Paars-zonder-groen inzet verkiezingen ? Van Rompuy en Michel willen af van groen

Over het overdadig en incorrect gebruik van de term fascisme verscheen overlaatst volgende tekst op een of andere IMC-site uit de VSA. Ik zou het nu graag inbrengen tegen het artikel van Révolte, dat zich volgens mij schuldig maakt aan een soortgelijke populistische demarche:

I keep seeing people talking about 'facism' on this site. Does anyone in this city know what fascism is (was)? Can anyone spell it?

There's a lot of loose talk about fascism floating around these days, people, and it's starting to get on my nerves, for a bunch of reasons.

First, the word itself is 'fascism', derived from the latin 'fasces', which were an axe surrounded by a bundle of sticks or rods carried by authority figures during the Roman Empire. They symbolized civic authority for the Romans.

The political party that adopted the word 'fascist' to describe itself existed in Italy in the early part of the 20th century, and ruled that country from 1922-1943. At that time, the Left generally adopted a policy using the word 'fascist' to refer to the Italian Fascists, the German National Socialists, the Spanish Falange, etc. Each of these political parties rode to power by taking over the government in a more or less revolutionary way, and proceeded to purge the government and wipe out all traces of political opposition within their respective countries.

Now, here's where the problems start.

First, a lot of people died fighting these swine (or were simply exterminated by them), and it is an insult to the memory of those dead millions when simpletons casually refer to anyone or anything they disagree with as 'fascist'. The next time you have an urge to do this, just imagine fifty million corpses stacked up in a big pile, and then ask yourself whether your opponent has done anything to warrant this degree of criticism.

Second, the casual use of this word can lead people on the left into the error of believing they're actually fighting -- fascists! Now, what were the distinguishing characteristics of the various fascist movements, politically speaking?

Well, the first thing you notice in fascist political thought, muddled and incoherent as it was, is a theory of corporations. That is, all of society should be organized into corporate bodies (labour, youth groups, religion, everything) which would eliminate social conflict and promote social harmony. This is, of course, total hocus-pocus, and the various fascist attempts to lower wages and destroy workers organizations, while largely successful, did not eliminate the restlessness of the working people in the factories, it merely acted as a very thin veneer.

This theory of corporations is where fascist theory comes closest to what advocates of IMF/World Bank/G8 corporate globalization are after. However, the fascist theory of corporations was just as much political as economic, and it was legitimated primarily by thinking of a corporation as merely a subset of the national 'corporation' (keep in mind that 'corpus' means 'body' in latin). That is, the smaller bodies make up the supreme body, which is the nation. The fascists, unlike our modern corporatists, always looked back to some idealized version of the past. They drew their support from a lower middle class that was looking for authority, which had been destroyed by 'progress'. The fascists generally, the Nazis most particularly, appealed to racist, xenophobic "blood and soil" mythologies as the basis for their rule - and our modern corporatists simply do not do this. Maybe a few of the Bible Belt religious nuts a la Pat Buchanan do, but it's not mainstream. Our own nationalisms in North America are a pale imitation of the fascist nationalisms, although they are still incredibly dangerous. Our 'corporatism' is primarily economic rather than political.

Structurally speaking, the fascist states were remarkably similar to each other in their employment of repressive techniques against the population. First, you take power in a fascist revolution. Then, you kick ass. Within six weeks of Hitler assuming power in Germany, the entire labour movement had been beheaded, its leaders jailed or shot, opposition papers gradually silenced, a secret police given control over internal security, and any expression of political opposition made virtually impossible.

Now, there have been some attempts in these directions on the part of various regimes in the G8 countries, but nowhere in the developed world are opposition movements forced completely underground, our leaders shot in dank cellars, our organizations forcibly destroyed without a single exception...and so I say, when you're up against fascism, you'll know it! It sounds romantic to talk of political opponents as if they are 'fascist', but this is simply stupid romanticism, cashing in on the martyrdom of Spain, as it were.

Another distinguishing characteristic of fascism, leader-worship, is evident in the news media, but not normally evident in the public pronouncements of politicians themselves, or in the functioning of our political system in and of itself.

Fascism has always relied on a populist base of mass support to bring it to power.

Fascists quite publicly held the view that truth is whatever serves the interests of power - that is, the will of Hitler was considered to be truth, and anything contradicting that will was falsehood.

Now, here's the actual situation in the developed world today.

For the most part, the people who bomb Afghanistan and attack Colombia, and commit all kinds of other crimes against humanity worldwide, are liberals. The people who bring us the FTAA are liberals - in Canada, they even call themselves that. Is this so difficult for people to understand? Why do you imagine that fascists have somehow taken over the government when it is obviously run by the same people who have been running it for the past hundred years? George Bush Sr. risked his life fighting fascism during the Second World War, as did Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Liberals are not fascists, and it is a mistake to think of them in that way.

Liberals don't need to take over the government since they already control it quite legally. The last thing George Bush or Jean Chretien would ever want would be a fascist revolution - it would upset the apple cart, and you'd get people like Pat Buchanan and maybe Stockwell Day moving into the residences of power and fouling the waters with their populist Christianity. No one serious in the government of our countries has time for these people, and the corporate leaders who control the money in Toronto and New York would oppose it because they are just as creeped out by this kind of small-town shit-headedness as you are. That's why we still have a national Progressive Conservative party in Canada - Joe Clark is acceptable to Bay Street, whereas the Alliance still smells like cow dung and cross-burnings even after all of their years in parliament. Big Business is quite content to run the country through the Liberal Party and stave off the Oakies from Alberta by keeping the far right from uniting.

Liberals believe in the rule of law, since they make it. They do not glorify the Leader, or the principle of authority. Liberals do not ride to power on a wave of populist discontent, they practise what we call 'elite accomodation': quiet, genteel horse-trading in the back room. In a fascist state, if you make the government angry enough, they'll go to a whole lot of trouble and shoot you. In a liberal democracy, if you make a lot of noise, you'll be asked to join the government so that you'll shut up. That's elite accomodation in action.

Liberals believe in the freedom of the press, suitably restricted to the reliable use of those who can afford to own the press, which allows the appearance of free debate without its substance. This means that they are open to attack when the freedom of the press is restricted, which the fascist press was not, because they would loudly proclaim that truth was power and power was truth. Also, it is doubtful that most people in the totalitarian societies actually believed that what was printed in the paper or heard on the radio was truthful; our modern corporatism, in contrast, has unprecedented political support precisely because people believe that they are witnessing a free and open debate.

Liberals believe in the other liberal freedoms, such as the freedom of association. The methods you use to radically oppose the abuses of a liberal government, obviously, are quite different than those you use against a fascist one, where open warfare as in Spain in 1936 is the only possible solution. Nonviolence, grassroots political organizing, the development of an independent press system, the formation of federations of opposition organizations, these are all impossible in a truly fascist situation, but eminently possible for us. Speaking of George Bush, Jean Chretien or Mike Harris as fascists is foolish and insulting, it simply clouds the political issues involved and makes it difficult to think of how to react to their actions with effective political responses. And you make yourself sound foolish with your overblown rhetoric. People on the street can see that the Ontario Conservative government is not fascist, even if you are not capable of noticing that fact.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)