What kind of a country is it where people turn giddy with glee and plaster their cars with Support Our Troops ribbons when their "boys and girls" have committed Fallujah-cide -- obliterating an entire city and driving its population into homelessness and destitution?
Fascism is about domestic repression mostly. Fascist Portugal and Spain were mere pikers compared to democratic Great Britain when it came to dealing with unruly natives. In last night's talk, Tariq Ali had choice words about the appointment of Niall Ferguson to the history department at Harvard. He said that it was highly revealing that they had to recruit an Englishman to come to Harvard to lecture on the benefits of empire. They couldn't find a suitable USA'er, which is a good sign. Ferguson is on record as hailing the "enlightened" imperial rule of Great Britain in Kenya, while newly published books reveal a pattern of near-genocide.
All in all, the comparison should be with Great Britain not Nazi Germany. The USA sees itself as the successor to Great Britain and behaves that way. Hitler rose to power because Germany was weak on the overseas territory front. As Lenin observed in "Imperialism":
>>And Cecil Rhodes, we are informed by his intimate friend, the journalist Stead, expressed his imperialist views to him in 1895 in the following terms: "I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread! bread!' and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.<<
Nazi Germany was unable to avoid civil war precisely for the reason that it was a second-rate imperial power.
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