"Liberal Fascism" ? It's An Oxymoron. Trump Is The Real Fascist - Along With His Cult Of Thugs

"Fascism now, fascism tomorrow (if I get re-elected) and fascism forever! Heil Trump!"

Trump endorsing fascism is nothing new as we've beheld it hundreds of times in his tweets, public statements and actions - from  teargassing peaceful protesters in D.C. so he could do a bible pose, to vowing to send in the military to break up protests, to entertaining fantasies about limiting free expression, and even endorsing Chinese concentration camps against the minority Uyghur Muslims,  gleaned from John Bolton's just released book ('The Room Where It Happened').  

But in his pathetic Mt. Rushmore July 4th (actually 3rd)  event this walking, squawking human sewage outdid himself, with his batshit crazy claims.  This, even as his own radical Right minions will now face charges in federal court pertaining to targeting law enforcement as well as legitimate protesters in the wake of George Floyd's killing, e.g.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alleged-followers-of-boogaloo-movement-face-charges-linked-to-protests-11592920008

 The piece from June 23, p. A4, details how assorted right wing renegades  (including Steven Carrillo, facing charges for murdering a Santa Cruz sheriff's deputy)  have now been apprehended and will be held to account, including members of the "Boogaloo Bois" I'd earlier cited as the real fascist culprits AG Bill Barr ought to be turning his spotlight on, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2020/05/american-tinderbox-blame-white.html

As opposed to the members of Antifa, who Barr - reckless with accusations as usual (even creating an anti-government task force")-   sought to turn into the nation's No. 1 Public Enemy and Boogeyman Even triggering hysteria amongst the Red state dregs, i.e.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/opinion/antifa-protests.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=OpEd%20Columnists

At his Mount Rushmore culture war slime fest, which would have done Hitler proud (in one of his dozens of bellicose efforts), Trump barked:

"We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation's children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life."

And:

"In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far left fascism that demands absolute allegiance."

The preceding just two samples of the tons of palpable brain sewage hurled out by the man of sewage.  A disingenuous and ignorant maggot buffoon who clearly has no remote idea of fascism.     As a CNN piece  by Chris Cillizza aptly  replied:

"I   looked up the definition of "fascism." It's this: "A political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition."

And let me complement that with this earlier 1983 American Heritage Dictionary  definition:

"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Which fits Trump and his reprobates to a tee, including Bill Barr. But why be surprised when this traitor with pretensions to extending his reign (and forging a real fascist dictatorship)  doesn't even read his critical daily intel briefs, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2020/06/why-cias-best-really-have-little-use.html

The man, then, is merely the embodiment of  fascist slime,  a Divider- in- chief, and seamless traitor to boot. A low class demagogue grifter and psychotic who needs to feed his deplorable base  incessant hate and division to have any chance at staying in office and not being put turfed into the nearest federal prison for his crimes.  A pestilence who yet seeks to use the office to enrich himself at the expense of the people, i.e.

Shock Doctrine in Action: Trump Friends, Former Staff Cash in on Covid-19 Crisis

Even as he lets Americans perish by the tens of thousands from his inaction on the virus.  

Incredibly, the WSJ editorial yesterday  ('Trump at Mount Rushmore', p. A16) remains in a delusional bubble even within its own paper, babbling:

"Dark? In most respects Trump's speech was a familiar Fourth Of July ode to liberty and U.S.  achievement that any President might have delivered.."

Adding:

"Contrary to the media reporting, the America Mr. Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity, as he highlighted the central ideals of the Declaration of Independence that 'all men are created equal'"

Which reinforces my take that tunnel vision in the service of ideology - especially on the op-ed pages dictated by Rupert Murdoch - can be an effective means to blind both the author(s) and the public ingesting this piffle.  First, because it is directly contradicted by the WSJ's main story on the event (p. A4 yesterday) which pointedly noted (for the benefit of the Journal's editorial nabobs who likely didn't read it):

"The president's effort to exploit cultural divides is a familiar tactic, recalling the 'American carnage' he described in his inaugural address."

Further it is preposterous for the WSJ editors to try to portray Trump  "defending America's founding principles" when at the same time he's viscerally and deliberately denouncing one group of citizens to another  - and employing, lies, historical distortion and monumental (no pun intended) dog whistles and gaslighting to do so.  Absolutely, this was not any speech any other president might have delivered. No way in hell. It was a performance - more like a red meat for a rally -   demagogue swill, that a Hitler or Jim Jones might have let loose. It was, when all is said and done, an insult to all the preceding decent presidents, as well as to the soldiers (like  my Revolutionary War ancestors) who fought for the real principles underlying the Declaration.   Which this fungal-infested orange garbage has not the slightest inkling of.

So there is little doubt in my mind, both Conrad and Jockel Brumbaugh - if they beheld his performances the past week - would see him for what he is:


And want him hung from the nearest tree.  They'd know that all the authoritarian or fulsome faux patriot banter disgorged by this orange -tinted Turd can't disguise he is a traitor.   


See also:

Donald Trump

Trump Is a Traitor

by Lucian K. Truscott IV | July 5, 2020 - 7:23am | permalink

And:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/04/politics/donald-trump-mount-rushmore-south-dakota-speech-lines/index.html

And:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/04/liberal-fascism-is-oxymoron-it-doesnt.html

And:

• Trump's sad, empty and tragic July 4th 

Excerpt:

"We are now reduced to bitterly watching a small, stupid, petulant excuse of a man conjuring up racial bogeymen for the cynical purpose of turning Americans against each other.

The fact that Donald Trump would travel to Mt. Rushmore for yet another opportunity to fan the flames of racism to an audience of white supporters frothing at the mouth at his culture-war catcalls is more than simply dispiriting—it’s pathetic. The fact that he and yet another of his stupid Republican lackeys—this one occupying the South Dakota Governor’s Residence—would make a point of pride out of the fact that this audience would not be burdened with taking any health precaution, in the midst of a pandemic that has already erased 130,000 American lives isn’t just perverse—it’s pitiable.

The fact that Trump barely mentioned the worst public health crisis to strike this country in over a century to an audience crammed together on zip-tied folding chairs, breathing, coughing and shouting in each other’s faces isn’t just sick—it’s malignant. The fact that he twisted a nation, riven for weeks by protests against police injustice, into an argument for white supremacy and more violence isn’t just disgusting—it’s revolting. "

Marc Thiessen Proves Once More He's A Hack By Analogizing Antifa To Nazis

Let's concede and admit that the WaPo resident troglodyte  Marc Thiessen is a fake news, fake history hack. In his latest essay, which surely must appeal to the fake news buffs (by comparing Antifa to the neo-Nazis), the imp writes (Denver Post, Perspective, p. 4K, Sept. 3):

"Neo - Nazis are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that killed 25 million people last century. Antifa members are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that - according to the Black Book of Communism - killed between 85 million and 100 million people last century."

Ok, I call for a flag. A big red one - on the basis of total false analogy.  In this case Thiessen's analogizing Antifa to Stalinists, unaware of the sheer level of his outlandish conflation and disregard for facts and history. Let us try to correct this impetuous ignoramus.  If this nitwit actually KNEW history, at least of Russia- Soviet Union, he'd have been aware of the fact that the greater number of the people killed under Soviet communism weren’t the ordinary people everyone pretends to care about but themselves communists.

Joseph Stalin not only ordered  Russian revolutionary leaders assassinated and executed, but indeed exterminated entire communist parties. For example, Stalin asserted that Leon Trotsky and his followers were most outspoken against him. He therefore ordered “Trotskyites” to be butchered remorselessly. Estimates from released former Soviet archives show more than 44 million Trotskyites were slaughtered.

Hence, it is an egregious claim of the basest form to behold Thiessen's conflation of "communists, Antifa members and hardened Stalinists.  The idiot also evidently doesn't know the primary hallmark of an Antifa member is anti-capitalist which historically has been tied to anti-fascist. Indeed, included among the 14 criteria of fascism are numbered the following:

9- Corporate Power is Protected -- The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed -- Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely or are severely suppressed.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption -- Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions, and who use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism is:

"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Both Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany embodied this definition as well as the 14 other criteria when they came into power.  This nexus of attributes defines what Antifa is against.  Thiessen, however, commits the standard error of associating anyone who is against business interests with "communism" and not just the garden variety form but Stalinism.   This then destroys the rest of his thesis,  i.e.  that Antifa members and neo-Nazis are the same.  Hence his assertion.:

"They are morally indistinguishable. There is no difference between those who gave us Hitler and Himmler and those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Stalin."

Falls flat, given:

1) Antifa isn't "beating innocent people" by and large. They are beating people who already initiated violence on peaceful counter protesters. One NAACP spokeswoman observing the goings on at Charlottesville noted  the Alt-Right rally wasn't about exercising free speech but fomenting violence and discord in a peaceful, progressive college community.

Even the right-leaning WSJ saw it that way in an editorial following the violence  ('The Poison Of Identity Politics'). Noting:

"The particular pathology on display in Virginia was the White Nationalist Movement...They alone are to blame for the violence that occurred when one of their own drove a car into peaceful protestors, killing a young woman and injuring 19.

Elsewhere, a group of clergy including Dr. Cornel West linked arms at the top of stairs leading to the park in its southeast corner and were about to be set upon by violent neo Nazis when Antifa members intervened. According to Prof. West: “If it hadn’t been for the antifascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.”

Rev. Traci Blackmon related on MSNBC the next day how her congregation had to be sequestered inside their church - during a prayer service- as the howling banshee white supremacists marched outside.

They were then led out the back doors of the Church to avoid confrontation with a clearly violent bunch  - already having tossed urine bottles at peaceful counter protestors, and clubbed others with baseball bats and shields.

She observed this behavior continued on Saturday when African-Americans singing a hymn  near an entrance in Emancipation Park were set upon by the White racist loons and goons who proceeded to beat and mace them. As Rev. Blackmon put it, "the only thing that saved them was the intervention of Antifa and other protestors" - one of whom drove the racist louts back using a spray can and a match - effectively engineering a mini flame thrower

2) As I already showed - indicating the relevant history Thiessen missed -  Antifa has nothing to do with Stalinism so isn't "beating people in the name of the ideology that gave us Stalin."

If Thiessen had more sense and perspective he'd also have noted another distinction: Antifa does charitable work! Antifa doesn't just fight Nazis, they assist the poor and downtrodden. They do food distributions, collecting food from grocery stores and markets to feed to the homeless.  Do Thiessen's neo-Nazis do this? I doubt it.

Antifa members also offer court support to political prisoners and work as street medics during protests. In Charlottesville, it was Antifa street medics who helped tend to burning eyes and busted faces of dozens. And when James Alex Fields drove his car into the crowd, street medics cared for the injured in the crucial moments before ambulances arrived.

More codswallop from Thiessen:

"The United States defeated two murderous ideologies in the 20th century, so we should all be repulsed by fellow Americans carrying either red flags of communism of black flags of Nazism."

Uh no.  The U.S. did not "defeat two murderous ideologies". It cooperated - in World War II - with more than a dozen other allies to defeat the Nazis, it didn't do it by its lonesome/  As for  defeating Stalinism, it was actually more Russians themselves who were responsible for eliminating that odious system. When the Soviet Union did finally fall, Mikhail Gorbachev was more the key player than Reagan or the U.S.

Thiessen in an earlier performance ('The Left's Hypocrisy On Trump's 'Enemy of the American People Comment' )  showed how derelict he is as a journalist or responsible reporter. At least NY Times Sabrina Tavernise tried to show some balance in her coddling of the Trumpies back in February  (at least in her TV appearance), while Thiessen showed little or none. He hyped the "venom spewed by the left at anti-Trump rallies" but said nothing of the venom spewed by Trump - which as we've seen has now given rise to hundreds of hate crimes. Those included the murder of an Indian techie in Olathe, KS by a hard core Trump supporter babbling his same rhetoric.  Also vandalized Jewish gravestones, and at least one burned Mosque (as in Tampa back in February) .

Did Thiessen mention any of these incidents while he attempted to put the Left on the same  vermin scale? No he did not. He showed completely his lack of perspective and his shameful commitment to false narratives - designed more to appeal to the Trump base than to the integrity of the nation.

Thiessen is the worst kind of abject hack: one who infuses his garbage not only with fake news but false history too.

Of Dangerous Ideas - And 'Dumb And Dangerous Ideas' From Dr. Steve Mason

Dr. Steven Mason  (left)- unable to distinguish a dangerous idea from a dumb and dangerous idea. Right- Joseph Schmitz, holocaust denier appointed as Trump foreign policy advisor.

In his latest Integra essay 'Dangerous Ideas', (Nov.-Dec, .p. 18) , Dr. Steve Mason outdoes himself with pseudo intellectual nonsense with his endorsement of "dangerous ideas". This would be a terrific essay if only Dr. Steve had managed to discriminate between the truly dangerous, for example - natural selection - which is true, and the merely dumb and dangerous, e.g. holocaust denial.  But alas, he doesn't, instead almost frolicking in the sheer contrarian shock value of the latter.

Why is this important? Well, because too many of our fellow citizens know too little about the holocaust and WW II in general. This knowledge gap enables hucksters and propagandists to harvest their brains. One of whom is Joseph Schmitz, a recent foreign advisor named by Trump to his administration. Schmitz acquired infamy by proclaiming, in dismissing the holocaust, that:

“the ovens were too small to kill 6 million Jews.”

Leaving out that the Jews were not killed in ovens, but in large gas chambers, as at Auschwitz.  The ovens were used to incinerate the bodies afterwards but because of the mass of victims, the Nazis later went to mass graves. It became too difficult to cremate thousands of gassed bodies at one time. This is why Dr. Steve's remarks bear scrutiny in the context of  his "Dangerous Ideas" theme. Let's return to natural selection as a dangerous idea before going to Steve Mason's example of holocaust denial.

In the case of natural selection which Tufts professor Daniel Dennett covered in his book, 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea', we have a truly dangerous idea, the moreso because it is true. We learn of a 4 -step loop process that amounts to "a mindless algorithm that displays no intent, no design, no purpose, no goal, no deeper meaning. This simple algorithm has been running on Earth for four billion years to produce every living thing, and everything made by every living thing" . A purposeless, algorithmic process - the horror!

It is "dangerous" precisely because it undermines orthodoxy (in this case religious) but also because it has the benefit of being true in the scientific sense - meaning  has been validated a gazillion times.  Then Mason breaks down and blows it with this.  (Even wifey, when I showed her his reference, exclaimed: "What an idiot!"): Mason actually wrote:

"Here's a really Dangerous Idea: The Holocaust is a hoax. It must be a Dangerous Idea because simply repeating those five words will get you jailed in  more than a dozen countries, including: Belgium, France, Germany, Romania and Poland."

Mason then draws an absurd parallel putting the "holocaust hoax" on the same "dangerous idea" level as the Apollo Moon landings hoax. In the latter case,  citing all kinds of nonsense "evidence", e.g. American flag "rippling" on an airless world, from idiot lunar landing hoax websites.

This again shows Mason lacks any balanced rational insight to compare these two. In effect, comparing the claim of hoax for an actually recorded historical genocide to a nonsense claim which is easily refuted by reference to lunar laser ranging experiments - only made possible by the fact laser reflectors were left on the lunar surface....by humans.

Incomprehensibly, Mason appears to regard both ideas as equally "goofy". He scribbles, in regard the lunar landing deniers (p. 21):

"The last I heard no one was locking them up.  Being goofy isn't against the law, so what is it about questioning the death camps that creates such a stir?"

He then speculates it might be because "support for Israel will diminish"

But he's off base in his reasoning. As I showed before, Mason often makes erroneous conclusions in his assorted essays predicated on a solipsistic viewpoint. For example, in his June Port of Call effort he actually questioned whether global warming is real based on: "Clearly I don't know but then who does?" To which I pointed out that Mason is not a climate scientist - like Prof. Gunter Weller- so no surprise he wouldn't know, his specialist training is in psychology not climate science.

The same sort of skewed reasoning leads him to question death camp denial based on something like offending Israel. In fact, it is a dangerous idea because extreme right, pro -fascist parties (like Marine Le Pen's National Front) in France, actually exist in the here and now. Further, they are eager to invoke holocaust denial as an auxiliary means to advance their own justifications for existence and agendas. The upshot of actual German history, as my German sister-in-law Krimhilde put it, is that even frivolous dismissal of the holocaust plays directly into the neo-fascist platforms, as we beheld in Munich back in 2013, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-are-new-german-nazis-really-up-to.html

Those "dozen nations" Mason cites, therefore,  do not want a repeat of history, in line with George Santayana's famous words "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." They would rather err on the side of legal heavy handedness than regret it later when a future Fuhrer tries to duplicate the inhuman acts of the earlier one.  Impossible? Then read the Financial Times article below ('Ideas That Fed The Beast of Fascism Flourish Today') on how the same forces active in Europe in the 1930s are also present today:

https://www.ft.com/content/599fbbfc-a412-11e6-8898-79a99e2a4de6


The nations that prosecute it, for Steve's information, do so in order to impose a painful reminder that one cannot just lie about the past as a cynical way to sweep it under the rug to thereby better enable similar horrors in the future.  To put it another way: They already experienced the horrors once,  they have no intention to do so again! Thereby harsh laws punishing the denialists (who effectively diminish the holocaust)  are intended to send an uncompromising message: "You spread this crap - undermining the historical truth- at your own peril. We will not tolerate your lies here!"

So Mason has his head and emphasis in the wrong place. Apart from those countries bearing far right parties eager to exploit holocaust denial they were also places whose citizens were packed  into box cars for transport to death camps (Treblinka,  Auschwitz,  Mauthausen etc.)  to be gassed and for which we possess actual visual and other recorded evidence that it happened, e.g. the scene below photographed outside of Mauthausen by Russian soldiers who liberated that camp in 1945:


This is emphatically not the stuff of droll essays in a high IQ journal, or invoking facetious word games.

Poland was among the worst affected nations, featuring the death camp Auschwitz, where over 1.6 million were slaughtered and Dr. Josef Mengele performed hideous experiments on children, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/01/auschwitz-commemoration-why-wasnt.html


Mason, by using a specious basis to compare dangerous ideas  (conflating goofy, stupid ones with serious ones) actually demeans and diminishes the import of the real ones, e.g.  the denial of the factual genocide of 6 million Jews.   Let us also  reference how he earlier chirps: "I should come clean and admit I like dangerous ideas!"  Evidently, both the dumbass and the serious dangerous, like holocaust denial.

Now, to be fair, Mason is not a stupid guy by any means. He can't be to have become a doctor in psychology or a member of Intertel. However, he does have a habit of becoming overly enchanted with his own peculiar, idiosyncratic ruminations. This solipsistic fascination leads him to wander off the rational reservation at times,  writing idiotic essays in Intertel's media.

Recall Mason is the same character who wrote several months ago (in the June Port of Call NL):

 "How can I believe anything when what I believe changes?"   This is actually a misrepresentation of his stance when what he really meant was "How can I believe anything when the science behind it changes?" And seen in this light, one wonders if Mason was ever a genuine scientist at all, because the very nature of the scientific enterprise is to mount new discoveries, via new findings obtained from ever more refined instruments and techniques. Hence the change from the old epicycles-based Ptolemaic solar system to the heliocentric one. Or, the change from Bohr's simple 'planetary' model atom to the wave model of Schrodinger, Born et al. Or the change from Newtonian gravitation to general relativity (though the former is still used for space trajectories, missions).

In the current essay, after ruminating on Darwin's dangerous idea,  he recycles  similar nonsense to that  he opined in the June PoC, writing (p. 19).:

"The world of science - if you wait long enough - is always wrong anyway!"

If he really, truly believes this codswallop I'd like him to explain to me how it is we can reliably use celestial mechanics to send space craft (like Curiosity Rover) to Mars, and the Horizons probe to Pluto.  If science is "always wrong" how can that be? Well, ok, maybe he's thinking 5 billion years in advance when orbits likely shift for a variety of reasons. But, in that case it isn't the (current) science that's wrong, it's the fact orbital elements would have changed.

Same thing with quantum theory, one of the most complete we have, which enables us to correctly predict the spectral line emissions of atoms as well as the working of solid state devices.

It seems clear based on these examples that Mason's glib takes on physical science disclose he really doesn't know much about it. I would bet he actually thinks that because Einstein's theory of gravity is used, Newtonian gravitation is wrong or passe.  If so, he'd  probably be amazed to learn that Newtonian gravitational theory is what enables our celestial mechanics to get space craft to Mars, the Moon, or Jupiter.

The point is that a real scientist - even a psychiatrist or psychologist- would know and understand science HAS to change for our understanding of the cosmos, nature to evolve. It is unscientific and naive to expect findings to remain static. At the same time, the true expert in science has to know that changes in a scientific discipline - like physics - don't necessarily mean the former theory is chucked. Again, look at Newtonian gravitational theory and Newton's laws of motion.  These still have applicability at macro-scale levels, and at speed much less than the velocity of light, c.

Other Mason examples in his essay are more clearly and rationally chosen, and articulated. For example, the dangerous idea that "religion is a WMD". (Though I would have phrased it as a "mind virus of mass destruction")  Another plausible choice is that "our system of government causes us to elect the worst candidates".  (Say like Donald Trump) To support that dangerous idea he cites evidence from evolutionary psychology, to wit, "groups work best only when they get behind a leader, to put him in that position".  This contrast with our money-graft  system where candidates aspiring to be leaders must incessantly beg for money and votes, so "are probably the least well qualified for command" - again from an evolutionary psychology standpoint.

These are "dangerous ideas" to be sure, like Darwin's natural selection, but based on a record of data, investigations and historical experience. They are worthy of consideration in an essay aimed at  people in the upper 1 percent of IQs, in other words. But holocaust denial and fake lunar landings are not in that same category. The first is indeed dangerous, and not merely as an idea.  The second is too stupid and easily disproven to be considered truly dangerous.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/69871/the-big-trump-media-story-bannon-and-a-crew-of-dangerous-propagandists-are-in-the-cockpit-of-national

"Liberal Fascism" is an Oxymoron. It Doesn't Exist Except in Right Wing Brains!

The term "liberal fascism" has become increasingly fashionable to bandy about but mostly in right wing circles because this enclave of under-educated folk don't know the difference between any of the historical political-economic systems, whether fascism, socialism, or Neoliberal capitalism. Hence, it's no surprise the term would be misused.

What prompted the Right to inject the boogeymen of liberal fascism into the ongoing cultural wars? Well, a sequence of incidents. First you had the way most of us in the liberal spectrum came down like a ton of bricks on Nate Silver for hiring climate denier Roger Pielke Jr on his Fivethirtyeight blog. Then there has been the massive criticism of the Right - as in the 'Hobby Lobby' case, trying to exploit the specious "religious liberty" theme to justify aborting the contraceptive sections of Obamacare. Finally, there was the Brandeis University announcement that it would rescind an honorary degree it planned to award to Ayaan Hirsi, a best selling author and critic of Islamo-fascism.

Brandeis’ decision to cave has been described (even in liberal quarters like salon.com)  as arising from pressure by the left-wing/Islamofascist militants and thus canceling Hirsi Ali’s honor has been castigated by champions of freedom around the world..

Here, we need to back up and explain that there is no such thing as a "left wing Islamo-fascism"  no matter what the militants call themselves. This would have about as much "left wing" bona fides as Hitler's National Socialist Party would have socialist bona fides. (Leading to the continued confusion that remains today between genuine socialism - which is wholly left wing - and Hitler's Right wing version). IF "left" is synonymous with Liberal, then no kind of fascism can be permitted. Fascism is a creature of the Right, not the Left, and has been since the days of Hitler and Mussolini.

 It is instructive here to consult Douglas Rushkoff's  Chapter Four ('Individually Wrapped').  in  his  book, Life Inc. - How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back.   He observes (p. 109):

"American corporatists saw in fascism a counterbalance to FDR's strong-handed tactics and aggressive social welfare programs.....Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME magazine, put Mussolini on the cover five times and traveled the country arguing that corporations - not government - were really in charge of America.  Luce convinced many business people that fascism might be corporatism's best hope for organizing and influencing people."


One is led to question why  American corporatists would want to invoke fascism to offset FDR's pro-government programs. There are several reasons, all of them tied to the historically accepted characteristics of fascism and germane to Rushkoff's point, as well as mine, i.e. that liberalism and fascism are counterpoised:

Corporate Power is Protected -- The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation are often the ones putting government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and a power elite.  This automatically sets domestic non-military and social insurance programs in opposition, and at risk - from the nascent pro-corporate economic structure.


Labor Power is Suppressed -- Because the organizing power of labor is the only real remaining counterbalance to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely or are severely suppressed. We have seen this happen progressively in this country as unions have all but vanished from the landscape and are mightily resisted where they might find new places to begin.


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.  This is deliberate in all fascist nations-systems, given their opposition to providing domestic social insurance for the masses. Thus, if the military spending can be made large enough it can deplete the tax commons to the extent that inadequate money is available to support social -domestic needs.

Obsession with National Security -- Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses and special attention is focused on those who complain about inadequate domestic resources, say because they are at the mercy of increased military spending and inciting wars by which to validate such spending.  If then a "boogeyman" can be created and sustained it can also be used to mute the demand for addressing domestic needs.  Create a system of color -coded alerts or 'warnings' then you keep most people in tow, and also the critics at bay.

The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary defined fascism as:

"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

The U.S.-based  dictionary definition has gotten somewhat squishier since then, as all the larger dictionary companies have been bought up by multinational corporations (e.g. Bertelsmann AG, NEWSCorp etc.), who would be more invested in obscuring key definitions to align with their corporatist bias.

Benito Mussolini, however, was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote,

"If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government."

But not a government of, by, and for (We)  The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation. In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like John Boehner and useful idiots like the Tea Partyers, they were openly in charge of the government.

The above preliminaries are useful in parsing salon.com writer Alex Pareene's take:

 “All of these seemingly unconnected incidents can be understood with one simple word: fascism. Liberal fascism. “Fascism” as a term has been abused by leftists over the decades, but it is a definable and concrete thing. Essentially, fascism is when a bunch of people criticize something they disapprove of or are offended by, and ask that the thing or person that offends them not be rewarded in some fashion."

But as we've seen,  fascism is a lot more complex than merely a "bunch of people criticizing something they disapprove of or are offended by, and asking that the thing or person that offends them not be rewarded in some fashion." 

This is what I would call the "elementary school version" of fascism.  Comprehensible to those at the fourth grade level - i.e. grasped easily in the personal antagonism 'he said-she said' domain, but unfitting for an adult of even moderate intelligence to really grasp what fascism is about.

As for "liberal fascism" it can only make sense in the cartoon context Pareene describes, but not in the formal definitional sense.

If you're at a cocktail party and engage in a political debate (not advised), don't interject "liberal fascism" unless you want to be thought of as an over-sized, ill-informed 4th grader!    

Citizens - Regarded As Too Dumb Or Dangerous To Read Full CIA Torture Report

Douglas Rushkoff, in Chapter Four ('Individually Wrapped').  of his  book, Life Inc. - How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back, singles out the arena of public relations (PR)  and its perverse uses to bamboozle citizens. The essential thesis is that properly applied, PR divides each citizen from every other - each accepting his or her own version of political and economic truth.  The outcome is that the citizenry is disarmed from opposing the excesses of the state or corporations, because they are instead fighting each other.

Rushkoff singles out the immediate era after Edward Bernays - the author of 'Propaganda' - signed on with the corporate state, to promote fascism. As he observes (p. 109):

"American corporatists saw in fascism a counterbalance to FDR's strong-handed tactics and aggressive social welfare programs.....Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME magazine, put Mussolini on the cover five times and traveled the country arguing that corporations - not government - were really in charge of America.  Luce convinced many business people that fascism might be corporatism's best hope for organizing and influencing people."

Rushkoff goes on to note that by the end of World War II fascism had revealed itself as "ruthlessly dehumanizing" so  American industry had to take a different tack known as "Americanism. This approach used advertising PR to turn citizens into consumers - driven by spending on all manner of fluff and nonsense- to take their minds off serious politics and economic issues. Combined with this the media empire developed to the point it was able to frame issues, events, ideas to shape the minds of the masses.   This followed Edward Bernays' PR description in his work, 'Propaganda':

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country."

If then this power is wielded to split consumers into "brand" factions along with their political affiliations and beliefs, the effect is polarizing and also dissolves any united citizens' front, i.e. to hold the Deep State or corporations to account.  It additionally is designed to keep citizens at the infantile level of "consumers" who shy away from examining what their government is up to. If a person then refuses to venture outside this compromised matrix of PR he remains a mental invalid and automaton run by the Deep State. Believing whatever it spouts, or what its talking heads blab, or distort.

It is no accident that Bernays' use of the term 'invisible government'  equates to 'the true ruling power of the country'.  Today, this ruling power inheres in a military-corporate- security state nexus called the  Deep State, and it requires deep politics - not its superficial media counterpart-  to plumb its depths. This is irrespective of  examining the Ukraine crisis, the JFK assassination, the yen for pretext "wars" as in Iraq, the related monstrous Pentagon budget, or the growing inequality in the country.

It also pertains to the examination of the CIA torture program which went on for years, and which report - of 6,300 pages- will now likely never be seen by the American people. As a Senate committee moves to declassify a landmark report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s descent into torture, among the only certainties is that the public won’t see the vast majority of it. Instead we will be told by PR talking  media heads what they want us to think about it, and only dribbles released concerning what we can actually  be allowed to know.

True,  the Senate select committee on intelligence has waged an unprecedented and acrimonious public battle with the CIA over the secret 6,300-page investigation  known as the "Panetta Report", concluding torture  is an ineffective intelligence-gathering technique and that the CIA lied about its value. But now they ought to release it in full to citizens wanting to know - so we can at least see what the spook degenerates did in our name. Instead, we're told to expect a similar micro-managing of files as was done  previously with the  HSCA Investigation of the JFK assassination back in 1978. So the Senate  vote has allowed only  a slice of the CIA Torture report to be made public. Worse,  the CIA will have a significant degree of influence over how large and how public that slice will be. Of course, this is reminiscent of the perverse manner in which information was controlled with the files released by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, once the CIA got control of it, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-jfk_19.html

 

Thus, the committee is not going to release the 6,300-page report. Its chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein of California, said on the Senate floor three weeks ago that only the “findings, conclusions and the executive summary of the report” were the subject of the committee’s declassification efforts. The vast majority of the Senate report – effectively, an alternative post-9/11 history detailing of years’ worth of CIA torture and cover-up – will remain shielded from public view.

So what gives? Why prevent us from accessing a report we paid for with our tax dollars?  The short answer is that part of the Deep State's PR conditioning process - to dissuade any remaining citizens (who haven't mutated into totally infantilized consumers) from pressing the national security state to back off - is framing and omission.  Both techniques were first noted by Michael Parenti in his 'Dirty Truths', to do with how the media manipulates the public mind.  Omission here serves the same purpose it does with the National Archives refusing to release all the files on the JFK assassination. If we are then prevented from knowing the dark aspects of our history, and the extent of our own government's complicity in it-  i.e. in having Kennedy assassinated- then we can't break out of the realm of false tropes and American goody-goody exceptionalism. Hence, it dovetails precisely with the post-WWII corporatists embrace of "Americanism" as a practical substitute for fascism.

 

The problem with that is that it's still leading us down a path of fascism, which in its most fundamental definition means the control of a nation's destiny by the wealthiest using corporate power. It is also a feature of fascism that it extols expanded military power - because for every dollar wasted in unprovoked conflicts or insinuating American power where it doesn't belong, there is less available for the public commons or the general welfare. It's a 'win-win' for the Deep State because with military expansionism more money is pumped into pockets of defense contractors, corporations while more is taken out of struggling citizens' hides. Thus, everything from the dramatic increase in student college debt to our crumbling infrastructure and the stagnation of middle class wages can be laid at the door of creeping fascism.

 

Meanwhile, Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, considers the CIA's  role in managing the Torture Report file release a conflict of interest.  He stated in an interview with the UK Guardian:

 

" They functionally control the declassification process, and they have an interest in how they as an agency are portrayed in the final product.  They’re not an impartial party, and that’s a flaw in the process.”

 

Of course, neither were they an "impartial party" in the case of the JFK assassination files released by the HSCA.  In the latter case, none other than CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator  Jim Lawderman – on July 27, 1977- wrote out the terms of the CIA’s control of  HSCA head Robert Blakey’s investigation. (Mellen, J., ‘Farewell to Justice’, p. 345).  One of the terms cited was (ibid.):

 

“ Certain areas relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should be entirely disregarded based upon our contention they are without merit or corroboration” (ibid.)

 

Thus, the CIA was effectively judging the evidence even before there was any. This statement in many ways is as glaring and outrageous as the terms of the document NSC-68 paving the way for perpetual war.

 

In this way  practical citizenship can be kept at bay in the Deep State, and citizens (actually mostly consumers) can be set against each other because each will have different purviews of knowledge, media exposure and extent of research into what's really going on.  The Deep State has nothing, nada to worry itself over, since those of us who DO this digging into its nefarious backgrounds will often be dismissed as "tin foil hats" or "conspiracy theorists" or some such misbegotten term. Each of which betrays the inner fear the infantilized citizen has for facing the unsavory truth. That he really inhabits a gangster corporate-militarist state which doesn't have his best interests at heart.

 

The refusal of the Senate committee to release the full CIA Torture report is in line with all of the above and Feinstein et al regard their decision as justified because  they see American citizens are either too dumb or dangerous to place the full report in their hands.   Thus, we will likely never know the extent to which we, as citizens, supported a horrific policy of torture done in our name.

 

Welcome to Americanism V. 2.0 and the Deep State!

 

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/medea-benjamin/55186/the-cia-whistleblower-and-the-torture-report

 

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bob-burnett/54660/the-war-on-democracy-the-deep-state