A post by Maynard
“Fascism” is a word that gets tossed around a lot. It’s one of those “bad” things. But does anybody know exactly what it is?
Let’s check Wikipedia.
Fascism is a radical, authoritarian nationalist ideology that aims to create a single-party state with a government led by a dictator who seeks national unity and development by requiring individuals to subordinate self-interest to the collective interest of the nation or race.
I guess the essence of the thing is that the state is supreme, and the individual is subordinate.
Government is an entity that, like so many other entities, aspires to grow. Just as a glutton will become obese, an ever-growing government will ultimately cross the threshold and become a fascist thing.
A government cannot exist without coercive authority. Whoever transgresses against the government’s mandates faces the government’s guns. It’s a reality that too many people want to forget. I wish every lawmaker would ponder every law from the angle of: Is this important enough that I’m willing to kill violators?
(Perhaps you think I exaggerate the point. Do we kill people for spitting on the sidewalk? No, of course not; we merely fine them. But if you don’t pay the fine, they’ll jail you. And if you won’t go to jail, they’ll come with guns. Just because we act like gentlemen with respect to these messy little details doesn’t mean they don’t exist.)
Educated citizens of a republic understand that, in an imperfect world, there is a sweet spot between anarchy and fascism. That’s the place where we regard government as a necessary but tolerable evil. It has enough coercive authority to maintain a reasonable degree of order and infrastructure. But it does not have a monopoly on power. That’s why we have, for example, the Second Amendment. And that’s why the Second Amendment is considered controversial and is under constant attack by those that want the balance of power to tilt toward government.
In a free and healthy society, citizens regard government as an annoyance, albeit a necessary one. Government is a good thing…when taken in small doses.
Things have gotten out of hand when government regards its citizens as the annoyance, and decides that our power must be curbed.
The political left implicitly argues that we should consider intent. The fascists were evil, but socialists try to help, and therefore are respectable.
The problem is, none of these movements ever announced themselves as evil. The fascists likewise regarded themselves as saviors of mankind. So does Osama bin Laden.
It’s well and good to make your best judgment about what the proponents of a movement think they’re trying to accomplish. Such speculations affect the nuances of our reaction. But we’d better stand firm against fascism, unless we’re willing to live in a fascist state.
As a society, we look more and more to government for gobs of personal services: education, transportation, employment, health care, pensions, food, recreation, and of course sage advice. We see a rising proportion of our wealth controlled by government, either directly confiscated, or else through subtle regulatory processes.
Control by big government is a wonderful state of affairs — if we’re a nation of children. But this level of smothering oversight is incompatible with the responsibilities and dignity of adulthood. You can’t be free when you’re living under daddy’s roof and eating at his table. If you’ve made the transition from being a child to being on your own, you know what I mean.
When we get scared, fascism doesn’t look so bad. It’s like moving back in with your folks; maybe a bit embarrassing, but who cares about the abstract notion of “liberty” when you’re unemployed? And the more people who do it, the less embarrassing our personal situation becomes. There’s a sense that it’s not right when only some people are dependent upon government largesse. The ones that don’t get a check from Uncle Sugar make the rest of us look bad.
In troubled times, the siren song of the strong, charismatic leader, the man with the plan, may seem like the only choice.
We should know better by now. Dammit, it’s our heritage to know better. If we of all people have forgotten this, then the world is in for a very bad turn.
Thanks for the post. I think one of the best descriptions of our form of government is shown in this video, which I linked below. It really puts in perspective all of the -isms (fascism, communism, socialism, etc.), and demonstrates that they are all shades of the same thing: oligarchy.
http://tinyurl.com/thegovernment/
Maynard,
I enjoyed the analogy about moving back in with one’s parents.
If I may add to your explanation, it’s helpful to think of the roots or origins of a word. In the dictionary the 1st definition is usually that a fascia is the tissue which binds together internal organs. In buildings a fascia is that board or sheathing which wraps the rafter ends. A fascia helps to enforce unity.
Applied to military endeavors unity of thought and purpose are a key ingredients for victory and, a matter of life or death. In civilian society it’s brutal and should be resisted except in times of war.
During the 2008 presidential election our country was subjected to a kind of Fascist distribution of information under the color of journalism.
Example:
Ask yourself three simple questions! At the moment of your birth:
1. Was your mother an American Citizen?
2. Was your father an American Citizen?
3. Were you born on US soil?
If you can say yes to all three that means you are a natural born citizen and fulfill one of the minimum requirements to be POTUS under Article II, Section I, US Constitution.
Election laws including the Natural Born Citizen clause from main body of the US Constitution were swept under the rug by the press and the two political parties. Obama’s natural born allegiances to land of his foreign father and his trail of alias and false identities were concealed from most of the electorate. Among the many decent Americans I know it continues to turn up that they voted for Obama because they are for racial reconciliation. They think Obama will heal the country racially. They don’t know about Obama’s ties to racist and Jew haters like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Minister Farrakhan or the Islamic Militants who funded his tuition for Harvard Law school. They are ignorant that he denounced his birth citizenship, whatever it was, to become a citizen of Indonesia. They’ve never heard of Barry Soetoro and don’t know that Barry Soetoro and Barack Obama are the same person. They don’t know that Barry Soetoro used his Indonesian passport as an adult. I saw the CNN report where a news team went to Indonesia to show where presidential candidate “Barack Obama” lived as a child. I missed the part where they explained that he became the son of Lolo Soetoro, a Muslim and Communist, and renounced his birth citizenship to become Barry Soetoro. Wonder why? I just remember the part where he made lots of friend who are now proud and loyal. How convenient it is to have two identities.
Let’s see. Bill Ayers hired him (Barack Obama, supposedly American citizen not Barry Soetoro, Indonesian citizen) to run the Woods Foundation and sponsored his candidacy for the Illinois State Senate. Next step: US Senate where a threshold requirement is US citizenship of any quality. What do I mean by quality of citizenship? A US citizen can be born on US soil with one American parent and one foreign parent or, two American parents but born on foreign soil or, now days with two foreign parents on US soil or, by legal immigration. We have 230 years of State Department rulings and case law. Who would question the citizenship of an Illinois State Senator? After all his mother was Stanley Ann Dunham and she was born in the USA.
The elephant in this Fascist room of ours is the life and times of Barry Soetoro, also known as President Barack Hussein.
To shed further light on current events it is interesting to study how socialist Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler took control of private economic sectors under their spheres of influence verses how Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and little Fidel Castro did it. In each case mob rule as a balance between democracy and anarchy was a skillfully utilized tool. During chaotic events security is pitted against liberty. A well set up mob can often be guided to choose security. When the people of Russia, Germany and Italy “moved back in with their parents” (little Cuba too) millions died.
Too many people on the Left who are always bewailing fascism, know so little about what fascism entails. If they did they would not be using that word so cavalierly.
Classic facism as expressed by Mussolini, its creator, is the alignment or merging of the interests of government, banking, and industry for the “good” of the masses. Remenber that Wilson and Roosevelt were enamoured with this idea, and wrote glowingly about the great “Il Duche”(?).
We are watching helplessly as government takes over near complete control of the financial system, not even allowing the banks to pay back TARP funds that were wrongly given to them to shore up failing balance sheets.
The government will soon be fully in the auto business, picking the winners and losers. They will have so much fun choosing what cars can be made, that they will proliferate the model to all other “key” (large) segments of industry. As in facist Germany, the small shop owner was the last to be driven out.
They’ll start with major industries, and they won’t stop until we all have chips imbeded in us, and the government knows and limits what we can buy, what we can eat, where we can go, and employs armies of beurocrats to keep copius records of it all.
Maynard, Very few people today have put together what the real essence of “fascism” is as well as you have just provided. Yes, “it gets tossed around a lot” without understanding, like another word “nazi”. Frequently, the focus is upon the draconian aspect without paying attention to the various measures that either contribute to it or become elements of it. With economy of words you have provided a ‘reasonably intelligent’ audience the steps to follow (or walk back) in touring the fascistic nightmare.
Linking, as you have, it’s elements to socialism and its variants is essential to understand it.
Too many people see socialism as some form of “spoonful of sugar” to facilitate a remedy, when many of us see as it as the predatory toxin which can easily morph into dependency upon the big dealer; government. When that submission is granted, we then read about “enabling” and “emergency” acts, categorization of peoples and a return to less enlightened times.
Challenge: Have any us ever read or heard in classrooms (or on our own) a more accurate and succinct definition of fascism as Maynard has provided?
Oh dear, Maynard, there you go opening those stinky cans of worms again!
Thanks for the timely reminders. Well said…
With all the TEA Parties of recent weeks, there is hope. We may not be as screwed as we feared. Some of us still have our gonads intact.
It was only months ago that every media outlet in this country, left,right, and center, were completely dismissive of the notion that Barack Obama was a socialist. Obama himself was in complete denial.
He’s rather unabashed about it now.
Rather well stated Maynard. He is indeed, in my mind, dangerously close to the underpinnings of a fascist leader. They say history repeats itself. Who knows what damage he has done to this country already, given his unfettered meetings with anti-American dictators and those who wish to dictate and direct our economic future to their own benefit.
“Fascism is a radical, authoritarian nationalist ideology that aims to create a single-party state with a government led by a dictator who seeks national unity and development by requiring individuals to subordinate self-interest to the collective interest of the nation or race.”
Even the definition is problematic, because the Wikipedia editorship had to stretch it to cover Nazism as a variant of Fascism, and thus start talking about race. They are related, but they’re not the same thing. Both are subsets of anti-Marxist socialism (Mussolini was a leader of the Italian Socialist Party during WWI) but the mode of reaction against Marx was RADICALLY different between them.
Nazism in subordinating everything to race is almost the ultimate logical outgrowth of the 19th century German Romantic movement, a reaction that emphasized and mythologized the pre-Modern. Race was imagined as “organic”: one belonged to the Volk, a living thing. Fascism, by contrast, was not pre-Modern but ultra-Modern: if the Volk was a living thing to which one belonged for the Nazis, the State was that which was the essence of modernism. The State was, and is, not a living thing but a machine. The State is not a vehicle for advancing the nation or the race, but is an end in itself, and in glorifying the Romans, Mussolini recognized this: the Roman Empire was something above race or nation, and this is what the Fascist State was ideally to aspire to.
One is not a part of the machine Fascist State, but serves the State. Hitler did not talk or think in any deep way about economics; Mussolini made it the core of his philosophy, and was the first to talk about a “Third Way” between capitalism and Marxism. Fascism is based upon completely coopting and subordinating the facade of private property to the servitude of the machine State–whether by persuasion or by force–rather than simply trying to destroy it as Marx and his heirs attempted. Merely to say that is to recognize the Fascist legacy in our political midst, keeping in mind that FDR was an explicit fan of Mussolini right up until Il Duce picked the wrong horse in WWII.
Thanks for the words, Maynard. Also, thanks for the Vid. Chuck!
I love the fact that some of our greatest statesmen; Reagan, Thatcher and Churchill knew too well to destructive power of the State.
Who was it that wrote: “A little luck and a little government are necessary in life but only a fool trusts either.”
Great post Maynard.