"Living under Fascism"

Via Jessica Wilson, I learned of this illuminating lecture by Austin-based Universalist Minister Davidson Loehr--what a great town Austin is!--that touches on themes we have considered before (maybe Rev. Loehr is a reader?).   An excerpt:

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word "fascism" in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don't mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That's what I am about here. And even if I don't persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights....

When most people hear the word "fascism" they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini's and Hitler's tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in "The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul"), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s....One of the most outspoken American fascists from the 1930s was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism, a coming which he anticipated and cheered as Dennis declared that defenders of "18th-century Americanism" were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."

So it is important for us to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s, and nearly worshiped by some powerful American industrialists. And fascism has always, and explicitly, been opposed to liberalism of all kinds.

Mussolini, who helped create modern fascism, viewed liberal ideas as the enemy. "The Fascist conception of life," he wrote, "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual." (In 1932 Mussolini wrote, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, an entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism. You can read the whole entry at  http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.html)

Still, fascism is a word that is completely foreign to most of us. We need to know what it is, and how we can know it when we see it.

In an essay coyly titled "Fascism Anyone?," Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, identifies social and political agendas common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 "identifying characteristics of fascism" (the list is here).  See how familiar they sound....

This list will be familiar to students of political science. But it should be familiar to students of religion as well, for much of it mirrors the social and political agenda of religious fundamentalisms worldwide. It is both accurate and helpful for us to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. They both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again....

Our current descent into fascism came about through a kind of "Perfect Storm," a confluence of three unrelated but mutually supportive schools of thought.

1. The first stream of thought was the imperialistic dream of the Project for the New American Century. I don't believe anyone can understand the past four years without reading the Project for the New American Century, published in September 2000 and authored by many who have been prominent players in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan, to name only a few. This report saw the fall of Communism as a call for America to become the military rulers of the world, to establish a new worldwide empire. They spelled out the military enhancements we would need, then noted, sadly, that these wonderful plans would take a long time, unless there could be a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor that would let the leaders turn America into a military and militarist country. There was no clear interest in religion in this report, and no clear concern with local economic policies.

2. A second powerful stream must be credited to Pat Robertson and his Christian Reconstructionists, or Dominionists. Long dismissed by most of us as a screwball, the Dominionist style of Christianity, which he has been preaching since the early 1980s, is now the most powerful religious voice in the Bush administration.

Katherine Yurica, who transcribed over 1300 pages of interviews from Pat Robertson's "700 Club" shows in the 1980s, has shown how Robertson and his chosen guests consistently, openly and passionately argued that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian Dominionists. Robertson is on record saying democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians. He also rails constantly against taxing the rich, against public education, social programs and welfare and prefers Deuteronomy 28 over the teachings of Jesus. He is clear that women must remain homebound as obedient servants of men, and that abortions, like homosexuals, should not be allowed. Robertson has also been clear that other kinds of Christians, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are enemies of Christ. (The urica Report. Search under this name, or for "Despoiling America" by Katherine Yurica on the internet.)

3. The third major component of this Perfect Storm has been the desire of very wealthy Americans and corporate CEOs for a plutocracy that will favor profits by the very rich and disempowerment of the vast majority of American workers, the destruction of worker's unions, and the alliance of government to help achieve these greedy goals. It is a condition some have called socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and which others recognize as a reincarnation of Social Darwinism. This strain of thought has been present throughout American history. Seventy years ago, they tried to finance a military coup to replace Franklin Delano Roosevelt and establish General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in 1934. Fortunately, they picked a general who really was a patriot; he refused, reported the scheme, and spoke and wrote about it. As Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie "The Corporation," they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.

Our plutocrats have had no particular interest in religion. Their global interests are with an imperialist empire, and their domestic goals are in undoing all the New Deal reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that enabled the rise of America's middle class after WWII....

These "storm" components have no necessary connection, and come from different groups of thinkers, many of whom wouldn't even like one another. But together, they form a nearly complete web of command and control, which has finally gained control of America and, they hope, of the world.

When all fascisms exhibit the same social and political agendas (the 14 points listed by Britt), then it is not hard to predict where a new fascist uprising will lead. And it is not hard. The actions of fascists and the social and political effects of fascism and fundamentalism are clear and sobering. Here is some of what's coming, what will be happening in our country in the next few years:

1. The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.

2. Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.

3. Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children's education to Christian schools.

4. More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work.

5. Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state's official stories.

6. The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veteran's Day sermon for this year.)

7. More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.

8. More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.

9. Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.

10. Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.

11. Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control as the New York Times, for instance.

12. Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America's workers to a more desperate and powerless status.

13. Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.

14. Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.

15. In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive are the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.

Can these schemes work? I don't think so. I think they are murderous, rapacious and insane. But I don't know. Maybe they can. Similar schemes have worked in countries like Chile, where a democracy in which over 90% voted has been reduced to one in which only about 20% vote because they say, as Americans are learning to say, that it no longer matters who you vote for.

I also strongly recommend Rev. Loehr's lecture on religious fundamentalism and fascism; an excerpt from this lecture, remarking on what we learned after 9/11:

First was list of things some Muslim fundamentalists hate about our culture:

• They hate liberated women, and all that symbolizes them.  They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will become breeders, when they show the independence of getting abortions, and changing laws that previously gave men more power over them.

• They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies.  They hate homosexuality, can’t confront the homosexual tendencies that exist in them, so project them outward and punish them in others.

• They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the single rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people.  They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.

Not much about these revelations was really new.  We saw all this before, when Khomeini’s Muslim fundamentalists wreaked such havoc in Iran in the years following 1979.  We have long known that Muslim fundamentalism is a mortal enemy of freedom and democracy.

But the surprise came just a few days after September 11^th, in that remarkably unguarded interview on “The 700 Club” between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  It was remarkable partly because these men are so media-savvy it’s amazing they would say such things on the air.  But it’s also remarkable because as they listed the “causes” of the September 11^th attacks, we heard exactly the same hate list the Afghan Taliban had outlined:

* They hate liberated women who don’t follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten, or laugh at, their arrogant pretensions to rule them.

• They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies.  They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children – even when that describes fewer than one-sixth of current American families. 

• They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country.  Pat Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn’t a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians of his kind.          

It is terribly important for us to realize that the fact that “our” Christian fundamentalists have the same hate list as “their” Muslim fundamentalists is not a coincidence! 

From 1988-1993, the University of Chicago conducted a six-year study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done.  About 150 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism.  And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.

Or as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Aghanistan put it most succinctly:  "Fundamentalism is the mortal enemy of all civilized humanity."