American Fascism

Way back in 1944, before I was even born (and that's a long time ago), then US Vice President Henry Wallace had this to say:

The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

The new rightwing talking point about radical Islamists is that they are "Islamo-Fascists". Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are Theocrats who are in no fundamental way different from their counterparts in the Taliban Wing of the Republican Party.

American Christianists want the same things as their Islamist brethren (and I use that word advisedly, since the "sisteren" on both sides have no real role): The merging of government and religion.

As Sinclair Lewis so famously said (a quote which adorns the right-hand column of this blog), "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross."

The amoral Mayberry Machiavellians in the BFEE don't really give a fuck about religion except as a tool to sweep up the "useful idiots" among the great unwashed Moron-American voting bloc.

Their true goal is classic fascism: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." (1983 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary)

Even the John Birch Society can recognize it: "...from the administration's perspective, the president is, in effect, our living constitution. This is, in a specific and unmistakable sense, fascist."

Now in my wildest imaginings I never thought I would be in agreement with the John Birch Society. About anything. But there it is.

Here's Henry Wallace again:

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.

We have an unhealthy -- an unholy -- alliance between business interests -- big business -- and the reins of power concentrated in the iron fist of the BFEE that will be very difficult to destroy. These fuckers mean business, and they will not willingly surrender the tremendous power that they have accumulated.

All the more reason to work -- and work hard -- for Democratic candidates this fall.

[Thanks to Thom Hartmann for the details on this.]