Oh, Fascism

Oh, fascism, how I have toyed with your name for years now. Horrors, I said, in 2003. If we don't do something about this country, we're gonna be fascists. Ack, I said, in 2004, since when do we torture people and act all proud of it? Help, I said before the elections in November: this could be our last chance to turn back from the brink! And now here we are, at the end of 2005. Let's review:

1) The President did lie about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in order to mislead the nation into a war he didn't bother to plan a way to win.
2) The President did smear, purge, lie about, and ruin the careers of anyone in government who dared to question his motives, evidence, planning, or goals.
3) The President did authorize the kidnapping, transfer, drugging, and torture of people who, oops, turned out to be innocent.
4) The President did authorize government agencies to spy on American citizens engaging in constitutionally protected activity, without judicial oversight.
5) He has threatened the press.
6) He has called members of the opposition traitors.
7) He glorifies military action in support of grand ideals.
8) He robs the people to give to the rich.
9) Man, I'm tired of this, I can't go on. You know the drill.
10) Oh yeah, holding american citizens without trial.

The people running the Executive branch are fascists. George W. Bush is a crazy fascist. Have they and their supporters managed to turn the country into a full-blown obviously fascist state? Well, it doesn't look like that from inside, perhaps, but then, it hardly ever does. Most of us go about our lives as we always have. We carefully avoid saying certain things ("bomb", for example, or "somebody should shoot that guy" -- even in obvious jest.). We stay away from protests (well, who wants to get arrested? -- those people are just troublemakers, they're not getting anything really done.) We try not to think about the people we don't know that the government has tortured, kidnapped, and killed. There aren't too many of them, anyway, we think. Well, that bipolar guy shouldn't have looked so shifty on the plane, right? Of course the air marshals had to shoot him. Well, okay, so they have to check bags on the subway. Fine, so I have to take my shoes off to get through security.

Oh, and then there's the bizarre memory hole: Every week there's a new revelation, and yet it's as though the old ones never happened. Next week, I swear, we'll hear the press talking about some shocking new evidence that the Administration lied about the war. This week we read about that German guy who was abducted by the CIA, held and tortured for a while, and then let go. The press kept talking about it as though it were a new revelation, except that they'd printed articles about it nearly a year ago! See my post about this, from last January, for christssake! And then again, in May, the U.S. admitted to kidnapping the German guy, also something I noted in the blog.

So of course we can go through our day-to-day lives and think "well, it's not really fascism, not yet." And of course we can hope, and look for signs that things are getting better, that we are stepping back from the brink, that the worst of it is over and we are emerging from a long, terrible dream. But let me go ahead and bring up my favorite 'related-to-fascism' book again, They Thought They Were Free, and point us all to some pertinent quotations:

A people like ourselves, who know such systems only by hearsay or by the report of their victims or opponents, tends to exaggerate the actual relationship of Man and the State under tyranny. The laws are hateful to those who hate them, but who hates them? It is dangerous, in Nazi Germany, to go to Communist meetings or read theManchester Guardian, but who wants to go to Communist meetings or read the Manchester Guardian?

"The schemers, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, Bormann -- they built him up into a man of destiny," said Salesman Damm, the Party office manager in Kronenberg. "They did it so skilfully [sic] that he finally believed it himself. From then on, he lived in a world of delusion. And this happened, mind you, to a man who was good and great."

Hitler was a man, one like ourselves, a little man, who, by doing what he did, was a testament to the democracy "you americans" talk about, the ability of us little men to become great and to rule the whole world. A little man, like ourselves.

Ordinary people -- and ordinary Germans -- cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, of the nation, the race, the religion. Or, if they are not enemies (that comes later), they must be an element in the community somehow extrinsic to the common bond...

...

It is actual resistance which worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point which the tyrant must always approach and never pass.

It is in this nonlitigable sense, at least, that the Germans as a whole were guilty: nothing was done, or attempted, that they would not stand for.

The German community -- the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism -- had nothing to do exceptnot to interfere. Absolutely nothing was expected of them except to go on as they had, paying their taxes, reading their local paper, and listening to the radio.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.