| "Who
you callin' a nazzy?!" As a college graduate with a degree pertaining to English, I don't like it when people use important words incorrectly. One such word is "fascism." It's been mangled by so many people lately, up to and including Don Rumsfeld, that I've finally had enough. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned yesterday that "moral and intellectual confusion" over the Iraq war and the broader anti-terrorism effort could sap American willpower and divide the country, and he urged renewed resolve to confront extremists waging "a new type of fascism." Drawing parallels to efforts by some nations to appease Adolf Hitler before World War II, Rumsfeld said it would be "folly" for the United States to ignore the rising dangers posed by a new enemy that he called "serious, lethal and relentless." Fascism is a political philosophy. Boiled down to the skeleton, it goes like this: The more you contribute to a state, the more control you ought to have over it. Corporations and the wealthy contribute an awful lot to a state. Therefore, corporations and the wealthy should have an awful lot of control over a state. With that control, corporations can freely manipulate industry and laws to increase their ability to make contributions to the state, which gives them more power, which allows them to manipulate more, which nets them more contribution rights, ad infinitum. This spine of fascism is too often blocked from recognition by its more visible and notorious side-effects, i.e. negative health effects from pollution or genocide for profit and cheap labor. Early on, fascism was associated with violence instead of economics. It learned its lesson. When it came back, it wore a suit instead of khakis. The fascist states of the early-to-mid 20th century weren't nearly as clever as ours. We don't invade nations for natural resources, we do it to spread democracy. We don't have colonies, we have "free markets" under "globalism" (neither of which are truly what they say they are). And we certainly don't want to establish a greater homeland for our ethnic/cultural/linguistic/religious group, we just want to protect our borders against terrorists. Under fascism, nothing is done unless it brings in the kind of profit with which you can buy low-latitude islands. So to modify the Don's comment, the extremists we're confronting aren't practicing fascism at all, they're practicing theocracy -- a theocracy that doesn't want to play with us. History has clearly shown that the United States does not mind trade deals with belligerent entities so long as they are on our side and/or open their asses to the invisible hand of American-style capitalism. These theocratical murderers differ from other theocratical murderers in that they want no part of our economic empire, so of course they're our enemies. They're just not fascists. Yet. In a country with oil and high-fructose corn syrup for blood, people forget or ignore the root causes of things. They know "fascism = mass murder" and nothing else on the subject. So when Don Rumsfeld, the rest of the cabal and the corporate echo chamber keeps spouting tripe about islamo-fascists, fascists who say bad things about the President and/or fascists who want to blow up planes with hair gel, they're preying on the mass ignorance cultivated by a mentally impotent culture. The maintenence of which they of course had nothing to do with. Edit: Keith Olbermann knows the score. Re-Edit: On television, no less. |