SPEAKING FREELY The appeal of fascism By
Richard Risemberg
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"What
constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and
independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our
bristling seacoasts, the guns of our war steamers, or
the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These
are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in
our fair land. All of them may be turned against our
liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the
struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which
God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the
preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the
heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy
this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism
around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the
chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs
to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of
those around you, you have lost the genius of your own
independence, and become the fit subjects of the first
cunning tyrant who rises." - Abraham Lincoln
What afflicts the people of the United States in
these days, that they have developed the capacity not
only to tolerate, but even to cherish, the blatant lies
and hypocrisies, the injustices, the evasions, and of
course the invasions perpetrated by George W Bush and
his neo-conservative cabal? How can even conservatives
themselves stomach this internationalist,
interventionist, activist-court-packing,
states'-rights-suppressing cat's-paw of the
transnational culture of control that is the only
heartfelt homeland of the corporate elite?
Yes,
there is opposition, an opposition that comprises most
likely a small majority of the country's people - but
the supposedly "liberal" media do their best to ignore
and even marginalize it, and besides, that yet leaves
hundreds of millions here who work themselves into
ecstasies of adulation at the words, however fumbling,
of this jug-eared cipher, and into equal ecstasies of
joyous indignation at the sound of any word that
controverts the image his handlers project to the loving
masses huddled underneath the balcony ...
Let us
not put too fine a point upon it: we are in danger of
reverting to fascism.
Fascism is a disease
endemic in our species, a periodic fever whose tremors
induce a psychosocial orgasm in its sufferers,
tantalizing them with physical delusions of both
security and power. Far more than its structural and
functional ramifications - well illustrated by Benito
Mussolini's definition of fascism as "the melding of
state and corporate power" and George Orwell's fictional
synopsis of a tech-enabled fascist state in Nineteen
Eighty-Four - it is fascism's capacity to make a
nuanced oppression seem both nurturing and empowering
that makes it so dangerous. It is this nuance of fascism
- more than the Big Lie techniques and the brute force
fascists also employ - that makes the Bush/Cheney
administration and its police and propaganda mechanisms
a true threat to humanity in general and to the United
States - formerly respected as an icon of liberty -
specifically.
The fundamental appeal of fascism
to the everyday person is threefold. It consists of:
The promise of security. Fascists typically
posit threats, external and internal, that are easily
identified but difficult to fight, and then promise to
protect you from them - if only you will give them
absolute power to do so.
Relief from uncertainty. It is no accident
that Orwell had his dictator characterize himself as Big
Brother. The fascist relieves you of the responsibility
to make difficult decisions. You simply follow orders -
given, of course, by Big Brother.
A share of strength. Most insidious, Big
Brother will let you exercise power over others - as
long as you exercise Big Brother's power Big Brother's
way.
This last is the stroke of genius. The
fascist enlists the sufferers of fascism themselves as
petty dictators over those who have been designated as
"below" them. And we the people are all too often eager
to enlist.
As we know, power corrupts, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the watered-down
wine of authority is good enough for many - even the
feeling that they are exercising power by proxy when
they grant it to the fearless leader who leads them into
endless fear.
The paradigm is nearly universal.
From Josef Stalin's and Adolf Hitler's structured
goonocracies to the serried pyramids of corporate middle
managers, the pattern is similar: a Supreme Leader
(dictator or chief executive officer); a Politburo, or
General Staff, or Board of Directors, who, as cronies of
the leader, pull the levers for him; a rubber-stamp
parliament that always approves all proceedings set
before it; a highly involved hierarchy with just enough
upward mobility that you may strive a lifetime toward an
ever-receding Valhalla without ultimately disturbing its
present occupants; a rigid culture that prescribes
behavior and in many cases (IBM, Albania) dress and
appearance; and an intolerance for any deviation from
the chosen definition of the Perfect Man, the
Ubermensch, the Good Soldier, the Team Player.
(Except, of course, by the leadership elite, who can get
as wacky as they please.)
The fascist first
makes us all afraid, then makes us all spies, then gives
us an enemy, who has often (the Jew, the communist, the
jihadi) been hiding right in our midst. And we are
almost always ready to drop the dime, to swing the club.
And the definition of the "enemy" is
ever-expanding. The US Justice Department, no longer
living up to its name, now invokes the USA Patriot
(Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism) Act against readers of dissident books,
against environmental activists - though not, so far,
against rich organizations with plenty of lawyers.
We know now that the invasion of Iraq had
nothing to do with terrorism, and in fact has nurtured
it. But terrorism has everything to do with justifying
the arrogation of power by these most foully banal
crypto-fascists in the name of protecting us against
"terror" - a terror they help create by magnifying the
injustices our neo-feudalist corporate culture has
perpetrated on the world this century past. But we still
"stand behind our president". Why?
Remember two
things:
First, it is not who has power that's the problem.
It's that someone has power.
Second, the founders of the United States designed
inefficiency into the government precisely to prevent
accumulations of power, having had immediate experience
with imperial tyrants.
Beware those who would
bring efficiency to government. A government that's run
like a business is a dictatorship.
