[Peace-discuss] Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Chris Hedges has apparently gone off his meds entirely, but if we can get him 
to breathe into the paper bag for a while, he has some important things to say. 
   The best come from Cynthia McKinney, plus his own observation that "Our 
educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique
activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their 
jobs." And of course his predicted outcomes are not out of the question. --CGE]


	Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’
	Posted on Mar 29, 2010
	By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war 
from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the 
snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and 
be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich 
and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before 
thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen 
this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other 
tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, 
charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and 
despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for 
president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. 
Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those 
who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound 
personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think 
offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their 
nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a 
jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to 
an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think 
that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to 
eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall 
Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 
2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this 
year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is 
clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And 
the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and 
recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our 
anemic democracy die.

The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war 
was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse 
of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger 
and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient 
scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in 
motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and 
self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet 
Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and 
the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the 
Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they 
are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, 
the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans 
believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street 
Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the 
government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we 
do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through 
a terrifying right-wing backlash.

“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The 
old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in 
this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child 
of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are 
labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not 
afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The 
Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White 
House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it 
came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am 
willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully 
constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”

We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, 
from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand 
for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the 
working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the 
college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the 
financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in 
self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political 
correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of 
racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a 
black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows of 
legislators’ offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a 
revolt against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame 
lies with us. We created the monster.

When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of 
Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” there are desperate 
people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the 
pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are 
messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” 
at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the 
mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We 
made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the 
violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly 
call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly 
advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who 
has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for 
fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it 
is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor 
back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the 
nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American 
society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred 
for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for 
Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely 
white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. 
The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic 
institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our 
continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and 
stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us 
swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/is_america_yearning_for_fascism_20100329/




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