists in the United States for the plight of the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisoners (even going so far as to just call them “detainees”) has been shocking. Worse, when either atrocity is mentioned, the people who would prefer not to think about them respond – almost without exception, in my experience – with “well, at least we’re not cutting off heads.”

The logical fallacy required to make that leap is also shocking, maybe moreso. Simply put, explaining away one bad thing by accusing someone else of something worse in no way negates or mitigates the first morally and ethically unsound act. Torturing people is wrong, and no amount of severed heads will make it right. Imagine the very worst, most vile thing the enemy soldiers in Iraq could do to other human beings, and it still will not excuse torture on our part.

Point 2: Check

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.

In some ways, we now have the ideal “enemy” in terrorism. Terrorism never ends, it only abates. An enemy like that is, by its very nature, undefeatable in the military sense. If you can successfully unify the people of a country against such a nebulous enemy, and convince them that military responses are the only means to effectively dealing with said enemy, then you have a war that can functionally continue forever (at least until the people rebel, which historically speaking is almost inevitable).

Point 3: Check

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.

The constant push to “support our troops” (which in practice translates into “support the civilians who sent them there”) isn’t worth expounding on much. It’s become so prevalent in today’s America.

Point 4: Check

5. Rampant sexism.

Sexism, while still a problem, was on the downswing until recently. Unfortunately, with the ongoing efforts to undo Roe vs. Wade, and the stances against birth control, the pendulum looks like it’s beginning to swing the other way again.

Point 5: Check, but only conditionally. It’s not as bad as it’s been in the past yet.

6. A controlled mass media.

The greatest coup the neoconservatives won was in convincing the people that the corporate-owned, corporate-managed, and corporate-controlled media was somehow liberal. Imagine for a moment that the voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida had garnered the kind of widespread coverage that the flawed Ukraine vote was exposed to; Ohio’s electors could never have voted, and Florida would currently be auditing and testing all their optical scanning machines. Heck, at the very least the fact that today was the day the Electoral College voted would have been mentioned somewhere prominently in the newspaper, and would have been a lead story all over TV. Instead, we were subjected to the Peterson trial.

Point 6: Check

7. Obsession with national security.

Oddly, the obsession seems to go hand-in-hand with an inability to actually do anything about national security. A lot of noise (and color-coded charts) are being made about this all the time, but if anything were actually done, anything effective, people would stop being afraid.

Point 7: Check

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.

God help us (heh), for the first time in our history the religious nuts have a monopoly on all three branches of our government.

Point 8: Check

9. Power of corporations protected.

By any community standards, I cannot, as an individual, dump billions of pounds of industrial waste into my local water table. I would rightly be thrown in jail. Corporations can do this with impugnity, because the perceived harm to our economy if we stopped them would be so great as to devastate the country.

This is an artificial situation. The current corporate structures allowed in the United States are given the legal status of people without suffering the legal repercussions a person who acted in a similar manner would face. You cannot arrest a corporation, and our government has proven quite unwilling to use legal remedies that are available to it. I can count on one hand the number of large corporations that have been banned from doing business (jail time) or disincorporated (death penalty).

Point 9: Check, big time.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.

As with sexism, things aren’t as bad as they once were…yet. The efforts underway to dismantle the unions are starting to have an effect, though. We all know unions aren’t perfect and are open to corruption, but they’re the best solution we have right now, and we’re beginning to lose them.

Point 10: Check, conditionally.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.

This one makes me want to scream. How, how, how could the people of the United States, even a significant minority of them, have been convinced that intellectuals (smart people) are their enemies? I’ve heard several farmers on television decry the “intellectuals” who don’t know what it’s like to work out in the “real world.” These people wear clothes manufactured using a smart person’s methods, wear eyeglasses that a smart person created (and another smart person fit to their eyes), use cars and other internal combustion engine-powered vehicles invented by smart people (and in the case of Francois Isaac de Rivaz, inventor of the first reciprocating internal combustion engine, French-sounding smart people). They eat pop-tarts, use microwaves, and watch television. They wallow in the wonders that intellectuals have brought them, while deriding them for being smart.

Point 11: Check (and AAAAAAAAARGH!)

12. Obsession with crime and punishment.

This is pretty traditional for the modern Republican party. The only major development recently is the push towards Biblical crime and punishment. It’s an odd thing when more people appear on television to rant and rave about men making love to other men than to decry the current levels of violent crime.

Point 12: Check

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.

Two words: Tom Delay.

Point 13: Check, and ’nuff said.

14. Fraudulent elections.

Point 14: Check, and now I’m crying.

That’s all of them. Two of them conditional, the rest… Well, I’d say we’re currently living under a mild fascism. I say “mild” because none of the points above have reached the more extreme levels, yet. And most importantly, I’m still free to make this post, still free to hold these opinions, and even to scream them as loudly as I can. It’s not to the point where dissent results in disappearance.

Of course, if I don’t make any more posts tomorrow, you’ll know that maybe we’re past that point, too. ;)