IS FASCISM APPROACHING AMERICA?

US DEMOCRACY AT RISK
Hugo Adan, may 16-2011
http://nd-hugoadan.blogspot.com/ (website just released from censorship)

1. THE RULE OF FAIR COMPETITION IN ELECTION IS BEING SUPPRESSED

The uses of State power to achieve electoral goals by a President seeking reelection is illegal in most advanced democracies and at world level, it is also anti-democratic and non-ethical at all. Obama is doing so when using war-mongerism in the case of bin Laden. War-mongerism is typical of fascistic or nazi-regimes. Its main feature is the appeals to Patriotism with flags and images of the Leader with soldiers everywhere.

The uses of war mongerism for electoral purposes is a way of rigging elections when used by a President in power to get re-elected. It makes the whole competition for power totally unfair. With the free TV & free campaign Obama is not departing from the same line in this electoral competition. In a sport competition he would have been disqualified. In a fair political competition that is illegal.

I wonder if the same will happens if Gaddafi is killed in Libya. Will Obama be happy to come to power on the shoulder of the soldiers this time?. Is that good for the future of democracy in the US?

The uses of this electoral strategy is a perfect cover up & smoke screen for the issue “humanitarian interventions abroad”. Everybody knows that current wars are draining our economy, most people want peace and the “bringing our troops home” . This hopes will be postpone forever. Regarding democracy and the ethics of human rights, since this regime did not care for those values at international level, a key question remains: how many American life of young soldiers has to be sacrificed to please the voracity of less than ten big corporations that profit from wars abroad?.

Obama electoral strategy has nothing to do with the core American value: “peace and peaceful resolution of political conflicts”. If he sincerely planned to re-unite the nation, this aim can be accomplished much better by fostering the value of peace, not war-mongerism. Obama’s luck of imagination to design a peace-plan to re-unite the nation reveals his failure as national leader.

Obama just started a new era of anti-democratic dictatorship of the big corporations, the Orwellian era, or the era of neo-fascism in America, as some scholars say below. America has not control of the world economics and politics, this explains the emphasis on tech-military control abroad and the planning of more wars for the near future. On top, we have a greater foreign debt and the risk of losing the dollar as major trade and bank reserve currency at world level. At domestic level the economic volatility indicates that the recession is not over and it could recur. So, this regime failed to provide the basis for economic, political and social instability and the chances of violent disrupts are greater than before.

2. WE HAVE AD PORTAS A NEO-FASCIST ERA IN AMERICA

Dr. Lawrence Britt in "Fascism Anyone?," Free Inquiry, Spring 2003 defined the ten major features of fascism:

1. Extreme nationalism: control of people through fear and invented foreign enemies
2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
4. Supremacy of the military: Soldiers and military service are rhetorically glamorized
5. Rigging elections with extreme patriotism or war mongerism
6. Control over mass media, internet and Covert Censorship.
7. Obsession with national security
8. Religion and government are intertwined
9. Corporate power is protected
10. Labor rights and unions power are suppressed

Source: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html. http://www.hippy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=226

Do these features sound familiar in America nowadays? If so, we are in the road to fascism or we are arriving to this point. It is also the view of Professor William Robinson. Please read what he said in “Obama Weimar republic in the United States”. Extract from: Global Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism. The global economic crisis and the attack on immigrant rights are bound together in a web of 21st century fascism. http://futurefastforward.com/images/stories/featurearticles/21st_Century_Fascism.pdf

3. INTIMIDATION & REPRESSION IS RAMPANT and it SHOULD BE PROHIBITED. This is my case.

Internet censorship is not covert, is open now. In a globalized tech-environment every country share information beyond borders, not here in the US. All those who are fed up with everyday cacophony “news-debates” in the corporate media are forced to search for alternative means of information and by doing so we are bombarded with viruses. We have to buy spy-hunter and then use the latest Norton antivirus with “power eraser” to rid of viruses and get a real sense of what is going on around the world (rt.com, www.xinhuanet.com, http://futurefastforward.com/malaysia-updates, jornada.unam.mx, etc). It is a shame its happens in the US.

Now Mozilla Firefox is placing a band in the computer of many American with Latino background to prevent the opening of those websites. They place a tiny read square with a circle in the middle in my computer too and when I tried to open FFF appear this text: “Reported Attack Site! . This web site at futurefastforward.com (FFF) has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences. Attack sites try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system. Some attack sites intentionally distribute harmful software, but many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners”.

1. “Attack Site”?. The real attack is coming from google-Mozilla-firefox. The excuse for censorship is ridicule since FFF did not prohibit the dissemination of their news. They instead want you to read it and thank you for doing so. I made a mistake to open Mozilla firefox to open FFF and open Must-watch video OBAMA GETS OSAMA where an Argentinian journalist summarized the lies about the death of Osama Bin Laden. I gathered it from Internet explorer & even if US censors control this tool as well, it will be easy to gather it from other sources in Latin America (either argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc or China Xinhuanet.com or from rt.com). The freedom of information is the best thing from globalism.

2. “Blocked based on your security preferences”?. My preferences are according to Law. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and The American Convention on Human Rights state that not even during war-time the freedom of thought, conscience and information can never be suspended. It is simply illegal to do so, as it is illegal to deny the right to nationality and to participation in government affairs to any American citizen, even if not born here but naturalized American. That was my case.

4. 21st century fascism in the United States, by William Robinson

There are some key features of a 21st century fascism I identify here:

1. The fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power

This fusion had been developing during the Bush years and would likely have deepened under a McCain-Palin White House. In the meantime, such neofascist movements as the Tea Party as well as neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB1070, have been broadly financed by corporate capital. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as prone to seek fascist political arrangements to facilitate accumulation: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy (particularly petroleum) sector.

2. Militarisation and extreme masculinization

As militarised accumulation has intensified the Pentagon budget, increasing 91 per cent in real terms in the past 12 years, the top military brass has become increasingly politicised and involved in policy making.

3. A scapegoat which serves to displace and redirect social tensions and
Contradictions

In this case, immigrants and Muslims in particular. The Southern Poverty Law Centre recently reported that "three strands of the radical right - hate groups, nativist extremist groups, and patriot organisations - increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22 per cent rise, that followed a 2008-9 increase of 40 per cent."

A 2010 Department of Homeland Security report observed that "right wing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on the fears about several emergency issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right wing radicalization and recruitment." The report concluded: "Over the past five years, various
right wing extremists, including militia and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruitment tool."

4. A mass social base

In this case, such a social base is being organised among sectors of the white working class that historically enjoyed racial caste privilege and that have been experiencing displacement and experiencing rapid downward mobility as neo-liberalism comes to the US - while they are losing the security and stability they enjoyed in the previous Fordist-Keynesian epoch of national
capitalism.

5. A fanatical millennial ideology involving race/culture supremacy embracing an idealised and mythical past, and a racist mobilisation against scapegoats

The ideology of 21st century fascism often rests on irrationality - a promise to deliver security and restore stability is emotive, not rational. 21st century fascism is a project that does not - and need not - distinguish between the truth and the lie.

6. A charismatic leadership
Such a leadership has so far been largely missing in the United States, although figures such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck appear as archetypes.

The mortal circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion

One new structural dimension of 21st century global capitalism is the dramatic expansion of the global superfluous population - that portion marginalised and locked out of productive participation in the capitalist economy and constituting some 1/3rd of humanity. The need to assure the social control of this mass of humanity living in a planet of slums gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects and facilitates the transition from social welfare to social control - otherwise known as "police states". This system becomes ever more violent.

Theoretically stated - under the conditions of capitalist globalisation - the state's contradictory functions of accumulation and legitimation cannot both be met. The economic crisis intensifies the problem of legitimation for dominant groups so that accumulation crises, such as the present one, generate social conflicts and appear as spiralling political crises. In essence, the state's ability to function as a "factor of cohesion" within the social order breaks down to the extent that capitalist globalisation and the logic of accumulation or commodification penetrates every aspect of life, so that "cohesion" requires more and more social control.

Displacement and exclusion has accelerated since 2008. The system has abandoned broad sectors of humanity, who are caught in a deadly circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion. The system does not even attempt to incorporate this surplus population, but rather tries to isolate and neutralise its real or potential rebellion, criminalizing the poor and the dispossessed, with tendencies towards genocide in some cases.

As the state abandons efforts to secure legitimacy among broad swathes of the population that have been relegated to surplus - or super-exploited - labour, it resorts to a host of mechanisms of coercive exclusion: mass incarceration and prisonindustrial complexes, pervasive policing, manipulation of space in new ways, highly repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity through petty consumption and fantasy.

A 21st fascism would not look like 20th century fascism. Among other things, the ability of dominant groups to control and manipulate space and to exercise an unprecedented control over the mass media, the means of communication and the production of symbolic images and messages, means that repression can be more selective (as we see in Mexico or Colombia, for example), and also organized juridically so that mass "legal" incarceration takes the place of concentration camps. Moreover, the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes
allows for 21st century fascism to emerge without a necessary rupture in electoral cycles and a constitutional order.

The United States cannot be characterised at this time as fascist. Nonetheless, all of the conditions and the processes are present and percolating, and the social and political forces behind such a project are mobilising rapidly. More generally, images in recent years of what such a political project would involve spanned the Israeli invasion of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, to the scapegoating and criminalisation of immigrant workers and the Tea Party movement in the United States, genocide in the Congo, the US/United Nations occupation of Haiti, the spread of neo-Nazis and skinheads in Europe, and the intensified Indian repression in occupied Kashmir.

The counterweight to 21st century fascism must be a coordinated fight-back by the global working class. The only real solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power - downward towards the poor majority of humanity. And the only way such redistribution can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below.

SOURCE: The global economic crisis and the attack on immigrant rights are bound together in a web of 21st century fascism. By William I. Robinson

http://futurefastforward.com/images/stories/featurearticles/21st_Century_Fascism.pdf

William I. Robinson a professor of sociology and global studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara.