[Peace-discuss] The fascist threat

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Fascist Threat

“Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, we are now confronted by well- 
funded conservative evangelicals promoting a sinister vision of  
America as a corporate autocracy, with Dominionists as Gauleiters of a  
totalitarian state religion.”

So Lawrence Swaim, Executive Director of the Interfaith Freedom  
Foundation wrote on [CounterPunch.org] last week. Swaim concluded with  
a familiar quote: “This recalls the prescient words of novelist  
Sinclair Lewis: ‘When fascism comes to America,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘it  
will come wrapped in the flag, and carrying a cross.’”

Not in my opinion.  As a rule, the field of battle between secularism  
and our Christian  ultras ends up stained with the blood of the  
latter, as Satan counter-attacks. Just glance at the the career of the  
original Know-Nothings or the history of prohibition. Indeed, looking  
across the American landscape, I’d say the Dark One has scant cause  
for lament amid  quavering pieces about the Dominionist threat which  
so delight  fundraisers for nonprofits touting the menace of Christian  
evangelism. Back in the god-sodden Fifties who could presage that a  
half century later tots could go online to view fornication in every  
guise and combination.

In my view fascism mostly crosses the threshold these days wrapped in  
Green clothing, with a thousand  summary edicts, which people gloomily  
strain to read by the pallid glimmer of the new, mercury-filled light  
bulbs promoted by greens, the General Electric Corp., and signed into  
law by George Bush Jr. whose own timid  effort to promote the fusion  
of church and state – allowing religious  non-profits to run some  
government programs — didn’t fare too well.

The main purpose of invoking the fascist threat is to scare people  
into voting Democrat, as Frank Bardacke has often remarked to me. In  
1964 it was the Goldwater threat, in 2011 – for now – the Perry  
threat.  Obama will save us from fascism.  Alas, fascism is currently  
wrapped in the decorous clothing of this self-same former  
constitutional professor.

Back on September 13, 2001, I wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that  
“The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in  
identifying the actual assailant. The targets abroad will be all the  
usual suspects — the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, who started off as  
creatures of U.S. intelligence. The target at home will be the Bill of  
Rights.”

It was maybe an hour after the north tower of the World Trade Center  
collapsed that I heard the first of a thousand pundits that day saying  
that  America might soon have to sacrifice “some of those freedoms  we  
have taken for granted.” They said this with grave relish, as though  
the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution  
–  was somehow responsible for the onslaught, and should join the  
rubble of  the towers, carted off to New Jersey and exported to China  
for recycling into abutments for the Three  Gorges Dam, with a special  
packet of “nano-thermite” (aka paint dust) reserved for Paul Craig  
Roberts to sprinkle on his porridge.

Of course it didn’t take 9/11 to give the Bill of Rights  a battering.  
It  is always under duress and erosion. Where there’s emergency,  
there’s opportunity for the enemies of freedom. The Patriot Act,  
passed in October 2001  (the bits that Bill Clinton’s DOJ forgot to  
put into the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) and  
periodically renewed in most of its essentials in the Bush and Obama  
years,  kicked new holes in  at least six of our Bill of Rights  
protections.

The government can search and seize citizens’ papers and  effects  
without probable cause, spy on their electronic communications,   and  
has, amid ongoing court battles on the issue,  eavesdropped on their  
conversations without a warrant.

Goodbye to the right to a speedy public trial with assistance of  
counsel. Welcome  indefinite incarceration without charges, denial of   
the assistance of legal counsel  and  of the right to confront  
witnesses or even have  a trial. Until beaten back by the courts, the  
Patriot Act gave a sound whack at the 1st Amendment, too, since the  
government could now prosecute librarians or keepers of any records if  
they told anyone the government had subpoenaed information related to  
a terror investigation.

Let’s not forget that a suspect may be in no position to do any  
confronting or waiting for trial  since American citizens  deemed a  
threat to their country can be extrajudicially and summarily executed  
by order of the president, with the reasons for the order  shielded  
from the light of day as “state secrets”.  That takes us back to the  
bills of attainder the Framers expressly banned in Article One of the  
U.S. Constitution, about as far from the Bill of Rights as you can get.

There’s a difference between fascism and a efficiently functioning  
modern police state. America well into to the latter, instrumented by  
laws shoved through on a federal bipartisan basis and through state  
legislatures. Check out the DUI laws and penalties, state by state. A  
friend here in California was just telling me about a friend up on his  
second DUI, among whose penalties for his offense has been 45 days  
house arrest, with a camera installed to observe every move. No  
visitors allowed. He can go out for two hours a day to do his  
shopping.  The supervising officer in semi-SWAT rig enters his house  
without knocking or permission at any time. Let’s not even talk about  
the treatment of sex offenders.

[From <http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/16/is-fascism-coming-to-america-and-if-so-dressed-as-what/ 
 >]


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