So says one of the occupiers. You don’t say. Actually, if you understood fascism, you’d realize it started that way.
36 thoughts on ““Our Movement Became Fascist””
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So says one of the occupiers. You don’t say. Actually, if you understood fascism, you’d realize it started that way.
Comments are closed.
When a movement’s foot soldiers, the ones who have endured the bitter cold, describe their movement as fascist to the press, abandon it, and praise the police, it’s over.
It’s not growing. It’s imploding.
At first I thought that the lack of understanding fascism was a failure of our education system. Then I realized that my perspective was skewed towards veracity rather than propaganda. Since our educators seem to have the opposite view of their responsibilities, I suppose I have to count it as a success for the US Department of Propaganda (Education). Yea for the Obummer Jugend!
Mayor Menino of Boston is one very lucky man.
He was in no hurry to push the Occo-flops out. And when there was violence and death in other occu-flop encampments, he still didn’t move.
Had someone then been mugged, raped or killed in the Boston Occu-flop encampment Memino should have been immediately impeached and put on trial. He had fair warning.
But he chose to roll the dice. He got lucky this time.
I don’t think these things start up as fascist, but rather they almost inevitably turn into fascism. OWS started up as a really stupid idea based on completely idiotic ideas about how anything works, and then when people actually rallied to it it proved disastrous. This required the smarter participants to try and organize. Naturally they were quickly maneuvered by the professional activists (a type of conman) and the movement gained a “leadership”. From that point on the protestors were quickly pushed into a conflict between the need for organization and the inherently odious, and fascistic, nature of that necessary organization. The fact that they had no clue meant that the fascists inherently had no opposition.
I didn’t want to turn that into a dissertation, but the contrast with the Tea Party is very signifigant. The Tea Partiers were able to resist this because they were already organized, they had even at the very beginning a native organization that we call “bourgeois values.” But any functional group has this internal discipline, it is just this is what we call the culture of internal discipline of the only social group to ever create and sustain actual liberalism. The occupy protestors as rejectors of this culture are completely helpless. They don’t even have the enefits that a bunch a medieval peasants would have because they have never had to construct a functional culture as anything other than parasites.
I din’t mean to start a dissertation, I just wanted to clarify what I meant.
The Tea Party had a huge advantage. A mission statement keeps people on message. The TP started with two. Taxed enough already and the US Constitution.
It also helps, a lot, that the Tea Party was a protest movement and not an alternate society. Its a lot easier to get together for an afternoon with a couple of speakers than it is to have several hundred people camp out in the winter for months.
Hubris.
“OWS started up as a really stupid idea based on completely idiotic ideas about how anything works, and then when people actually rallied to it, it proved disastrous.”
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…but if you change it around a little, or change something…trivial…
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The Nazi Party started up as a really stupid idea based on completely idiotic ideas about how anything works, and then when people actually rallied to it, it proved disastrous.
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Fascism is Fascism it is no big surprise, that the date, country of origin or native language don’t change that. And it’s dangerous, anywhere, anytime.
“We are the neon-sign-wielding 99 percent!”
Funny to see the old adage that, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Here we are at the start of another century and rebooting the fascist movement all over again. Though people in this day and age have all nearly been given their requisite history classes. The only problem is all these occupiers think they’ve got this idea of what history was like but not many of those ideas probably align themselves all too well with reality.
+1
Josh,
where do you live that anyone of the mean OWS crowd’s age was taught ANY history?
And I don’t mean the FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor Attack before it happened, JFK was a great father & husband, Nixon caused the war to be lost in ‘Nam and OK’d the break in, kind of history either.
My older son is 37, he never had ANY decent history classes and I remember people with children 8 to 10 years older than him talking about the crappy history in junior high and high school, I remember my own parents talking about the lack of history my sister was taught she would have been 47 now. So for about 25 to 35 years, I’ve been hearing parents complain about history NOT being taught efficiently.
I hear ya, Schteveo. I know of a friend of a friend that teaches at a local high school that was using his sick days to spend time out at the Occupy Dallas gathering. You know, the one where the 11 year old was being passed around as a sex toy. I believe he teaches history of all things. I’ve meet him a few times and can tell you the guy has more than a few screws loose. A total shame that he has been given the position to mold the minds of our next generation.
I have been a substitute teacher in history/social study classes in high schools and middle schools in recent years. My first shock was how deathly boring the textbooks are now. And the textbook writers invent exercises in which the students are supposed to figure out how they would apply something they just learned about a historical event to some hypothetical situation in which they are in charge of changing the world. Most kids are totally turned off by these exercises. I worry about the ones who like them.
Hmmm.
People are pretty vague about what exactly fascists are, even more vague than they are about communists.
A major, perhaps even defining, difference between fascists and communists is that fascism is strongly nationalistic. Fascists are nationalists, maybe even patriots. The American left certainly isn’t patriotic.
I see the Occupy types as much closer to communists than fascists.
Neither is a good thing to be, although communism has more of a fanbase these days than does fascism. Everybody “knows” fascism is bad, but some think communism is basically OK.
The simpler notion is that both groups are ultimately totalitarian; all leftist bents are. (Never forget that fascists are not right wing).
Never forget that there’s no such thing as a right wing.
The linear scale of politics left over from 18th Century France is useful only to Statists – those who want to control a state that controls everything. “Rightists” are their fictional whipping boys.
According to Trotsky, Hitler was a “right-wing Socialist”, by which he meant a bad Socialist. According to Stalin, Trotsky was a “rightist”. See the pattern?
Asked a Statist what made Hitler “right” – he wasn’t for low taxes and small gov – quite the opposite. The answer came back that he killed Jews. Right = bad, it’s just that simple.
Indeed, the “right wing” is simply the random odds and sods who have not subjugated their wills to the Politically Correct theocracy.
“Right wing” power structures are the authoritarian (not totalitarian) dictatorships that emerge once democracies collapse – you might get a Pinochet; you might get a Sulla.
Yes/no.
in political terms fascism is nationalistic (but not in the way most people use the term, fascist nationalism is fairly unique). in economic terms fascism is based on government control of the economy to rein in the greed of the capitalists while ensuring that workers are paid enough and prices are controlled for the consumers. as Mussolini said, the fascist state is the corporate state (and by “corporate” he was referring to entities like the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau not business entities like GE). Economically OWS seems to be straight fascist instead of communist.
+1
Mussolini’s fascism was supposed to be large corporations, large labor organizations and Government would get together and plan the economy, with government of course having the last say. It was fairly popular in FDR’s administration with pictures of Mussolini hanging in offices. In the US it was commonly called corporatism which didn’t mean our type of business corporations but labor unions which were called “corporationies” (sp). Fascist was a roman symbol of each of the three elements which together would be stronger than each separately.
There was considerable nationalism in the old soviet union, in china, Vietnam, well the list goes on….
A while ago there was a list circulating of characteristics (I forget the exact number) defining a fascist country. Of course, the USA was a perfect fit. I then had the idea to see how France would rate. Giving France the benefit of the doubt, I found that it fit all but 2 of the points. And yet there have been no panicky statements about France being nearly fascist. I wonder why.
Dogbert pretty much nailed OWS, the Russian Revolution, the Nazis, etc
http://dilbert.com/2011-12-05/
I always thought fascism was government control of favored private companies and banks. You know, GM, Goldman Sachs, siezing control of student loan and nationalized health care, that kind of stuff. . . not a confused mishmash of conflicted goals unreachable via their utopian 90% democratic/mob rule.
I have a (personally cobbled-up) definition of Fascism that works for me. It is a system where the ultimate political entity is the State, rather than individuals. All else that is odious about Fascism flows from that formulation.
While in Communism that State inevitably become the ultimate political entity, merely from the concentration of power and the nature of the ideology, the concept is not necessarily at the root of communism, where supposedly it is the ‘workers’ as a collective that that are supposed to be the source of political legitimacy.
Try it sometime, I find that this definition fits pretty nicely.
> While in Communism that State inevitably become the ultimate political entity, merely from the concentration of power and the nature of the ideology, the concept is not necessarily at the root of communism
Actually it is. Communists just don’t mention that as much because they think that it scares the useful idiots. (I think that the Cs overestimate the idiots, that you could tell many of them “we’re going to slaughter millions” and they’d still sign up.)
> where supposedly it is the ‘workers’ as a collective that that are supposed to be the source of political legitimacy.
The phrase “hey rube” comes to mind.
Still sign up? The prospect of slaughtering millions of people they’ve been told are inferior is a drawing card. They all think they’ll be the ones who get to rule. I hope it’s a shock when they learn they’re going to be herded about just like the rest of us.
I tend to think Totalitarian is better term to describe the Leftist agenda. They are about control and getting the power to control every aspect of our lives.
I don’t really buy that this group did not start with goals. They said they wanted a revolution like they’ve seen in Egypt and other places. So; if you are taking to the streets (ok, camp ground) for revolution in a liberal democratic republic in favor of some kind of socialist people’s republic instead… well… whether it is fascism or socialism with a vanguard party… your splitting hairs IMO. You’re the bad guys. The press knew that they were about this and covered it up with the ‘they have no defined goals’ crap IMO. They were a no war but the class war group since day 1.
West
“While in Communism that State inevitably become the ultimate political entity, merely from the concentration of power and the nature of the ideology, the concept is not necessarily at the root of communism, where supposedly it is the ‘workers’ as a collective that that are supposed to be the source of political legitimacy.”
Except there is no such thing as communism. The name of the USSR said they were socialists. Their legal system was called socialist law. They had socialist on their money and passports…. It is just more socialist memory hole stuff to try to push it onto another name (like nazi instead of national socialist…). If anything, communist is the name of a socialist party.
OWS and others of the Left are useful idiots. When they are no longer useful,
they are just idiots.
Not fascist – totalitarian.
One of the key and irreducible features of fascism is the fuehrerprinzip (as the German Fascists called it) – the principle of the Leader, be it Hitler, or Mussolini, or even Franco, in the Spanish pseudo-fascism.
OWS deliberately and entirely rejected not just a leader, but any leaders at all.
Whatever they are, it’s not quite properly “fascist”.
(I’m going with totalitarian, though.
They’re that in spades, especially in their little camps – they’re just disorganized and decentralized totalitarians.
Which is a wonderful little contradiction and a reason for the chaos.)
That is a feature, yes, but it’s neither “key” nor “irreducible”. Evidence: subtract it, and see what difference it makes in practice: Zippity. The victims of each are just as dead, just as voluminous, and are even killed by very similar means (e.g. camps) and under similar justifications.
Communism emphasized no leader (hell, no government; does the phrase “wither away” ring a bell?) in its original doctrines. In practice, however, a leader is precisely how it ended up, and *must* end up.
This is due to a principle which I call “ideological causality”. It means that certain premises — the fundamental ones, what you call “key and irreducible” — assert themselves over time as an ideology progresses towards its logical end, while the non-essential ones, that were merely window-dressing meant to obscure that fundamental core, are jettisoned and fall away, such as your “leader emphasis” or the “principles” adopted by the animals in “Animal Farm”.
The fundamentals common to all authoritarian and totalitarian systems, including fascism, communism, primitive tribalism, oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorship and theocracy, is the following:
1. The individual is morally subordinate to something other than himself. Could be God, society, race, spirits, “the other”, “everyone that looks like you”… the particulars don’t matter. The “key and irreducible” here is that the “something” is always some sort of anthropomorphized abstraction whose will and *moral sovereignty* must ultimately be taken on faith, *or else* (because five minutes of genuine *reasoning* would tell you that none of those things actually *exist* in the manner that actual individuals do).
2. There is an elite class whose claim to that status lies in possessing the ability/authority to articulate the will — and therefore the moral sovereignty — of that nonexistent entity. That elite class may consist in initial doctrines of a single leader, it may even consist of “everyone” (i.e. in a pure democracy), but *in practice* there must be, and always will be a pyramid, with nomenklatura consisting of one to several rulers at the top, and on down through the various nobles/commissars down to the serfs/comrades.
These things are common to all non-free political systems — because, of course, they are fundamentally anti-individualist. The emergence of the elite is what marks the logical end-of-road for all such systems; it’s only a matter of time.
What’s the inverse? A society based upon the following:
1. The principle of individual rights. The individual is morally sovereign, while society (the government, specifically) is subordinated to this principle.
2. The rule of law pursuant to #1, particularly equality before the law. No elites, no “group rights” — only individual rights, which are merely *recognized*, not granted, by society and its laws.