On 1/2/07, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 1/2/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 1/2/07, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > The authoritarianism we've seen in recent years -- especially right
> > after 911 -- was forcible only toward an unpopular minority and was
> > generally accepted by the majority in the US. In many ways, it was
> > akin to Cointelpro back during the 1970s, which also applied to
> > unpopular minorities (e.g., the Black Panther Party). The fascism in
> > the Mussolini or Franco sense of the word was aimed at very popular
> > movements tending toward becoming the majority. The authoritarianism
> > of recent years in the US isn't that kind of fascism as much as it's
> > American as apple pie.
>
> In the past, though, the targets of repression as American as apple
> pie were more clearly defined: racially, as in the cases of American
> Indians, Blacks, Japanese, and so on, when racial exclusion was
> perfectly legal, which is not the case today; or politically, as in
> the case of Communist Party members, Black Panther Party members,
> etc., though liberal sympathizers could become collateral damages.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus and repressed a very
unclearly-defined minority, i.e., southerners who might be sympathetic
with the CSA.
He went way beyond Bush, by the way. Was Lincoln a fascist?
It's useful for us not to get into a debate on "Fascism in the USA?"
The term has a way of arresting thinking.
Unlike Charles, I do not think the state of affairs in the USA today
is or approaching fascism (the only case of the political rule in the
USA that was arguably fascistic was white southerners'
counter-revolution against Black Reconstruction). However, it is safe
to say that the US government is discarding liberalism, bit by bit, in
a way that it has not done before, since we are not in the midst of a
civil war as was the case with Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas
corpus. I'd call this a transition from liberal plutocracy to
illiberal plutocracy. But setting aside the question of what to call
it, which isn't all that important, what can we do about this, since
the majority apparently accept it?
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
