@@ Living in fascist states of America @@
Arash
October 2005
Living in a Fascist State
"But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move
forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot
of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by
old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land". -- Franklin D.
Roosevelt, November 4, 1938
By Lewis Lapham
letters[AT]harpers.org
In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged metaphor for
all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on coming across President
Roosevelt's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt) prescient remark in
one of Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry -- a
reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse) or the pit of Hell but
to the political theories that regard individual citizens as the property of the
government, happy villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for
the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more
emphatically, as Benito Mussolini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini)
liked to say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against
the state".
The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering crowds, rousing band
music, splendid military uniforms), and in the United States they numbered among
their admirers a good many important people who believed that a somewhat modified
form of fascism (power vested in the banks and business corporations instead of with
the army) would lead the country out of the wilderness of the Great Depression
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression) -- put an end to the Pennsylvania
labor troubles, silence the voices of socialist heresy and democratic dissent.
Roosevelt appreciated the extent of fascism's popularity at the political box office;
so does Eco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco), who takes pains in the essay
"Ur-Fascism" (http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html), published in The
New York Review of Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to translate fascism
into a figure of literary speech.
By retrieving from our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of
fascist tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at
Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained the tyrant's
rise to glory. The several experiments with fascist government, in Russia and Spain
as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so
Eco, in search of their common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a
standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a habit of mind, and on
sifting through the assortment of fantastic and often contradictory notions -- Nazi
paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc. -- he finds a
set of axioms on which all the fascisms agree. Among the most notable:
The truth is revealed once and only once.
Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the
voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.
Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.
Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture
and subvert traditional values.
The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.
Argument is tantamount to treason.
Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do
not act; they play the supporting role of "the people" in the grand opera that is the
state.
Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy as it has since become
to see the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the character of an American government.
Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been surprised.
He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to his belief in such a
thing as a United Nations to judge the force of America's racist passions and the
ferocity of its anti-intellectual prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it happened.
The American democracy won the battles for Normandy and Iwo Jima, but the victories
abroad didn't stem the retreat of democracy at home, after 1968 no longer moving
"forward as a living force, seeking day and night to better the lot" of its own
citizens, and now that sixty years have passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it
doesn't take much talent for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is
fascism, not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's "Greatest
Generation", added to its weight and strength on America's shining seas and fruited
plains.
A few sorehead liberal intellectuals continue to bemoan the fact, write books about
the good old days when everybody was in charge of reading his or her own mail. I hear
their message and feel their pain, share their feelings of regret, also wish that
Cole Porter was still writing songs, that Jean Harlow and Robert Mitchum hadn't quit
making movies. But what's gone is gone, and it serves nobody's purpose to deplore the
fact that we're not still riding in a coach to Philadelphia with Thomas Jefferson.
The attitude is cowardly and French, symptomatic of effete aesthetes who refuse to
change with the times.
As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political endearment are
refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them already accepted and
understood by a gratifyingly large number of our most forward-thinking fellow
citizens, multitasking and safe with Jesus. It does no good to ask the weakling's
pointless question, "Is America a fascist state?" We must ask instead, in a major
rather than a minor key, "Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world
has ever seen", an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of the
international capital markets, worthy of "a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind"? I wish to be the first to say we can. We're Americans; we have the money
and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with
advantages not given to the early pioneers.
We don't have to burn any books.
The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the
inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own good, against the
infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don't bear
the burden of an educated citizenry.
The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last
thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and
Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government's
propaganda posters.
The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit
(books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don't
know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen
pond.
We don't have to disturb, terrorize, or plunder the bourgeoisie.
In Communist Russia as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the codes of social
hygiene occasionally put the regime to the trouble of smashing department-store
windows, beating bank managers to death, inviting opinionated merchants on
complimentary tours (all expenses paid, breathtaking scenery) of Siberia. The resorts
to violence served as study guides for free, thinking businessmen reluctant to give
up on the democratic notion that the individual citizen is entitled to an owner's
interest in his or her own mind.
The difficulty doesn't arise among people accustomed to regarding themselves as
functions of a corporation.
Thanks to the diligence of out news media and the structure of our tax laws, our
affluent and suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring
serial killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard Business
School -- think what you're told to think, and not only do you get to keep the house
in Florida or command of the Pentagon press office but on some sunny prize day not
far over the horizon, the compensation committee will hand you a check for $40
million, or President George W. Bush will bestow on you the favor of a nickname as
witty as the ones that on good days elevate Karl Rove to the honorific "Boy Genius",
on bad days to the disappointed but no less affectionate "Turd Blossom".
Who doesn't now know that the corporation is immortal, that it is the corporation
that grants the privilege of an identity, confers meaning on one's life, gives the
pension, a decent credit rating, and the priority standing in the community? Of
course the corporation reserves the right to open one's email, test one's blood,
listen to the phone calls, examine one's urine, hold the patent on the copyright to
any idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it not? As surely as the loyal
fascist knew that it was his duty to serve the state, the true American knows that it
is his duty to protect the brand.
Having met many fine people who come up to the corporate mark -- on golf courses and
commuter trains, tending to their gardens in Fairfield County while cutting back the
payrolls in Michigan and Mexico -- I'm proud to say (and I think I speak for all of
us here this evening with Senator Clinton and her lovely husband) that we're blessed
with a bourgeoisie that will welcome fascism as gladly as it welcomes the rain in
April and the sun in June. No need to send for the Gestapo or the NKVD
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD); it will not be necessary to set examples.
We don't have to gag the press or seize the radio stations.
People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement have no further use for
free speech, which is corrupting, overly emotional, reckless, and ill-informed, not
calibrated to the time available for television talk or to the performance standards
of a Super Bowl halftime show. It is to our advantage that free speech doesn't meet
the criteria of the free market.
We don't require the inspirational genius of a Joseph Goebbels
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels); we can rely instead on the dictates
of the Nielsen ratings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Ratings) and the camera
angles, secure in the knowledge that the major media syndicates run the business on
strictly corporatist principles -- afraid of anything disruptive or inappropriate,
committed to the promulgation of what is responsible, rational, and approved by
experts. Their willingness to stay on message is a credit to their professionalism.
The early twentieth-century fascists had to contend with individuals who regarded
their freedom of expression as a necessity -- the bone and marrow of their existence,
how they recognized themselves as human beings. Which was why, if sometimes they
refused appointments to the state-run radio stations, they sometimes were found dead
on the Italian autostrada (motorways) or drowned in the Kiel Canal
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_Canal). The authorities looked upon their deaths
as forms of self-indulgence.
The same attitude governs the agreement reached between labor and management at our
leading news organizations. No question that the freedom of speech is extended to
every American -- it says so in the Constitution -- but the privilege is one that
mustn't be abused. Understood in a proper and financially rewarding light, freedom of
speech is more trouble than it's worth -- a luxury comparable to owning a racehorse
and likely to bring with it little else except the risk of being made to look
ridiculous.
People who learn to conduct themselves in a manner respectful of the telephone tap
and the surveillance camera have no reason to fear the fist of censorship. By
removing the chore of having to think for oneself, one frees up more leisure time to
enjoy the convenience of the Internet services that know exactly what one likes to
hear and see and wear and eat. We don't have to murder the intelligentsia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia).
Here again, we find ourselves in luck. The society is so glutted with easy
entertainment that no writer or company of writers is troublesome enough to warrant
the compliment of an arrest, or even the courtesy of a sharp blow to the head. What
passes for the American school of dissent talks exclusively to itself in the pages of
obscure journals, across the coffee cups in Berkeley (http://www.berkeley.edu) and
Park Slope (Brooklyn, New York), in half-deserted lecture halls in small Midwestern
colleges. The author on the platform or the beach towel can be relied upon to direct
his angriest invective at the other members of the academy who failed to drape around
the title of his latest book the garland of a rave review.
The blessings bestowed by Providence place America in the front rank of nations
addressing the problems of a twenty-first century, certain to require bold
geopolitical initiatives and strong ideological solutions. How can it be otherwise?
More pressing demands for always scarcer resources; ever larger numbers of people who
cannot be controlled except with an increasingly heavy hand of authoritarian
guidance. Who better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set the
paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? The existence of mankind hangs in the
balance; failure is not an option. Where else but in America can the world find the
visionary intelligence to lead it bravely into the future -- Donald Rumsfeld
(http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82) our Dante
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri), Turd Blossom
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove) our Michelangelo?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo)
I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made brave strides forward. By
matching Eco's list of fascist commandments against our record of achievement, we can
see how well we've begun the new project for the next millennium -- the notion of
absolute and eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right#U.S._foreign_policy_and_Christian_Zionism)
and embodied in the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity
provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of
"intelligent design"; a state of perpetual war and a government administering, in
generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two presidential elections stolen with
little or no objection on the part of a complacent populace; the nation's
congressional districts gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty
years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news media devoted to
the arts of iconography, busily minting images of corporate executives like those of
the emperor heroes on the coins of ancient Rome.
An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to expect from the
innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early twentieth-century fascisms
didn't enter their golden age until the proletariat
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat) in the countries that gave them birth had
been reduced to abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of
eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy.
On the evidence of the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration
with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say nothing of
expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we can look forward with
confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling
cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police.
* Lewis H. Lapham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Lapham) is the editor of
Harper's Magazine http://harpers.org/Newsstand200510.html
The Bush Fascist Index
http://www.bushwatch.net/fascism.htm
Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
http://www.why-war.com/files/ur_fascism.pdf