What's a Fascist?

Fascism is a broad topic of discussion covering decades of history and a lot of different people. It's not isolated to a guy with a Hitler mustache named Hitler, or a few brownshirts or just a few bad cops, street brawlers and Ernst Zundel types. Fascism didn't die with Hitler and Franco and Batista, Pinochet, Christiani etc etc. Fascism is very much alive and well today and spreading its tentacles around the world. Fascism is big business today.

jrootham wrote:

The police in Canada are not fascists. They are institutional authoritarians, not populist authoritarians.

This makes them MORE dangerous than fascists. If we only had to deal with people who we could legitimately call fascist we would win hands down (ref Ernst Zundel).

So it's the police we have to worry about and not would-be architects of fascism, corrupt politicians, big business types and the like?

[url=http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2010/01/oliver-stone-says-adolf-hitl... Stone says Adolf Hitler was 'Enabled by Western Bankers'[/url]

As they say, it takes a few fascist bankers and magalomaniacs to Tango.

Frmrsldr wrote:

Although believed at the time (with good reason), it has since become a myth that fascism lost the Second World War.

Exactly. Fascism just slithered from one part of the world to another. I think it was Oliver Stone who mentioned that an Italian business person once said to John F. Kennedy that America would some day be forced to deal with fascism.

American conservatives and even Liberals down there sometimes say that FDR saved America from socialism. I think the truth is that FDR saved them from fascism. Today they are in desperate need of FDR heroics. They need a pinch hitter to go to bat for democracy. Today the umpires are all bought off and game thoroughly rigged from top to bottom. No one's on base, the legendary Casey's at bat for the 2-2 pitch, and America needs a grand slam to pull it out.

I agree with ceti's definition.

OK so we qualify on that chart for pretty much everything under Harpler. The only change is on nationalism. They put it out there and whip it up, but they are only nationalist to foreign(or rarther corporate) interests.

I think American fascism is unique in a number of ways and fascism is essentially redefined over the last 40 or 50 years as a result, but fascism is essentially corporations and government in bed together. American fascism has redefined this particular characteristic of fascism in the way that US corporations were given increasing rights as persons under US constitutional and other laws since the 1970s.  One of the most obvious effects of those other laws as far as Canada is concerned are CUSFTA and NAFTA. Canada's own national energy policies are dictated to Ottawa and the rest of the country from corporate board rooms in America. Canadian energy security takes a back seat to what's good for corporate America while priorities for workers and the environment are way down the list.

But even more fascinating is the way in which banking and finance have usurped industrial capitalism since 1987 or so. Not even Marx predicted this insane maneuver to hand powers of resource allocation to bankers and finance capitalists. Marx considered banking and finance as usurous appendages detrimental to the capitalist system. In Marx' view, rule by financial capitalism would necessarily lead to disastrous results as it obviously has. US economist Michael Hudson says that the foundations of western world capitalism are even weaker than Marx predicted. Capitalism is fascism with the mask on.

jrootham wrote:

That's not a useful definition of a fascist.

It's far too broad.

Why?

Since you started the thread, it behooves you to engage in full discussion. If time was the problem, I hope you'll come back to explain your issue with various broad definitions at the first opportunity.

You're not the only one here who regularly objects to the use of the term, but I've never received a useful explanation of why, and I'm hoping to be enlightened...

Maysie wrote:

Poster by the Syracuse Cultural Workers.

It covers most of Harper's agenda, as well as a lot of Rob Ford's priorities and values. I might not call them "fascists" but they sure are stealing a lot from the playbook.

Gotta love those SCWs. I think I'll have to pull my "Citizen" t-shirt out of the drawer and wear it today.

The main area where I think people use the term mistakenly is when it comes to absence of democracy and checks and balances.

I believe that a lot of the warning signs are just that - an indicator that a society might be moving toward fascism, so I do take it seriously.

But so long as there is a democratic process (even a partially broken one like ours which keeps the power in the hands of a certain class) or a judiciary which can stop the government from doing something, that ain't fascism in my books.

What I find most fascist about Stephen Harper? Not any of his polices or actions, but the fact that he is micro-managing his entire government (right down to scripting public events) from his office. Even so, the fact that he can be stopped from doing something like shutting down the safe injection site by the courts means that we are not there yet.

Fascism includes scapegoating, corporate control, use of violence and a lot of other things, but unless you have all power in the hands of one person, I don't consider it fascism. A lot of the worst abuses and human rights violations have been done by countries which are actually democracies, and are done with the support of a plurality or majority of the electorate. It's bad, but it's not fascism.

(edit)

For instance, I don't consider the teapartyers to be fascists at all. They probably don't realize that some of their actions might be taking that country that way, but they actually come from the American tradition of deep mistrust of government authority.

Firing of those that disagree with policy AGAIN and AGAIN

And America doesn't actually have a fasces symbol on the flag or anybody wearing little black mustaches. So therefore, it's not fascism. They're close, and things aren't looking too good, but it's not butter. We have to be careful of these agitators and misanthropes labeling everyone and their dogs fascists. It's over the top really.

I agree 6079.

No soup for you!

But the Junta in El Salvador was Fascist because they attacked Honduras. Meanwhile, Franco was just an "authoritarian".

So lets see, a populist cult of authority in the police and security forces, set against the backdrop of nationalist jingoism against Muslims, and involvement in an imperial war in Asia... hhmmm.

jrootham wrote:

Because I line up with Orwell on the use of language.

As I pointed out above using fascist is a shortcut to Godwin's Law territory.  I don't think we win by going that route.

My conception of this is that is is a question of the strategy and tactics of language.

Is that helpful, LTJ?

Unfortunately, not. (Orwell seems to say the word is next to meaningless.)

Could you attempt to say where and when the word might be appropriate, perhaps?

Who are scholars of the subject?

I certainly don't deny that the Tea Party has fascistic tendencies, but suggesting that having a bunch of wacko's running around on the streets saying regressive and stupid and jingoistic things is an absolute requirement for fascism is plainly absurd. Indeed, evolved fascism, when it has gotten beyond the point of siezing power does everything it can to repress those kinds of social movements and enroll those forces in state institutions (usually the police) so that it can control them.

Please find me a scholar who suggests that Mussolini or Hitler encouraged ranging mobs of morons to disturb the public order after the point at which they had served their usefulness had expired? I doubt you will find any because any scholar on Fascism who is worth their salt has studied closely how Hydreich and Himmler worked to centralize authority within the SS, and remove the grass roots leadership from their movement, once they had used the "Brown Shirts" to help them take over the state.

In the end your point seems to be somehow to diminish the threat of institutionalized fascism by asserting that fascism requires mobs of civilian supporters running around and terrorizing the civilian population and the opposition, when in fact the overt object of fascism is to suppress grass roots initiative, and institute supreme authority within a state run by bureaucratic fiat by a centralized gang whose word is law above the law based in legal procedure or rights for the many.

Those mobs are colourful surely, but they are not the be all and end all of fascism. I think you are allowing yourself to get distracted from the reality by focussing too much on the cosmetics.

Why do you insist then that institutionalized fascist authority can not arrive at supreme authority without populist vigilantes aiding the regression?

jrootham wrote:

@Sean Words with multiple meanings tend to be less useful.  If you throw fascist at someone as a general insult they can duck the impact by pointing out they are not like that.

I am not arguing what is best.

I am arguing what is. This is the reality of the English language -- and many others. Words often have more than one meaning whether we like it or not. That is a result of history and usage.

The solution when it comes to language is to in an important conversation, define key terms. Even legislation does this-- that way you can admit the words have multiple meanings but then move on and say -- for our purposes here, this is the meaning we will choose.

That is much easier than trying to dump all the multiple meanings in a language just because they are inconvenient.

The alternative here is to have a conversation chasing its tail as one calls another wrong each pulling out the basis of their favorite meaning refusing to acknowledge the existence of others-- we could do the same with the word "to" or the word "one" or any of hundreds of common words.

Because not to long ago you asserted that the recent abuses of power relating to those organizers arrested as part of the police party at the G20 should not be confused with fascism of the Tea Party sort that you suggested were the real danger.

If Dale Newart and Sara Robinson are asserting that a "brown shirt" phenomena is an essential part of the functioning of a fascists state, beyond their usefulness as a tool for achieving power, then I don't think much of their scholarship. Sure, making such comparisons can be useful, but suggesting that it is necessary for achieving power, or that such vigilante gangs are fundamental to the functioning of fascism when it has achieved power is to get too caught up in the specific detail, and dare I say, glamour of a specific era,

Why use ad-hoc facsist militia street gangs, when you can simply use the police, or turn your street gangs into institutionalized forces of state terror?

As can be seen, the actual Fascist state when manifested as a state has very little use for such antics. The question is "What is a Fascist?", not "how do fascists achieve power?".

It is. But what is even more important is that easing of concepts of rights unleashes abuse of the system, so that in fact the adminstration is not guided by policy, procedure, or law at all, but the whims of the powerful. For example Jason Kenny interfering in the due process of the immigration department in the case of George Galloway based on political perogatives, or the Crown and the police conspiring to misconstrue Hudert's bail condition that banned him from public demonstrations, so that a "public demonstration" included sitting on a panel with Judy Rebick at a meeting held at a university.

This kind of bureaucratic overeach that tramples on basic rights and freedoms for a political end are typical of fascism, which asserts the individual perogatives of power of the leadership over the rights of indivduals, regardless of the written law.

This is true to a point. But for everyday people who are not high flying public personas abuse of procdure by the police department and the crown creates a kind of Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of constant fear, revolving door arrests (a person is re-arrested for a new charge after being let go on the first) and endless financial outlay that eventually impoverishes the victim.

Maysie wrote:

I agree 6079.

No soup for you!

[url=http://damngoodfood.blogspot.com/2009/04/soup-nazi-mulligatawny-indian-s... (Indian) Soup recipe[/url]

Jeez, I just had a vision of what could happen if the tea swillers seized power. They might threaten another oil-rich country with a  shellacking by the air force if they don't promise not to build imaginary nuclear weapons. They might not close the torture gulags at Gitmo and around the world, or not withdraw hundreds of thousands of troops from illegal foreign military occupations, and not stop spying on the lives of Americans and pointing to a false flag terrorist attack nine years ago as the reason for not not spying on the lives of Americans.