From My DU Journal in 2007 "When Do You Call It Fascism?"

[McCamy Taylor]

So we "moved on"..... into the gaping maw of another presidential coup. Since I am having a bad case of deja vu all over again, I decided to look back at some of my observations from the W. Regime. Here is one that seemed pertinent. Pardon the truncated links. It's what happens when you cut and paste.


When Does it Become Fascism?
Posted by McCamy Taylor in General Discussion (1/22-2007 thru 12/14/2010)
Thu Nov 29th 2007, 02:43 PM


Fascism does not spring up fully formed overnight, like Athena from the head of her father Zeus. Its architects build the foundation slowly, then they begin to invite people in, one at a time, then in groups of tens, then hundreds, then millions. At first, it is a radical fringe group. A hate movement that no one would admit to being affiliated with. Then, it is a right wing party. Then, it is a player. Then----

When does it become fascism?

We all recognize that this is fascism:

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online...

On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a wave of pogroms against Germany's Jews. In the space of a few hours, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses and homes were damaged or destroyed. This event came to be called Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass&quot for the shattered store windowpanes that carpeted German streets.
Snip
Stormtroopers killed at least 91 Jews and injured many others. For the first time, Jews were arrested on a massive scale and transported to Nazi concentration camps.

But what about this?

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.j...

JULY 25, 2006
Albertville, Ala.
The windows of six businesses owned by Guatemalans or Mexicans are shot out early in the morning, while white-owned businesses on the same street in this northern Alabama town of 17,000 go untouched. A year later, the crime is still unsolved. Albertville police say the attack wasn't racially motivated, although many observers, pointing to which businesses were targeted, suspect otherwise.

Or this?

APRIL 3, 2006
Tucson, Ariz.
One of the founding members of the Minuteman movement, Laine Lawless, exhorts the leadership of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) to launch a campaign of violence and intimidation against Latino immigrants. "Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place. … Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school," Lawless writes in a private E-mail to Mark Martin, "SS commander" of the NSM"s western Ohio chapter. "Be creative. … Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border."

The goal?

"Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status."

Maybe we can use the “duck test”. If it quacks like a duck then it is a duck, right? Here is what Nazi propaganda sounds like:

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ho...

In a further speech in April 1925, Streicher declared: "You must realize that the Jew wants our people to perish. That is why you must join us and leave those who have brought you nothing but war, inflation, and discord. For thousands of years the Jew has been destroying the nations. Let us make a new beginning today so that we can annihilate the Jews."

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goe...

Goebbels made this number one on his list of why the Jews were the enemy “1. The Jews are our destruction”


Here is how the anti-immigration camp quacks:

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/...

Illegal border crossings are not victim less crimes. They are crimes of such magnitude they could destroy a nation. They have cost American citizens trillions of dollars in property devaluations, destruction of the social security fund, lost wages, benefit fraud, health care, identification theft and theft of government services and in so many other ways. The emotional toll is much greater. Many American Citizens have lost their families and their hope in this the greatest of all crimes ever committed against humanity.

http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/immigrat...

"AllisioRex," a member of the neo-Nazi web forum Stormfront, wrote in July 2005 that "they are barbarians, they are our enemies, they want to destroy our civilization and we have to fight them.


Sometimes the anti-Latino immigrants slip in some anti-Semitism, too. Must be the Nazi roots showing.

http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/immigrat...

White supremacists have not simply expressed racist convictions, but have urged each other and white Americans generally, to "fight back" against the perceived invasion of the "white" United States by Hispanics from Mexico.

James Wickstrom and Frances Farrell, the virulently racist and anti-Semitic hosts of the "Yahweh's Truth" radio program, blamed Jews for the immigration "invasion" on his May 3 broadcast. Wickstrom claimed that pro-immigrant marches were being organized and financed by "communist Jews" and the "communist Catholic church," and that Jewish organizations are "criminal accomplices of these illegal aliens." Farrell suggested that "one attack on one of their marches with automatic weapons or even just rifles will put a stop to them and the time's coming when this is going to happen."

How were Jewish people going to destroy German civilization?

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ho...

Throughout the film, these traits are contrasted to the Nazi state ideal: While “Aryan” men find satisfaction in physical labour and the creation of value, Jews only find pleasure in money and a hedonistic lifestyle. While members of the “Aryan” race have a need for aesthetic living, rich Jews live in bug-infested and dirty homes, even though they could afford better. While western man has an appreciation of northern culture and imagery, Jews only find satisfaction in the grotesque and decadent. Many things that run contrary to Nazi doctrine are associated with Jewish influence, such as modern art, cultural relativism, anarchic and socialist movements, as well as sexual liberation.

As those who read my recent journal entry recall, the main charges leveled against Latino immigrants by the spokespeople of the anti-immigrants movement were that they were dirty, disease infested, pedophile rapists, habitual criminals who use drugs. This is how Latinos are going to destroy our civilization. Oh, and they are going to bleed our economy dry, just the same way that the Nazis accused the Jews of bleeding the German economy dry.


So the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. walks and talks a lot like the Nazis in Germany, but does that make them budding fascists? Maybe they share other similarities, but lack some essential fascist characteristic. What exactly is fascism?

Here is a useful definition from Robert O. Paxton from the book Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.


Key characteristics
1.“At bottom is a passionate nationalism”
2.“a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions”
3.“the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external”
4.dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences”
5.“the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary”

Fascism, Paxton believes, has been useful for elites, because they can partner with fascist movements against socialist or other populist political groups which would rob the elites of their power. It presents a “young” or “fresh” political face, which is attractive to people who are tired of the old face of government, particularly in times of crisis (like a financial crisis caused by the monied elites). Paxton also points out “The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism”

Just how American can be seen in the meteoric rise of the national KKK in the 1920s, when the group which was originally founded to repress the freed slaves during Reconstruction became a cash cow which raked in millions in the name of keeping America white, Protestant and pure. The KKK was everywhere, not just in the South. Northern states had their own chapters.

http://www.msu.edu/course/mc/112/1920s/KKK...

During the first five years of existence, the Klan only increased by four thousand; but during the next eight years nearly ten million men and women joined the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan. What events transpired that caused such a dramatic increase in Klan membership in such a limited time span? Leading Klan theorists of the 1920’s often pondered this question and it is my intention to examine their findings. Three prominent causes seemed to be found in these findings: the post-war feelings of many Americans, the natural aversion to anything foreign, and the various propaganda spread about and by the Klan.
The natural tendencies of man are to be loyal to ones’ own people, thus having an aversion to all that is foreign. Preying upon this very idea, the Klansmen preached of their hatred for all groups alien to their original American stock. These groups included Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and all immigrants in general.

http://www.theamericanist.com/Americanist/...

Immigrants from Europe, but also Mexico, were often seen as socially depraved.

Snip

The economic insecurities of immigrant
competition for jobs seem to have been, and still often remains today, a key factor. In San
Diego, for example, Mexican immigrants, no matter how skilled in a profession, were forced
into menial labor occupations.

Is it fascism when organizations begin to recruit members who are attracted by the idea of ridding their nation of all “alien” influences in order to return to a state of purity? The KKK has recently begun to recruit new members for the first time in years, thanks to the anti-immigration movement. However, the U.S. did not actually descend into institutionalized federal fascism as a result of the Klan’s success in the 1920s. Instead, financial and sex scandals, brought down the Klan’s leadership and the nation elected FDR when the economy turned sour, rather than launching a pogrom against minorities and immigrants. It takes more. As Paxton points out, the elite who actually run the country have to get involved.

Oh my. But they already have.

I am not going to rehash all the ways that the Bush administration has used its so called War on Terra to initiate the first steps towards fascism. They had us waving flags and fearing the Enemy and giving up our civil liberties and circling our wagons and profiling Muslims and Arabs, the way the play book demands if you are trying to weaken a democracy and make it safe for fascism. However, the threat from a handful of Saudi terrorists over there is so vague. What they really needed was an internal threat. Something that would allow them to call out the National Guard using the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007

http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/... /

so that they could round up immigrants and confine them in Halliburton constructed camps where they could be put to work. All it would take is for a handful of Latinos to try to fight back when the Minutemen show up to use them for target practice on the border. Once that happens, all Latinos in the country will be suspect, since their sympathies will be presumed to lie with their incarcerated kinfolk. Good thing the President now has the power to declare even citizens enemy combatants. Lock them up, too. Let them pluck chickens for Tyson, with Halliburton collecting their wages. Or put them to work picking crops on the chain gang.

Mexico won’t like it. But hey, part of fascism is limited expansionism. If Mexico gets too uppity, that will give us an excuse to invade for the umpteenth time so that we can liberate all of that nationalized oil.

We are kidding ourselves if we think that no one in the far right is thinking this way in America right now. The right wing movement which tried to have FDR overthrown in a political coup and which is trying to stack our courts with Federalist judges can benefit from a fascist political movement, which can, in turn, benefit from partnering with the political elite. And a fascist political movement needs some group here at home to hate, preferably an immigrant group.

In times of economic hardship, it is even easier to sell messages of hate, since the working class wants to blame someone. While unions and the left attempt to blame the business owner and the politicians and the rich (income disparity has never been higher), the hate right says “Blame the immigrant. He is taking your job and using up your tax money.” And it is always easier to kick someone more vulnerable than it is to shake your fist at someone above you.

How will we know when fascism has begun to creep into the equation? Americans' will begin to lose their sense of neighborliness. We will stop seeing our neighbor's face, and we will start seeing our neighbor's race or ethnicity. It will no longer be "I don't like Miguel's Christmas ornaments." It will be "Those filthy Mexicans lower property values wherever they go. Maybe we should pass a city ordinance outlawing _____." The press will report on every crime of any sort--even moving vehicle violations--involving Hispanics, and the first question on everyone's lips will be "Was he legal?" That's because we will have begun seeing the world in Black and White. Just as there were once Good Negroes and Bad Negroes, now there will be Good Latinos and Bad Latinos.

Most ominous of all, We will also lose our sense of justice. The "all of us are created equal" doctrine will be thrown out the window. So, for instance, you might hear people talking about stripping Latino children who are born in the US of their citizenship rights and sending them away, because their parents were illegals. You might hear talk about letting a few Latinos enter the country to work for lower wages and no benefits but denying them the possibility of citizenship--ever--since they are not as good as us and when they get too old to work we want to send them back. And their kids and wives have to stay in Mexico. No more citizen babies. We might refuse to let them buy property or houses. They might have to pay more to become US citizens than other folks from around the world. We will begin to require that they carry their papers with them at all times, and no one can rent them (by them I mean anyone with a Spanish surname) an apartment or hire them or do business with them without asking for their papers, and if they do not produce their papers, they will be arrested. Or maybe we should just have them wear wrist bands with bar codes. Or badges----

Keep your eyes open, and when it is finally fascism, someone be sure to tell the rest of us, so that we can panic.

Coda: Are we panicking yet?

[AmericanActivist]

1. Apparently "W" and Darth Cheney were Phase I

of fascism laying the foundation for tRump Regime takeover with GOP aiding and abetting.