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For readers who have invoke Godwin’s Law against me for my article http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2013/08/02/is-a-mandated-workfarehouse-the-tories-answer-to-the-bedroom-tax-court-case/ – here’s your answer.
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The just point here re ‘Godwin’s Law’ is that ‘Fascism’ is a term used too indiscriminately for its emotive impact. Historically it implies a particular ideology, repellent, but vigorous and fanatical – xenophobically based on ‘all history is the struggle of the races’. And even beyond that, based on the occult quest for the Ubermensch, the Nietzschean Superman.
Whereas the ideological engine here has more to do with the Ancien Regime of the US Corporatist oil-economy and its ever-more desperate attempts to maintain US hegemony by any means possible. Establishment politicians here in the UK are of course the star-struck and willing drones of the Paul Ryans and Rand Pauls of this world, and their big-money backers.
There is undoubtedly creeping totalitarianism, but US-style corporate totalitarianism has traditionally kept fascism at arm’s length, because of its populist character and ability to throw up the odd ‘dangerous’ charismatic demagogue of the Jorg Haider type. I can imagine that the OPPOSITION to this US corporate decadence might well be a fortress-Europe movement with someone Haiderish in charge and someone like Guillaume Faye writing the movement’s equivalent of Mein Kampf.
That would be a Fascist movement. But what we have at present is to my mind more like Dickensian Gradgrindism or Czarism brought forward into a technocratic era. It has no vision, perverted or otherwise. It is purely and simply about hanging on to power in defiance of history. Which makes it very vulnerable to a fascist challenge – offer frightened and vulnerable people with a sense of grievance a vision and a common cause, however demented, and they’ll choose it over conventional tyranny any day.
So count me in with those who want to keep the term ‘Fascist’ in reserve. Faye’s Archaeofuturism and the like is something we may well still have to grapple with, and its motivations are a good deal more bizarre and satanic than those of merely powerful, greedy and frightened men compromising democracy in order to prop up their own wealth and status, which is what we have at the moment. People forget how sinister and weird Fascism actually was. They should read or re-read ‘The Morning of the Magicians’.
Have you missed the comments claiming that corporate totalitarianism IS Nazism? Populist and able to throw up a charismatic leader? Seems spot-on, to me! I think you’re wrong when you say there’s no vision behind what’s going on here; there is a plan. And bear in mind, we’re talking about the kind of regime that was running Germany in the 1930s/40s – not Fascism, which is slightly different as I understand it.
Reading the above – no wonder people are put off politics.Less verbal masturbation and more…………ACTION .
One thing may lead to another, and the conspiratorially-minded may say that these phases are all pre-planned by the Illuminati or whoever. But I don’t buy it. I think there are various factions, working both with and against each other as expediency dictates, all more-or-less authoritarian, but only some specifically ‘Fascist’. Others may hanker for a more traditional aristocratic absolutism, yet others for who knows what else. None of this is any comfort to the ordinary citizen, of course, except the thought that rival titanic egos may frustrate each others’ intentions. Corporate totalitarianism in Hitler’s day meant NATIONAL corporations with strong patriotic links – the history of Fascism in the intervening decades [by contrast] has emphasised its opposition to globalised capital and you can see how a pan-European Fascism might seek to oppose the twilight of US Imperialism with a different frightful regime of its own….but the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the philosophy of Hoerbiger remain different things, even if equally unappealing to sane minds.
Nobody mentioned the Illuminati or any other mythical conspiracy. The Conservatives had plenty of time in opposition to work out what they would do in power – especially if that window of opportunity was only open for a short period of time.
You mention national corporations in Hitler’s day – how does that compare with the international corporations with their claws in government now?
It was me who mentioned the Illuminati! Sorry about that. Obviously all the factions in the Western World’s power structures are up to their necks in corporate globalism these days, and the more EuroFascist contingent presumably formed the Bilderberger group to get in on the game and launder their image in the process. Anti-Globalist rhetoric may go down well with local Fascist foot-soldiers here or there when you need to lead them on a bit. The big question for me is whether what I see as the two new-money contingents [Ayn Rand-worshipping Neo-Liberals and corporate Euro-Fascists] are really ‘taking over’ or whether the old Plutocrats are sitting back watching the pratfalls and generally enjoying the show. If everything suddenly goes Keynesian, we get a few corporate leaders tried and convicted to appease public fury, and people like Krugman and Stiglitz are suddenly running the Fed and the World Bank I think we may conclude that the Old Money won out. If not, then something else will be happening…..
You’re an estimable political commentator and I did not launch into my comments in order to contradict you to any significant degree. I do however find that many with left-leaning views may tend to over-simplify the politics of the right, and also to under-estimate all the under-currents, cross-currents, fuming sulphurous pits of mutual loathing, and remarkably dissimilar ultimate agendas concealed under a veneer of establishment solidarity. Some recognisably ‘fascist’, some really better described as something else – like ‘Ayn Randism’ as practiced by very rich crackheads who have managed to persuade themselves that they are bona fide members of some ultimate high-tech aristocracy. These are all revolting political philosophies, but we are perhaps short of snappy words to describe them all?
Very interesting point. I think you may be right that it is too easy for left-wingers like myself to lump all right-wing thinking together, and it occurs that the main reason for this might be that they all seem to harm people with less money.
Yes, the effect is pretty much the same….but I hope we’ll continue to have your sane yet passionate commentary [rare and valuable combination] to rely on in chronicling the iniquities of our GOP clones and drones. If the last three years has at least revealed one thing it is to expose that the cabinet-level Liberals are all of the Rancid Manchester Orange variety. Poor old Liberal Left, must have wondered what happened to the party they thought they belonged to. My mother was old-left Liberal, if she could have lived to see the current unabashed revival of Victorian new-money capitalist liberalism at its most barbaric she would have been speechless with incredulous fury. Her generation laboured mightily to deliver us from the dark ages never dreaming that within fifty years there would be a great army of throwbacks in such a desperate hurry to take us straight back there.
The trouble with the Liberals is that nobody wants to read articles about them. I tried a few times last year and nobody wanted to read them.
I find that unsurprising. After all, it’s the Lib Dem rank and file who’ve blown it by simply rubber-stamping what their cabinet are doing. Even to discuss their toxicity would seem to be a non-starter.But then the Lib-Dems are not the old Liberal Party. I really boggled at the time at how David Owen had no sooner led the SDP to political Armageddon than the Liberals were falling over themselves to turn themselves into SDP Mark 2…but to return to the main point I started out by circuitously trying to make, I think it may be worth those of moderate-to-left views pondering the fact more often that the Establishment is ONLY united in its general desire to rob the poor, and, these days, even most of the respectable middle-class. [Probably their biggest mistake].
In sum I think the overwhelming likelihood that in private they are viciously and psychotically disunited should provide more cause for hope more often – there is not much scope for common cause when the only spurs are monumental greed and the expedient and conditional alliance of titanic screaming egos, many of them further warped by habitual indulgence in expensive designer drugs. The whole GOP thing is colossally irrational, in other words, in ways which would have made the likes of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Stalin, Beria and their like scratch their heads in stupefaction at how the whole show was even still on the road. And of course there is nothing so terrifying to a GOP as a plummeting share-price.
Identifying and studying the fault-lines in these ‘coalitions’ seems to me to be politically profitable in order both to predict better and to spot points where political pressure might rationally be applied to achieve some kind of return to sanity. So far we have no militarily-disciplined, cold, sane, and sober mass-movement capable of embedding a fascist revolution in communities everywhere. The conclusion high-up is probably that we’re all too far gone to seed for that, for one reason or another – drink, drugs, age and infirmity, decadent ingrained habits of mutual tolerance [!] – but that makes this establishment vulnerable, because there is only so much you can do with riot-police and repressive laws if people are wise to you and don’t make themselves into unduly easy targets no matter how many provocateurs you employ….
I do agree with your first comment that ‘there is a plan’ but a plan is not a vision. The psychotic World-War-Z visions being touted by the more Fascist Apocalyptics do not seem to be capturing the public imagination at all, and the mere fact that Obama is now muttering audibly about using presidential executive orders to facilitate neo-Keynesian policies suggests to me that some very high-up people – proverbial Rothschilds, Rockefellers, whoever they are – may now be backing him to do so against the GOP die-hards. He is not a person given to reckless political gestures. There seems to be War in Heaven, and it also seems at present as though our Coalition GOP glove-puppets will be ending up hung out to dry on the wrong side of the argument – but then flushing them out and then exposing them to ridicule may all have been part of somebody’s game-plan. All part of the ins and outs of the sulphurous internal politics of Bilderberger and the G8 and so on.
Of course there will be some unsavoury big-business interests looking to come out on top – obviously the corporations can exploit any highly-centralised political system – but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I don’t think voices like yours or mine are quite as far out in the wilderness these days as some governmental personages would like us to imagine. It’s them who are now being put on the back-foot, not just by the likes of us, but probably by big cheeses who used to encourage them in their rapacious neo-liberal ways. Despite all the mayhem and misery still being inflicted, might it be not unreasonable now to take a bracing Sunday walk along the top of Radnor Forest and dare to dream of a sunlit upland or two? Say hello to Water-Break-Its-Neck for me if you do……
Great talking to you, Mike, keep the broadsides coming!
Reblogged this on kickingthecat.