By mhanch Posted on

Fear and Loathing : Fascism on the Rise

First, Go watch Kieth Olberman’s latest Commentary: Here
Done? Great.
I have been trying to reduce much of my political banter as of late, largely because it becomes the same topic over and over. But recently I have seen the convergence of several topics, and Olbermann’s commentary really set me off. Fascism is one of those nasty, conversation-killing words, like comparing someone/something to Hitler, that only gets thrown around by most liberals the way that your white southern gentleman use "n*gger". Calling someone a Fascist has generally no value, as little or no work is ever done seriously to even look at what Fascism actually is, or why we are supposedly against it. I say supposedly because as is pointed out by several recent events, Fascism is certainly one fork in our future road.
So why am I so concerned now? If I were to look at the whole of the Bush years, and an actual definition of Fascism, I’d say that we are trending towards a pretty good match. Here’s the Wiktionary definition
fascism
  1. A political regime based on strong centralized government, suppressing through violence any criticism or opposition of the regime, and exalting nation, state, or religion above the individual.
  2. A system of strong autocracy.

And the entry from the wikipedia page on the same:

Fascism is a radical totalitarian political philosophy that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, militarism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism.

Since Bush took power you can look at each of the points that gets made and see how we creep closer and closer towards a definition of our own country that walks hand in hand with a Fascist state.

    • The "with us or against us" mentality
    • Opposition aids the Terrorists
    • Changing our course aids the terrorists
    • Democrats winning aids the terrorists
    • The wage gap growing between rich and poor

And so on, there are so many examples of this that it really isn’t worth citing them. John Dean’s latest book talks about the hard core percentage of Republicans that are true Authoritarians, with little concern for anything else (and it’s not a small percentage, like 20% or so.) And with the latest speeches coming out of our administration, it is clearer and clearer that each of these little things that goes on in our lives pulls us closer to a very bad place.

It would be quite convenient if we had some extra term to use for this type of governance other than the emotionally loaded "Fascism" but we don’t. We could make something up and try to place it into the public meme, but that’s not right either. In my mind, it has become time to call a spade a spade, and state what I feel is becoming more than obvious.

Those running our government today are building America into a new form of Fascism. And it’s about time we stopped them.

We in this case should be the majority of people, Liberal Democrats, Centrists, Old School Goldwater Republicans, those of us who, though we may not see it, still have more in common with each other than is apparent on first glance.

Seeing Kieth Olberman’s commentary makes me feel as if I’m not the only one who sees this happening, which I hope is true.