Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America

jrootham wrote:

Part of the definition of Fascism is the use the monied interests make of the populist elements of the movement.

Tea baggers are bang on the definition.

The key is how to fight back.  ...

I think key to fighting back to be very clear on who really has power in our society and to be consistently adamant about this point.

Now more than ever, ambigiouity has no place. And oh yeah - stay on message, repeatedly, make it clear, plain and obvious.

That's going to bu useful in Canada.  The US has a harder problem.  The legitimacy of the political system is in question, not least because it has been used for illegitimate purpose (id the banksters own the place).  The problem is that if it becomes truly illegitimate the Fascists win.  Hands down.  No question.  The left cannot defeat the right in the streets.

So we have to support the system.  Note:  supporting the system in this context is putting enough pressure on the individual members to get them to do the right thing, not just getting all panglossian about it.

The historic example is Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.  They lost.  You think you can do better than them?

It is very difficult to compare the current movements to previous ones since power may act the same but it does not look the same as it used to.

Naked fear worked well in Hitler's day. Today a greater sophistication is required. With all the cultural and propaganda tools available now the process is much subtler than it used to be even if the effect is not that different i many respects.

If Hitler were here today people would not recognize him.

Someone upthread invoked Orwell for good reason-- Orwell spoke from the time of Hitler predicting the more sophisticated upside-down world we have today where the oppressor has learned not to look oppresive except when he really needs to. Much has been learned about managing dissent and making it irrelevant.

Inasmuch as the word Facist has a purpsoe, we likely need a new word to describe this-- perhaps Orwellianists-- for there is a huge distinction between the direct threat and the more insidious convincing of the masses that down is up and good is bad etc. Hitler thought he was pretty good at propaganda but he was an amateur compared with what is considered normal today.

Turn on your TV and count the number of cop shows and military shows all based on America's police state.  Normalization of evil is more effective than its imposition by force.  People don't speak about the unspeakable like the fact that the Iraqi state prior to America's oil wars was a sophisticated secular society and no more totalitarian than any other state in the region. To the majority of the population it was fine that the only people that the government chased were people who wanted to upset the apple cart. That is what normalization does for a dictatorship it allows people to relax and say there is nothing we can do so why fight it.

I think we are entering into a phase of global feudalism.  The heads of nation states are the dukes and earls that keep the peasants in line for the benefit of the lords and kings.  And as in ancient China the real elite rulers are not even glimpsed upon by the masses.

Fascism will rise because as capitalsim breaks down people will become desperate. The people with fascist tendencies will gain power.

It's a slow march over acliff really.

The fact the Chomski is openly talking about it after he supported Obama, is proof that he has become afraid.

He thought that Obama would hult the slide to the right. But the fact is, American capitalismis in full decline and can not be stopped.

Marx understood what revolts were and how they started. He understood that the leaders of the working class need to direct this anger to build a socialist society. Unfortunatly any form of militancy in the ranks have been filtered out a long time ago and the right has propagated their position well.

jrootham wrote:

We are much closer to Fascism than Bolshevism.

We are. But it's still not Stalingrad under siege. Things are not the same here as what it has been for oppresssed Latin Americans living under US-backed tyranny in "the backyard." Canada and the US are not tiny, impoverished Latin American nations that they can kick hell out of without the rest of the world taking notice.

But as it was in 1930s and 40s Germany, the fascists in power still feel they have to convince German citizen equivalents in North America that the foreign threat is real. The Gleiwitz incident was about convincing German civilians as well as soldiers of the army that Poles and Jews were attacking German interests everywhere, and that an attack on Germany would be next unless pre-emptive attacks were carried out. Hitler even convinced Germans that the army was careful not to kill innocent civilians abroad, which was as much a lie then as it was for NATO in the former Yugoslavia, and in Afghanistan and Iraq today. The US has done this a number of times. Gulf of Tonkin was a lie. Veterans of the Vietnam war have said that they were lied to about why they were sent there. The doctor and the madman of the 1970s lied to Americans about their off the books bombing of Cambodia,  and their covert support for Pol Pot, the biggest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.

And there are Americans who still believe Saddam had WMD. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are still speaking to $1000 dollar a plate gatherings and telling them that Saddam was harboring Al-Qa'eda. Americans and Canadians are lied to constantly about foreign threats to all of us that don't actually exist. Ultra right-rightists are still there in the states and running things today. Obama and the legislative branch are little more than cosmetic government.