President Bush and the 14 Points of Fascism

[Ibby]

This is the paper I wrote for the quarter final in History (and got a 92% on!). Let me just preface it by saying, yes, it's extreme - probably actually more extreme than I actually believe - but it's no fun writing a nice, safe, middle-of-the-road essay.

Pinochet. Suharto. Franco. Mussolini. Hitler. These are the ranks that George Bush has joined – the ranks of the authoritarians, the ranks of the fascists. In the spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry magazine, political scientist Dr. Laurence W. Britt published an article entitled “Fascism, Anyone?”, in which he analyzed eight different fascist regimes and identified the fourteen common threads that linked together all fascist regimes – the fourteen points that practically define fascism. But these points don’t only apply to old, destroyed regimes; they are equally applicable to modern government. In fact, President George W. Bush fits at least 12 of these 14 points, to a greater or lesser degree, only missing points 10 and 11.

Nationalism by itself is not normally a big deal – especially not in the man who leads the nation. In fact, it’s almost a given that the President will be fiercely nationalistic; But in combination with other things, and if taken too far, it is far from safe. Bush has shown his extreme pro-America bias through his zealous xenophobia – his anti-immigration policies – and his pseudo-imperialism in the Middle East in the name of American interest.

Disdain for Human Rights, on the other hand, is a very dangerous and very terrible governmental factor – and one that the Bush regime does not hesitate to show. Human rights abuses abound at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, secret CIA torture sites, and in the suspension of Habeas Corpus. It’s hard to say which is worse; the abuse of foreign nationals captured illegally and held without evidence or charge, or the abuse of citizens, denied of their constitutional right to Habeas Corpus and spied on without warrant or oversight. Only suspicion is enough to spy on someone for; much like in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, if the ruling elite accuse you (or, more often, fail to accuse you and simply hold you anyway), you must be guilty – why else would they think you are? The Constitution of the United States forbids unreasonable search or seizure – forbids warrantless spying or searching – but that is merely a minor obstacle to be dodged, to the commander-in-chief.
And then there are the secret prisons, the CIA dungeons around the world where suspected (not known, not convicted, not confirmed) terrorists or terrorist sympathizers or enemy combatants or anyone who gets in the way are taken to be tortured, interrogated, beaten, cut, waterboarded, and as far as the American public knows, murdered. All of it done in obvious breach of Geneva Convention laws and the American constitution, and many points of international law. When confronted, the administration simply lied about them and only conceded the point when it was proven by the media. And of course, everyone knows of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, repeated on a smaller scale across all of Iraq.

The use of scapegoats by the Bush regime is obvious. Whenever anything bad happens anywhere in the world, Bush and his cronies blame the nameless faceless invisible terrorists, or the ‘Axis of Evil’, and whenever anything bad happens at home, his administration blames the godless immoral evil liberals. This is especially obvious in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, which the Republicans latched onto as a rallying cry for gun rights – blaming the pro-gun control liberals for the murders. Just like Bush used Saddam as a scapegoat for problems in Afghanistan (and to distract from problems at home), and just like he blames immigrants for economic problems in the US, he uses any misfortune as a way to shift the blame to any group or party that isn’t in his favor.

The militarism of the regime is even more obvious, from the two wars started, one instigated without any sort of provocation and in spite of intelligence that was known to be faulty and unreliable. Former ‘inner circle’ members of the regime have told of the way Bush, from the very moment he took office, before the terrorist attacks of September 11th or the war with Afghanistan, was looking for ways and reasons to declare war on Iraq. Bush has spent more money on “defense” than any other president in history, and the “GWOT” is second in cost only to World War II. And still, Bush asks for more money, more soldiers, more cost.

Sexism is inherent in the Bush regime’s “war on gays” and “war on abortion”. As the definition of the point in Dr. Britt’s article states of the fascist regimes analyzed, “They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.” This fits the situation of the Bush regime perfectly – the only argument they have against both homosexuality/gay marriage and abortion is what the Bible says, and the only way they get away with it is the strong support from the so-called ‘religious right’, the powerful conservative Christian (primarily Southern Baptist) voting bloc that almost put Bush in office. (Wolf) (CNN)

The Bush regime’s control of the media is much more subtle and insidious than some of the other more obvious offences of the administration. The press is still nominally free – and indeed, the media is the biggest thorn in the side of the regime – but the regime has its ways of, if not controlling, then at least manipulating the press to a degree not befitting a democracy. For example, blogger Josh Wolf was finally released from prison in April after 226 days in prison – for being a reporter who protected his sources (RS 30). That’s the longest any American reporter has been imprisoned for that. Why? Because he filmed an anti-Bush/anti-war protest. Then there’s the case of Sarah Olson, who was intimidated (though a powerful subpoena) after she published an interview with a Lieutenant who refused to serve in Iraq, or the case of the Pentagon demanding that all content uploaded to soldiers’ blogs be approved before posting – effectively limiting their ability to protest the situation in Iraq. And most disturbing (and confusing) is the case of Jeff Gannon (RS 30).

[Ibby]

Reporter Jeff Gannon created a short-lived controversy when he pitched Bush a “softball” question – a ridiculously easy question – at a press conference in early 2005.
But that was nothing compared to the scandal that erupted when it came to light that not only was he not a real reporter – with no journalistic experience more refined than being the editor of his high-school newspaper – had been repeatedly granted ‘daily’ press passes to the White House (which normally take weeks to apply for and receive) at the door for two years, assumedly from the Administration, after being denied a yearly pass on the grounds that, well, he wasn’t a real reporter. And not only was he not a real reporter – he was also a gay escort known as the “Bulldog”.

National security is important by any means; but when it becomes an obsession, it’s yet another red flag. Bush’s two Patriot acts, extensive erosion of freedom for the sake of security, wiretapping program, extension of intelligence agency power, and extreme willingness to go to war for (supposed) security all point to this obsession that was evident in too many dictators. The Republican agenda in general is, in essence, an authoritarian one; all their pet issues call for a limit on freedom for (what they call) the security of the nation, be that security moral, ethical, or militaristic.

The dubious intertwinement of church and state is the most blatant and complete of George Bush’s transgressions. Bush does nothing to hide the fact that he rules with a completely Christian agenda, going so far as to say “I believe that God wants me to be president” and, even more scarily, “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did…” (Beliefnet). This, coupled with his willingness to ignore the Constitution or the Supreme Court or even Congress to push a religious, conservative-Christian based agenda (like the banning of abortion or gay marriage, the push to remove education on birth control/safe sex from schools, the pushing of faith-based initiatives…) , is a threat to the religious and political freedom of all Americans.

The protection of corporations has always been a major point for conservatives in general – however, the Bush regime has taken it a step further with personal protection for individual companies – most notably, Halliburton. In June 2005, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Government Reform released a report on examples of preferential treatment for Halliburton, which has a list of 8 points on which the government is giving undue support to the company, even after Pentagon auditors advised that Halliburton was getting millions more dollars than it needed for contracts in the Middle East, and that all government funding to Halliburton should be cut and no new contracts signed with the company. The auditors were ignored, and Halliburton is still being awarded contract after contract – contracts the company neither bids on nor cuts costs on. The government regularly awards Halliburton contracts in secret, closed, no-bid decisions, and agencies such as the Government Accountability Office and the Defense Contract Audit Agency regularly reprimand the administration and the military for engaging in these corrupt contracts.

To the credit of the Bush administration, points ten and eleven are hardly evinced at all by the government at this point. The power of labor is not suppressed; if anything it’s simply ignored, as the middle class service-sector economy usurps the throne of
American economics and the working class shrinks and shrinks. Disdain for intellectuals is also not very commonly shown by the regime. However, if a parallel can be drawn between intellectuals and scientists, it can be said that the regime does fall under point 11 to an extent; the Bush regime has little appreciation or respect for scientists that contradict their conservative, religion-influenced beliefs on things like abortion or evolution.

An obsession with crime and punishment is not merely a facet of the Bush administration – it is a key point. From the PATRIOT acts to the “War on Drugs”, from the death penalty to Guantanamo Bay Prison, crime and punishment has been a key issue for the Republican party in general and the Bush Regime in particular. In the draconian drug laws rides an extreme right-wing authoritarian bent, the presumption that the government has the right to tell people what they can and can’t do to themselves in the privacy of their own homes. In the PATRIOT acts, the presumption that privacy is second to security and that no cost is too great for stopping terrorists (H.R.3162). Also, disturbingly, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, before a Senate Judiciary Committee, “There is no expressed grant of habeas [corpus] in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away,” implying that many other rights crucial to the US legal system (and, for that matter, rights crucial to freedom in general) are not expressly granted by the constitution because they are defined in the negative (Parry).
But even this is a breach of constitutional legality, as defined in the Ninth amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Without the right of habeas corpus, the American legal system can become little more than a Gulag (and has, in places like Guantanamo Bay), where people are held without charge or crime at the behest of only the government.

Corruption and cronyism is a recurring theme within the Bush administration. The entire administration is loyal not to America, not to the People, only to Bush and the Republican Party. In the first term of the Presidency, Secretary of State Colin Powell was, according to sources inside the administration, one of the only people who would stand up to the President on many issues – and was, in the early stages of the Iraq invasion planning, very opposed to it. When re-election came around, he was duly replaced. Even more obvious is the way that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales regularly and completely supports the administration, to the point of corruption, as in the case of the firing of many attorneys alleged deemed ‘too liberal’, and the subsequent complete denial of all knowledge of the incident during a congressional investigation, contradicting himself repeatedly and simply claiming no knowledge (“I do not recall” being repeated 42 times in one day).

Lastly, the election of George W. Bush was controversial from the very start. Dr. Britt’s paper describes “turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite” as one of the methods used by fascist leaders to gain or hold power – and turning to the Supreme Court is exactly what Bush did in the 2000 election, after failing to gain the popular vote and during the hotly contested Florida election. The Supreme Court declared an end to all recounts in Florida, essentially insuring a Bush victory. But it is what happened after Bush gained power that holds the greatest threat; under the Bush regime, voting has been ‘reformed’ to use electronic voting machines – voting machines made by the Diebold company, which has not only been repeatedly prosecuted for corruption (like putting ‘back-door’ programs into their software) but is also owned/managed by several regular and loyal contributors to President Bush and the Republican Party. (Black Box). The security has also been proven to be very lax on the voting machines; independent ‘hackers’ have test-hacked the machines innumerable times, showing a serious weakness in the machines’ security.

So is George W. Bush a fascist? Of course not. America is still among the freest countries in the world, with one of the highest standards of living, and is still a model of freedom to the world. But if President Bush can get away with all this – what will a future president do? If we allow our President to display such authoritarian, anti-freedom qualities, it only sets a precedent for future presidents who may not be as (relatively) harmless as President Bush. Lastly, always remember this: Adolf Hitler was elected. As Huey Long once said, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag."

[TheMercenary]

Facism Anyone?

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/076.html

Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

The Britt article started with what is happening in the U.S. and then crafted a description of fascism that only highlights those points that will support the thesis. This is a logical fallacy (the false notion that things that are similar in some aspects are identical in all aspects).

See also these definitions/descriptions:

http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/whatfasc.html

http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/whatfasc.html

Fascism is an especially virulent form of extreme right populism. Fascism glorifies national, racial, or cultural unity and collective rebirth while seeking to purge imagined enemies. It attacks both revolutionary movements and liberal pluralism in favor of militarized, totalitarian mass politics. Fascism first crystallized in Europe in response to the Bolshevik Revolution and the devastation of World War I, and then spread to other parts of the world. Between the two world wars, there were three forms of fascism: Italian economic corporatism; German racial nationalist Nazism; and clerical fascist movements such as the Romanian Iron Guard and the Croatian Ustashi. Since WWII, neofascists have reinterpreted fascist ideology and strategy in various ways to fit new circumstances.

Roger Griffin, an influential scholar of generic fascism, argues that cism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.

There are other common components of fascism, including an exclusionary form of ethnonationalism that narrowly defines who the real people or Volk are; the idea of the primary importance of the homogenous whole (Integralism); and the diminution of the importance of the individual in a society ruled by leaders who metaphysically represent the will of the people (Organicism). These factors create a drive for totalitarian control in fascist movements and states. Totalitarian movements and governments insist on intruding into and controlling every aspect of a person's life-public or private-political, social, or cultural. Totalitarianism is a term that still has analytical value despite its frequent misuse to bash the Left. Most notorious was Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1981-1985, who promulgated a theory that communist governments were totalitarian and could never be reformed, but brutal right-wing dictatorships were merely authoritarian and thus could be reformed through alliances with the United States. While this misrepresented the work of Hannah Arendt in her definitive book The Origins of Totalitarianism, it also suffered from a certain lack of historical accuracy when communism collapsed in Europe.

Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates
Co-author, "Right-Wing Populism in America"

[Ibby]

Yes, and?

You know, you post an awful lot of articles, and never do seem to say anything about them.
Do you actually have anything to say about the paper?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Ibram

Yes, and?

You know, you post an awful lot of articles, and never do seem to say anything about them.
Do you actually have anything to say about the paper?

Your paper? No.

But I do think it was important to post what those 14 points actually were for comparative purposes for the paper, and as I was researching what they were, since I had never read anything from the Free Inquiry, magazine of The Council for Secular Humanism, and I had no idea who this author was, I found someone who had researched his 14 points and did an in depth research of what he had written.

[Ibby]

Honestly I couldn't care less about how much of a quack Dr. Britt is. His points are still fairly valid, and all the stuff in the paper is true. If you wanna whine about Dr. Britt, take it to the Defining Fascism thread or something. I started this about my paper and the content therein, which is why it's a new thread, rather than something posted in the Defining Fascism thread.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Do you expect people to critique your writing skills or discuss the allegations you make in the paper?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Do you expect people to critique your writing skills or discuss the allegations you make in the paper?

[Ibby]

Either?

[xoxoxoBruce]

OK, since I haven't looked into the 14 points yet, I'll just say it was well written... you deserved the grade.

[tw]

Most interesting is the opening statement:

Pinochet. Suharto. Franco. Mussolini. Hitler. These are the ranks that George Bush has joined – the ranks of the authoritarians, the ranks of the fascists.

This is where you define what audience you want. For example, extremist George Jr supporters will never see another fact in that paper. They now have you buttonholed and will refuse to give any credence to what comes after it.

Whereas if that above quote was posted in the conclusion, then some with extremist attitudes would have read farther.

There is no good or bad interpretation. Demonstrated is how the same paper could be 'manipulated' so that those who view emotionally might read farther. Not all such papers are intended for the emotional. That paper could also have targeted only moderates who would view it in a critical manner based only in facts. The opening statement would drive off those with political agendas and would make them obvious by their emotional and illogical replies. That first statement can do so much to target the paper's audience.

One point by another that I agree with: a short statement quoting the relevant Dr Britt point at paragraphs discussing that point would have made it easier to read. The paper is written with the assumption that the reader is familiar with and need not reread any of Dr. Britt's fourteen points.

Most important, the paper usually goes after each of 12 points with a discussion of the point and with references to examples. Whether anyone agrees or disagrees with the paragraph is not relevant. Each of the twelve points is discussed in a logical manner.

Some teachers have a problem with that. They cannot separate their personal bias (political agenda) from an analysis of how logic is presented. Using only a first reading, discussion of each point appears to stay right on target which is how good papers should be written. And which is easily accomplished because Dr Britt broke his concept into 14 clear and distinct (numbered) points. Therefore your paper did not have to do that for the reader.

[Undertoad]

Don't forget Lincoln.

[Ibby]

When I actually handed in the paper, I had a footnote with the 14 points listed... I guess that didnt carry over so well to the Cellar version.

And tw, you DO have a point about the opening... But keep in mind that I did write this for school, and therefore needed a 'hook' like they tell us to write.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Ibram

And tw, you DO have a point about the opening... But keep in mind that I did write this for school, and therefore needed a 'hook' like they tell us to write.

That was the word I was looking for. Yes, you need a hook. But different hooks for different fish - was my point.

[dixy]

That was an interesting paper, and now I am off to buy that book online...