(I wrote a reply to a comment that yastreblyansky made on Booman’s recent post A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight. It grew, and I am now submitting it as a stand-alone piece.)
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From yastreblyansky:
That complaint about calling Putin a “Nazi” is a bit of a misdirection: of course Putin doesn’t subscribe to an ideology founded on the idea of Germans as a “master race”. More useful to map the Russian Federation government against one of the classic definitions of fascism in general, such as Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism. It’s pretty startling how tight the fit is.
My reply:
It is also startling how close a fit those 14 characteristics are to the U.S., yastreblyansky. And not just recently…over the past 50+ years…since the JFK/RFK/MLK Jr. assassination years.
Particularly these:
Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
I can look out of my Bronx window and see four flags without searching. Watched any mass media sports events recently? Seen what has happened to the football players who had the temerity to publicly protest the state of this country by taking a knee during the Star Mangled…errr, ahhh, I meant Star Spangled…Banner festivities?
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
C’mon…were Fallujah and Abu Ghraib so long ago? Drone strikes on non-combatants during our lovely “Peace President” years? The U.S. has the single highest percentage of it citizens in prison of any country on earth.
In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
I repeat:” racial , ethnic or religious minorities.”
National incarceration rate (per 100,000 of all ages)
African-Americans are incarcerated at the rate of 2,306 per 100,000 African-American U.S. citizens.
Latinos are incarcerated at the rate of 831 per 100,000 Latino U.S. citizens.
Whites are incarcerated at the rate of 450 per 100,000 White U.S. citizens.
Do the math.
Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
The U.S. spends more on its military than the next eight countries combined.
U.S.-$611 billion (And that’s not counting the dark money that goes to agencies like the CIA…multiple billions and billions more. Bet on it.)
The next eight countries? China, Russia, Saudi Arabia (!!!), India, France, the U.K., Japan and Germany? $595 billion.
Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
Witness the…now almost three years old…resolutely anti-Trump media barrage of the major mass media. Witness the buildup to the Shock and Awe attack on Iraq under Bush II. Do you think that the anti-Trump thing is because he’s such a bad man??? I call bullshit. Of course he is, but if he was playing ball with the establishment instead of trying to essentially take over, they’d be praising him to the skies. Bet on that as well.
I could go on, but I’ll just include the relevant titles of Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fasicsm. Anyone wth half a brain could provide examples of these points in mainstream U.S. policy over the past 50 years or so.
Read on:
Obsession with National Security
Religion and Government are Intertwined
Corporate Power is Protected
Labor Power is Suppressed
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fraudulent Elections
The only one of that I leave out from Britt’s list is “Rampant Sexism.” Why? As has been obvious in the headlines of recent months, there is most certainly a culture of rampant sexism in place in the U.S., but it is more subtly promulgated than in other…call them “Neofascist” for want of a better word…major powers like Russia. Less mainstream sexual choices are actually being supported by the centrist controllers and their media. In part this is due to political necessities…votes count here more than they do in more rigidly controlled systems…but also (as I have said elsewhere on this site) I think that birth control and homosexuality are gradually being recognized by the controllers as necessary parts of a depopulation movement. Too many people, not enough earth. Not enough work either, mostly due to the tech revolution combined with multinational corporations choosing to have their manufacturing done as cheaply as possible, thus sending work out the U.S. to more poverty-stricken areas of the world. Ross Perot quite accurately predicted what was about to happen during his 1992 debates with the two early neocentrists Bush I and Clinton I. (From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates):
Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.
PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
He was right on the money except for the “12 to 15 years” thing. It’s taking longer, but we are well on our way to wage parity with the poorer countries of the world.
Well on our way.
Look around.
AG