A Book Review and Two Essays Combine — to Make a Point about — the Concealed Rise of American Fascism

09 March 2016

A premise — we Americans are not the perpetually good guys we think we are

I develop the elements of this premise this way:

It is difficult enough for analytically thoughtful and knowledgeable people to recognize their own unstated assumptions. These often do not accord with Reality.

Ergo, one can infer that grossly ignorant and generally unthoughtful people are more or less continually subject to unexamined, subconsciously held, false truths.

Broadly speaking, we in the United States combine (a) cultural and historical ignorance(s) with (b) a complacent and unquestioning acceptance of working assumptions that are not grounded in what is real.

This brain-dead combination has today evolved into a murderous national hypocrisy that begins to parallel the rise of German fascism before and during World War II.

My metaphor is not as far-fetched as it may initially seem. Following are extracts from three sources that build toward supporting it.

First — a working definition of American fascism

American fascism can be described as self-serving collusion between (i) essentially bribed government leaders — distributed among all three branches of government — (ii) corporations and (iii) the wealthy elite.

This assemblage configures government institutions to do its will(s), which in most instances boil down to extracting riches from everyone else.

Corporatism is totalitarian in that the subservient public has no remaining lawful means of resisting wealth’s buyout of their once representative institutions.

American fascism today slops over into unrestricted militarism. The profit motive drives our Military Industrial Complex into beginning and fueling unending foreign conflicts. This is why President Dwight Eisenhower — a former 5-star (World War II) American Army general — warned against it.

Let’s start with Professor Robert Jensen’s essay

Jensen addresses the problem presented by uncritically accepting unexamined assumptions as accurate. What we take for granted, we usually do not see clearly enough to test for truth, nuance, or menace.

The University of Texas at Austin professor recently noted that American business schools never ask anyone to critique the capitalist concept, despite capitalism’s increasingly worrisome negative effect on the human environment:

Let’s use that as a definition of political correctness—a narrowing of the scope of inquiry, especially to avoid certain controversial ideas out of a fear of offending someone, falling out of step with peers, or being disciplined by authorities.

I ask students from the business school how often in their classes they are asked to challenge, or presented with a challenge of, capitalism. The answer typically is “never.”

Despite the many trenchant critiques of capitalism, the easily demonstrated failures of the system, and experiments with alternatives, it appears that the word “business” in “business school” actually means “business as it is narrowly defined in capitalism.”

One of the key problems facing the human species . . . is that . . . a continued pursuit of “growth” on a finite planet will intensify the multiple, cascading ecological crises that are unfolding around us. In other words, modern mass-consumption capitalism is ecocidal.

Why would this reality-denial strategy be dominant? Because of the coddling of the capitalist mind.

[T]he concentration of wealth in the system allows the wealthiest capitalists to have disproportionate influence in politics through campaign contributions and in education through philanthropy.

We can infer that some pretty big concepts hide under a concealing blanket.

Now let’s wander over to Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War

This book examines public attitudes that underlay the rise (and demise) of the Third Reich. I reviewed the book a couple of days ago:

Thoughtful readers of Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War will recognize that the rationalizations which justified the Holocaust and German military aggression during the World War II in German minds are similar to those (more subtly) motivating overblown American responses to terror and national security today.

In the below book extracts, try substituting the words terrorism, terrorists, Muslims and/or Islam:

[T]he German dictator’s strategic choices also fulfilled a long cherished desire to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and conquer colonial ‘living space’ in the east . . . .

Hitler opened the rhetorical floodgates himself on 2 October [1941], with his Proclamation to the soldiers on the eastern front to take Moscow, declaring that their key foes were ‘Jews and only Jews!”

On 8 November . . . Hitler lectured his audience about how he had ‘come to know these Jews as world arsonists’. The ‘entire intelligentsia’ of Russia ‘had been slaughtered and a mindless, forcibly proletarianised sub-humanity left behind over which an enormous organisation of Jewish commissars . . . rules. “This struggle is now . . . a struggle to be or not to be!”

[Goebbels] reminded them of the Fuhrer’s ‘prophecy’ of 1939 that the Jews would perish if they started another European war:

We are now witnessing the fulfilment of this prophecy; the fate befalling the Jews is harsh, but it is more than deserved. Pity or regret is completely out of case in this case.

Pertinent here, with regard to Professor Jensen’s essay about unquestioned assumptions, notice that post-Weimar Germany’s capitalism held an unreasoning fear of the threat posed by allegedly Jewish Bolshevism (another name for communism).

Similarly, we Americans only rarely confront the possibility that our Military Industrial Complex may be profiting from starting and fueling the United States’ unending and strategically unsuccessful wars.

Is this comparison to mid-Twentieth Century Germany overblown?

Probably not.

Look at Glenn Greenwald’s yesterday-published perspective about the use of deadly American force in Somalia:

The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people.

As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants — members of the Somali group al Shabaab — but provided no evidence to support that assertion.

[M]ost U.S. media reports contained nothing more than quotes from U.S. officials about what happened, conveyed uncritically and with no skepticism of their accuracy . . . .

With that boilerplate set of claims in place, huge numbers of people today who have absolutely no idea who was killed are certain that they all deserved it.

Other than the higher-than-normal death toll, this mass killing is an incredibly common event under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate, who has so far bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries.

[T]here are several important points highlighted by yesterday’s bombing and the reaction to it:

1) The U.S. is not at war in Somalia.

2) [T]he Obama administration has formally re-defined the term “militant” to mean: “all military-age males in a strike zone” unless “there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

In other words, the U.S. government presumptively regards all adult males it kills as “militants” unless evidence emerges that they were not. It’s an empty, manipulative term of propaganda and nothing else.

3) Why does the U.S. have troops stationed in this part of Africa? . . . even the Obama administration says it is not at war with al Shabaab.

It’s the ultimate self-perpetuating circle of imperialism: We need to deploy troops to other countries in order to attack those who are trying to kill U.S. troops who are deployed there.

4) Most countries on the planet don’t routinely run around dropping bombs and killing dozens of people in multiple other countries at once, let alone do so in countries where they’re not at war.

But for Americans, this is now all perfectly normalized. We just view our president as vested with the . . . divine right, grounded in American exceptionalism, to deem whomever he wants “Bad Guys” and then — with no trial, no process, no accountability — order them killed.

Within literally hours, virtually everyone was ready to forget about the whole thing and move on, content in the knowledge — even without a shred of evidence or information about the people killed — that their government and president did the right thing.

Now that is a pacified public and malleable media.

This is conceptually not all that far from the combination of fear and undiscriminating hatred and preemptive war that eventually became the Third Reich, is it?

American resistance to accepting the Reich analogy (for discussion purposes) is indicative of (a) the depth of our fear of “brown people” terrorism and (b) the excessive self-righteousness that we think excuses our responses to it.

The moral? — Unexamined assumptions create fertile ground for Evil’s seeds

This is why ignorant thoughtlessness is so often the enemy of defensible moral behavior. For nations as well as persons.

PeteFree.com

A Book Review and Two Essays Combine — to Make a Point about — the Concealed Rise of American Fascism