A thoughtful take on fascism

My friend Joel Swadesh writes in about the "Rush, Newspeak and fascism" series:

Part 1. It strikes me that Eco is talking largely about modern tactics of reactionary brainwashing. Reaction implies discrediting the present (rejection of modernism) and worship of a mythic past (cult of tradition). Brainwashing implies getting people to let go of reason (irrationalism, action for action's sake, fear of difference) and law ("rotten" parliaments). And, having stripped people of everything that makes life good-- progress, reason, law, democracy-- they must be occupied with something to distract them (endless war and hatred). The effect is to replace the ego with the state, such that the individual has no life except through the actions of the nation. What differentiates fascism from, say, the Cultural Revolution, is the use of the mythic past, entirely understandable since fascism is reactionary while Marxism is modernist.

Part 3. Griffin identifies the ethnicism as a key element of fascism. Certainly the Aryan myth was central to Nazi Germany. But as a corollary, one would conclude that pluralistic societies are incapable of fascism while ethnically homogeneous societies are exceptionally prone. While I think it's clear that pluralistic societies have a measure of resistance to fascism that homogeneous societies do not, that's more a matter of distribution of power. If one ethnic group feels that it is being made a scapegoat, it can strike back, and in particular by enlisting other ethnic groups that may feel threatened. Japan, one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world, has intense ethnic fissures, in large part because people want it to be so. People divide themselves according to province or dialect or even as "sweet" and "sour" people.

I would disagree that there is any substantive difference between the antimodernism of Islamists and that of, say, German fascism. They both need modernism to produce weapons and disseminate propaganda. In those areas, they both admire modernism. Outside of those areas, both are equally anti-modernist. It is notable, I think, that the Nazi regime did not arm and equip women to fight in the final days. Their propaganda had worked too well, and they failed to realize that healthy women could be better soldiers than elderly men and young boys.

Also, in this piece, the question occurs as to whether the Patriot movement represents a creation from bottom up or from top down. I think arguments can be made on both sides. The farm crisis, the declining relative status of men (especially white men) and the stagnation of American living standards has created discontent which has spawned extremism. But, on the other hand, would that discontent have reached the level of organization it has without help from very high places?

Part 4. This segment also identifies ultranationalism as a core element of the Patriot form of proto-fascism. I agree that this is critical. What is lacking for the transformation to full fascism, as you quote Pitcavage, is the melding of individual (groupuscular) fasces into a whole. This can only be accomplished by a large scale organization such a government, perhaps through a charismatic leader-- or perhaps through an uncharismatic leader with a relentless media machine and very good PR.

Part 5. I can't agree that the Bushes are certainly not underwriting the far right. While these matters are unprovable, I think it's likely they simply use deniable methods. But George W's participation in neo-confederate organizations, and GHW's participation with the Unification Church seem to go beyond simple opportunism. These suggest to me personal commitments to extremism. I would say, don't be too quick to write off GW as a fascist.

Part 6. This distinction between the corporatist and fascist wings of the movement is strained. Hitler rose to power because most industrialists saw his rise as advantageous. But this was not pure opportunism. Clearly many of them believed part or all of Nazi ideology.

Part 7. Straws that stir the pot or employees? I have a sense that the people who you call transmitters are either actual employees of someone else or are using the movement as a means of career advancement in a society that has started choose who to promote through ideological tests (for example, the attempts of DeLay and Armey to purge Democrats from lobbying and trade groups; for example, the rise of "Christian" businesses that decline to hire people who do not share the conservative, fundamentalist faith in Money). I call Limbaugh an employee, because it's clear that much of his advertising comes from sponsors who are not making economically rational decisions to advertise on his show.

Parts 8 and 9. Here this issue of who is a transmitter and who is part of the decision-making elite becomes clear. James Dobson is not simply someone who acts passively. He is a part of top Republican leadership and an exponent of Reconstructionist views (I regard Reconstruction as a fascist movement; Christian dogma about destroying the individual to reform him around Christ can be used in a totalitarian fashion). The fact that you list so many congressmen and top theocrats -- even Rupert Murdoch's cable network -- as transmitters calls the question: Who is in charge, if not these powerful people?

Part 11. The receivers -- this is the critical part. There are always nuts, and always people who want to seize power. But only rarely are nuts granted power. Certainly it is almost unheard of for a nation that is not in crisis, that is well-educated and nominally democratic, to make a transition from democracy to fascism. The closest example I can think of is Japan, but its democratic traditions were shallow. So, we have to recognize that among the causes of the rise of fascism in the United States, we must include a widespread illness of the body politic that makes it susceptible.

I think the psychological analysis starts to reach an understanding of the phenomenon of fascism, although I will quibble with the terminology. People who join extremist movements feel alienated, even though objectively they may not seem so. They no longer identify with the broader society, even though they may be right at the center of their community. This is what I think is meant by a "lack of integrative ethic" and a sense of a "broken covenant". Feeling isolated (even if one is not) is what sets in motion coping strategies, which you quote Anthony and Robbins as calling "splitting" and "projective". In effect, because the individual feels bad, he creates a locus onto which to displace his sense of badness. But the source of the feeling of badness is the sense of alienation.

And here is where the sickness in the body politic is. These people are allowed to gain power partly through laziness, partly through lack of self-confidence, partly through ignorance -- but partly because so many Americans feel like failures. We have talked about The People of the Lie and the malignant narcissism hypothesis behind right-wingism [a previous dialogue we engaged in at Salon's Table Talk]. I think there's an important insight there.

In summary, I think it would be wiser to forget about politics (temporarily) and split the discussion of fascism along the following lines:

1) The personality disorders, particularly disorders of the ego, at the heart of political extremism.
2) The role of war, financial depressions, forced relocation and other upheavals in exacerbating personality disorders.
3) Coping strategies for crisis. I think specifically of St. Paul's separation of the sinful body and the purity of Christ sown in the heart and the Christian subordination of the ego to the body of Christ as coping strategies that are easily subverted toward wrongful ends,
4) Tactics of modern totalitarian and cult movements; the subversion of individuality, the abandonment of reason, the enlistment of the individual in a great cause such as war.
5) The critical role of the powerful in transforming protofascism into state fascism.
6) Opportunistic issues such as ethnicism, religious extremism and ultranationalism.

Ultimately, I think that what differentiates fascism from other forms of totalitarianism is extremely simple. Of all the kinds of totalitarianism, only a few are reactionary (theocracy and fascism being the main forms). Of the few forms of reactionary totalitarianism, fascism relies on corporate power to effect the transformation.

Much of the dispute about fascism strikes me as actually argumentation about the means by which power is seized, and means tend to be opportunistic or incidental. Communists are not generally in control of corporations before the revolution, so they use other means. But as I commented to an employee who had escaped from post-Tienanmen China, "You have communists in charge, and they are very bad. But in this country, we have communists in charge too. We call them capitalists." In other words, ideology is like clothes. Underneath, totalitarianism is pretty much the same.

And, as for the Bushes, it's premature to write them off as mere corporatists. I think that, as Ronald Reagan said, "You ain't seen nothing yet".

Well, I really am an optimist underneath it all, Joel. But the facade is wearing pretty damned thin these days. Lately, I'm with Digby, for whom the war has been an extremely enervating event. Killing cuts the heart out of me.

The ordinary antiwar left

Richard Einhorn writes in regarding the "Rush" series postscript:

"The confusion [by the left of Fascism with the establishment] is alive and well today with peace marchers who blithely identify Bush with Hitler and compare Republicans to Nazis. The purpose of these analogies is to shame conservatives, but they instead only give their accusers the appearance of shrill harpies willing to abuse the memory of the Holocaust for cheap political theater."

I couldn't agree more. However, and this must be stressed, among peace marchers today, they represent a minuscule fraction of the crowd and their voice has no importance.

I have participated in three rallies so far, including the one this weekend in New York. I cringe when I see signs comparing Bush to Hitler as they are so clearly wrongheaded and counterproductive. I do not like going to them but it is too important to miss. It is the only way that those of us who oppose Bush get a sense of how large our numbers are.

I think that it is important to note that most of us know full well that Bush is not Hitler redux. Rather, we recognize with ever growing concern that Bush has mainstreamed the plans and rhetoric of right wing extremists who, if not fascist, certainly have overlaps in ideology and tactics.

Would that only "nice" and "educated" marchers would come to such large gatherings. But they are a minority. Ordinary Americans who despise Bush's policies and his values are the people that have made these marches so huge.

A point certainly worth making.

Blog sighting

Welcome to the blogosphere, my old friend John McKay, whose blog is named archie. It's about "politics, fringe watching, and other stuff."

You may recall John's name from the top-notch letters he's sent previously (here and here). And he opens with a terrific post:

I hope we all had a chance to look around last Wednesday and etch the world, as it existed then, into our collective memory. There is a very good chance that Wednesday was the last day of the world we grew up in. For the last week or so I have had a quote banging around in my head. As the British Parliment votes to go to war in 1914, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, is supposed to have commented to a friend, "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." I know how he felt.

The War on Dissent: The leadership front

I often thought that the cause of so much of the viciousness of the attacks on Bill Clinton during his presidency was not merely the desire to bring him down, but to make an example out of him, a la Ann Coulter. The larger purpose being to intimidate not merely the president but anyone who happened to be on his side.

Well, Clinton isn’t such a convenient target anymore. So naturally the guns have been turning toward whoever happens to be in what vestiges remain of the Democratic leadership -- particularly Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Spinsanity has already done a marvelous job of compiling much of the preceding attacks on Daschle, particularly Rush Limbaugh's bizarre rant equating Daschle with Satan.

Now the attacks are growing even more vicious, especially as dissent about Bush's war in Iraq simmers along. And once again, Daschle is only being used as an example of what happens to war dissenters.

First, Daschle said what needed to be said about Bush's dirty little war:

"I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country."

Then came the Republican onslaught. Uggabugga has done a nice job of compiling the nastiness of these attacks, including Marc "Irony Impaired" Racicot, who called it "divisive and brazen political posturing."

More than a few people have already pointed out that Daschle, at least, is a combat veteran who was decorated for his service. Most of his critics had "other priorities" when it came time to serve.

But even more significant is a point made recently by E.J. Dionne in his Washington Post column, A Double Standard on Dissent. Dionne points out that Republicans eager to silence Daschle's reasonable points about Bush's diplomatic failures applied a different standard when President Clinton launched his 1999 air campaign in Kosovo:

"I don't think we should be bombing in the Balkans," said Rep. Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican. "I don't think NATO should be destroyed because we changed its mission to a humanitarian one." His colleague Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Calif.) accused Clinton of pursuing "the most inept foreign policy in the history of the United States."

For what it's worth, at the time, I criticized both parties for overly personalizing the Kosovo debate around Clinton. But the fact is that DeLay, Cunningham and the other critics were, like Daschle, simply exercising their right -- as Americans and as members of Congress -- to differ with the commander in chief.

Defenders of Daschle have focused on the Kosovo debate, but almost all of Clinton's military decisions came under withering Republican criticism. That's especially true of those he took in the middle of his sex scandal. Note, for example, this Republican reaction to Clinton's missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

"I just hope and pray that the decision that was made was made on the basis of sound judgment and made for the right reasons, and not made because it was necessary to save the president's job," said Dan Coats, then a senator from Indiana and now President Bush's ambassador to Germany. "Why now? Bin Laden has been known to be a terrorist for a long time. Why did this happen?"

This is an important point, because this hypocrisy demonstrates with crystal clarity just how the Republicans' manipulation of the "patriotism" issue for their own convenience has been detrimental to the American public as a whole.

For more on this, turn to The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon. Benjamin and Simon are former counterterror officials with the National Security Council, incredibly well-informed insiders who lay out in very clear terms the road leading to the events of Sept. 11.

According to them, the turning point when al-Qaeda became America's greatest enemy was not on Sept. 11, 2001, but rather on Aug. 20, 1998 -- the day President Clinton launched missile strikes against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and the Sudan, the latter being a pharmaceutical plant at al-Shifa that was being used to develop chemical weapons. First, there's this, on pp. 260-261:

For a brief moment, the operation appeared to be a qualified success. Al-Shifa was destroyed. Six terrorist camps were hit and about sixty people were killed, many of them Pakistani militants training for action in Kashmir. The Tomahawks missed bin Laden and the other senior al-Qaeda leaders by a couple of hours. This in itself was not a great surprise: no one involved has any illusions about the chances of hitting the target at exactly the right time. The White House recognized that the strike would not stop any attacks that were in the pipeline, but it might forestall the initiation of new operations as the organization's leaders went to ground.

The months that followed, however, were a nightmare. The press picked apart the administration's case for striking al-Shifa, and controversy erupted over whether Clinton was trying to "wag the dog," that is, distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Washington Times -- the capital's unabashed right-wing newspaper, which consistently has the best sources in the intelligence world and the least compunction about leaking -- ran a story mentioning that bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." Bin Laden stopped using the satellite phone instantly. The al-Qaeda leader was not eager to court the fate of Djokar Dudayev, the Chechen insurgent leader who was killed by a Russian air defense suppression missile that homed in on its target using his satellite phone signal. When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling, the United States lost its best chance to find him.

Benjamin and Simon spend most of the next hundred pages or so detailing the very sound reasons for the al-Shifa strikes. For anyone serious about understanding how Sept. 11 happened, and the nature of the threat we now face, I strongly recommend reading the entirety of this book. But these passages are particularly important.

They return to the issue of the 'Wag the Dog' charges on pages 357-359:

In its coverage of al-Shifa, though, most of the media did embrace one gigantic inference: by attacking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, it was said, President Bill Clinton was attempting to "wag the dog," to distract the American public from a sex scandal just as war against Albania was used for the same purpose in the eponymous Robert De Niro-Dustin Hoffman move released eight months earlier. Clinton's grand-jury appearance regarding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky occurred three days before the August 20 attack. That event and the universal conviction that life was imitating art swept all considerations of American security aside on the radio and network television and in the daily papers. Within forty-eight hours of the missile attacks, NBC News had broadcast clips from the movie six times, and every other network ran the footage repeatedly as well.

On CNN's Crossfire, the satirist Mark Russell led Pat Buchanan and Bill Press in singing:

If a woman gives you trouble or maybe two or three, and your explanations put the public in a fog, no problem, pick that red phone up, it's an emergency, and go to war. It's been done before. It's "Wag the Dog."

"Wag the Dog." "Wag the Dog." Go to war, it's been done before, it's "Wag the Dog."

Well, no one will complain with a Hitler like Hussein, and everyone will understand your war. An Afghanistan distraction from your problems and your pain, namely, Monica and Paula and God knows how many more.

"Wag the Dog."

The bloodshed in East Africa had been eclipsed by a carnival.

That Clinton would be accused of trying to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal surprised no one in the policy loop. When the Principals met in the White House Situation Room to approve the operation, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said that the President was going to be criticized for trying to change the subject from the ongoing scandal. Others in the room were somewhat surprised that Cohen felt this needed to be spelled out, and no one commented on the remark. Later, when Clinton was briefed on the operation in the Cabinet Room, one adviser said that there were certain to be allegations that he was trying to distract the country. "If I have to take more criticism for this, I will," he replied.

Just how much Clinton ultimately had to take was incredible, not only because of the implicit disregard for the bloodshed in East Africa -- Exhibit A demonstrating that the United States was in a new game with new rules -- but also because of the absurdity of the idea that any President, and especially one with such a famously acute political sensibility, would actually think he could get away with wagging the dog. In Congress, however, some believed Clinton was brazen enough to try it. Senator Arlen Specter, the moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, declared, "The President was considering doing something presidential to try to focus attention away from -- his own personal problems." Senator Daniel Coats of Indiana was less restrained: accusing Mr. Clinton of "lies and deceit and manipulations and deceptions," Coats said that the President's record "raises into doubt everything he does and everything he says, and maybe even everything he doesn't do and doesn't say." Throughout this period and the remainder of the Clinton presidency, it is worth noting, no member of Congress ever called the national security adviser to discuss the rising problem of al-Qaeda. [Emphasis mine]

Of course, as Benjamin and Simon go on to explore further, the press particularly had a field day with the 'Wag the Dog' line. I was working on the news desk at MSNBC at the time and couldn't have counted the number of times I heard the phrase, not just on our cable outlet's natterfests but especially at Fox, with a healthy helping from CNN too. Meanwhile, of course, the Limbaugh and Free Republic brigades led the charge among the True Believers, along with (naturally) the Washington Times.

The most significant point about this is the way the nation's preoccupation with the president's sex life played a role in bringing about the events of Sept. 11. It seems evident that the extent to which Clinton's initiative against bin Laden was undercut both at home and abroad by the massive 'Wag the Dog' allegations helped persuade al-Qaeda's leadership that America was vulnerable to a serious terrorist attack.

More to the point: At the very time when the press should have been raising public awareness of the terrorist threat, and educating the public on the broader implications of terrorism in an open society, it was instead spending night and day focused on blue dresses and blow jobs. No wonder we appeared to be such low-hanging fruit for al-Qaeda.

Of course, no one has yet conducted a serious examination of the role played by the media, and its preceding decade of crass irresponsibility, in bringing about 9/11. Given the press' recent record of failure in taking its job seriously, I'm not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, one wonders just how many of those same members of Congress who undercut Clinton's actions are faring when it comes to handling dissent from Bush's Iraq plans.

Just to take the two examples provided by Benjamin and Simon … from a recent Washington Post story, there's this snippet from Arlen Specter:

The president has enjoyed wide, though not exceptionally deep, support for his Iraq policy among most lawmakers and the American public. He has benefited, at least from a public relations perspective, from Congress's reluctance to renew House and Senate debates over the wisdom of going to war amid mounting international opposition.

"We think the president has the strongest hand" in international affairs "if we don't voice doubts," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

As for Dan Coats -- who was unceremoniously dumped from the Senate in 1998 -- he is now the American ambassador to Germany. His success in that role should be self-evident -- as is his position regarding dissent from Bush's war plans. [From a recent speech by Coats: "Unfortunately, on the issue of Iraq, we have recently experienced a breach in the German-American relationship. The strain as a result of the recent German election was damaging to our relationship, and no one should underestimate that damage, and its consequences. Just last week, during his visit to Berlin for meetings with German law enforcement officials, Congressman James Sensenbrenner noted that, 'The burden is on Germany to restore the trust lost as a result of the election campaign.' That sums up the current view in Washington pretty well."]

It might be similarly instructive to go down the list of all these Republicans busy bashing Daschle to see where they stood regarding the attacks on al-Shifa.

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: A Postscript

[Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.]

One of the great bylaws of the blogosphere is Godwin's Law:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

Of course, a good deal of Usenet etiquette has become the standard for debate in the blogosphere as well, and that is particularly the case with Godwin's Law.

As Patrick Nielsen Hayden has suggested, virtually the entirety of the RN&F series has been in gross violation of Godwin's Law. It's pretty hard not to mention Nazis and Hitler, at least by implication, when one's focus is a clearer understanding of fascism and how its essence remains alive in American society.

However, I haven't been posting out of ignorance so much as impatience with these kinds of protocols. As someone whose reportage on many occasions has been on the subject of very real neo-Nazis, the idea that I'd lose an argument just by writing factually about the undercurrents they represent is nonsensical.

For that matter, I've always viewed Godwin's Law as symptomatic of the larger problem I hoped to confront with this series: Namely, an almost frightened refusal by most Americans to come to grips with the meaning of fascism, and how that blind spot renders us vulnerable to it.

When I first began seriously studying fascism some years back, one of the first things that struck me was how little I -- or anyone I knew -- actually understood what it meant, in spite of the fact that it, alongside Communism, was one of the two major political phenomena of the 20th century, both of them radical anti-democratic movements that the American system was forced to confront and defeat.

Virtually every educated person I know (and many less-educated people as well) has a relatively clear and at least semi-informed understanding of what Communism is, what its origins are, what comprises its ideology. Moreover, wariness of Communist influence is a virtual byword of the American worldview.

In contrast, hardly anyone I know understands just what fascism is. At best, they vaguely comprehend it as a kind of heinous totalitarianism, identified specifically with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. There is a great deal of confusion about its ideological orientation, embodied in the now-common conservative canard that "Hitler was a socialist." Mostly it is just flung about -- mostly by leftists and thoughtless liberals, but in the past decade by conservatives too -- as a catch-all term for totalitarianism, or worse yet, as a substitute for "police state" (which is not the same as fascism).

Hardly anyone can identify any tenets of fascism; most of the time its manifestations are understood almost as extrinsic infestations of a virulent hatred and violence, brought on by such influences as propaganda and "brainwashing." As I discussed in Part 11, though, this model is faulty; what is now clear about totalitarianism of all stripes is that it arises when certain ideologies and movements interact with personalities configured by 'totalist' predispositions. That is to say, it cannot be imposed from without unless there is concession within; its audience is not a blank slate, but people who willingly join in.

In the case of fascism specifically, the lack of an ideological core or easily recognizable signifiers (beyond, of course, such images from fully developed fascism as goosestepping stormtroopers and mass rallies) is a large part of the reason it's so little understood. This amorphousness, as I discussed back in Part 2, also arises from the fact that although fascism only arose in the 20th century as a political force, it originates in political strains that have deep historic (perhaps even prehistoric) roots, and which very much continue to be with us.

And it is this fact -- that even though we think of fascism as a distant and unlikely threat, it sits at our elbows and dines at our tables even today -- which makes a realistic discussion of fascism such an uncomfortable thing. Some of the very threads that combine to make a fascist weave are part of the everyday fabric of our own lives. It's much easier to declare an argument over when the issue of fascism arises than to confront the possibility that it lives on, even in a democratic society that we have come fondly to think of as immune from such a disease.

At the same time, I actually rather approve of the sentiment that underlies Godwin's Law. In today's context, Nazism specifically and fascism generally are most often cited by partisans of both sides not with any reference to its actual content but merely as the essence of totalitarian evil itself. This is knee-jerk half-thought. Obviously, I don't agree that the mere reference to fascism, let alone a serious discussion of it, automatically renders a point moot. But a reflexive, ill-informed or inappropriate reference -- which describes the bulk of them -- should suffice to invalidate any argument.

Without question the worst offenders are those on the left. It began back in the 1960s, when antiwar radicals came to refer to anyone from the Establishment as "fascist," particularly if they were from the police. This bled over into the later view that identified fascism with a police state. The confusion is alive and well today with peace marchers who blithely identify Bush with Hitler and compare Republicans to Nazis. The purpose of these analogies is to shame conservatives, but they instead only give their accusers the appearance of shrill harpies willing to abuse the memory of the Holocaust for cheap political theater.

Most of all, such comparisons obscure the reality of what's taking place. The genuine proto-fascists -- namely, the anti-democratic extremists of the Patriot movement, and their thuggish cohorts among the 'Freeper' crowd -- are identified with mainstream conservatives instead of being distinguished from them. That in turn gives their coalescence a kind of cover instead of exposing it.

A strategically astute left would try to drive a wedge between the two factions by raising awareness of their growing intersection, particularly in the growing phenomenon of agitation against antiwar protests. Instead, we have a liberalism that thoughtlessly identifies the conservative movement of the early 21st century with mature fascism of the 1930s, thereby only revealing how little aware it is itself of the eternal and mutative nature of fascism, and how little it can recognize it in action today.

The mainstream left has been content to make jokes about the stupidity of militiamen instead of recognizing the actual threat they represent. There has been little recognition of the way the far right is able to insinuate its ideas and agendas into the mainstream; indeed, the left's dismissive attitude about right-wing extremists has only helped further their ability to penetrate broader society.

No doubt a large part of the reason for this is itself the degraded state of the word 'fascism,' applied willy-nilly to virtually anyone opposed to their agenda, in much the same way that the right has debased the idea of 'communism.' Fascism has become a black hole of a term instead of the red flag it should be. No one nowadays can recognize the genuine article when it sidles up alongside them.

Of course, liberals are hardly alone in abusing the term. It has become fashionable among conservatives over the past decade -- indeed, the Hitler/Nazi comparisons were particularly rampant in the identifiably proto-fascist elements of the far right during the 1990s, when they frequently compared Clinton to Hitler and government workers to Nazi stormtroopers. Likewise, the fascism comparisons have crept into mainstream conservative rhetoric -- particularly by the Rush Limbaugh and Freeper crowds -- as part of their attempt to paint liberal America as an oppressive police state.

As I observed at the outset, this kind of misuse of the term is decidedly in the mold of Newspeak, since it flatly contradicts the basic nature of its core meaning -- that is, while fascism is properly understood as essentially anti-liberal, Limbaugh and his cohorts identify it with liberalism. If the word's meaning was degraded before, this misuse has simply leveled it into meaninglessness.

The combined effect of this left-right punch renders Americans' understanding of the realities of right-wing extremism nil at a critical time when it needs to be acute. The undying forces of fascism have been creeping back into power from the ground level up, and only a clear understanding of the phenomenon will enable us to recognize how this is happening.

So these essays were written in the hopes of resurrecting a proper understanding of fascism -- what it really is, how it operates, why it is in fact very much alive and with us today. Part of my purpose, of course, was to persuade liberals to drop the inappropriate references to fascism, mostly by coming to grips with its real nature and not its imagined one.

My deeper purpose, though, was to sound a call to arms for Americans of every stripe who believe in democracy, because ultimately those are the institutions that are most endangered by fascism. Until the strands of far-right extremism that have insinuated themselves into the fabric of mainstream conservatism are properly identified and exposed, they will continue to wrap themselves around it and through it until its corruption is complete. And when that befalls us, it will probably be too late to stop it.

________

I mentioned earlier that I plan to compile "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" into a PDF file that can be downloaded and read in a single piece. Before I do that, though, I'm planning to scribble out some supplementary posts that I hope will fill in some of the holes in what I intended to cover -- particularly the role of fundamentalism, as well as the nature of Newspeak itself. I'll be posting those sometime this week. Then I'll turn to making the entire essay more of a whole, which will entail some editing and redacting, as well as weaving in some of the related material from elsewhere on this blog. At that point, I'll zip it together, and readers should be able to access it all at once. Stay tuned!

Natural balance

This item is a bit old, but noteworthy anyway ...

Orcas feasting on seals -- which helps salmon

Scientists estimate that transient orcas in Hood Canal have eaten more than a third of the 1,500 harbor seals believed to have been living in the waterway when the whales arrived seven weeks ago. That means fewer seals will be feasting on summer chum and chinook salmon, which could turn out to aid the recovery of the threatened fish.

"They've made a significant predation impact on the harbor seal population in Hood Canal, no matter how you look at it," said Steve Jeffries, a marine mammal biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. "The take-home message is that the transient killer whale population is bad for the seal population but good for the salmon population, because seals eat salmon."

For anyone worried about the seals, Jeffries added, "The harbor seal population may have suffered, but we expect they will recover over time."

It's actually unusual for the transients to venture this far inside the Sound (the Hood Canal, incidentally, is not manmade by any means; it's just a long narrow finger of the Sound). But it brings up an important point.

Humans have been playing God with this ecosystem for a long time. For awhile, orcas were captured from these waters (this is where the killer-whale display industry originated, in fact), and fishermen used to shoot at them with impunity, believing them to be competitors for their salmon. Orcas are of course very smart and have long memories, and thus few of them ever venture far into the Sound anymore, which is where many of the old captures took place. This includes the transients, who are the only orcas that eat seals and sea lions (the resident orcas are exclusively fish eaters).

The result has been an unfortunate overpopulation of seals and sea lions (or pinnipeds), particularly at the mouths of streams where salmon runs are bottlenecked. For awhile in Seattle, fish and wildlife officials have been forced to resort to a relocation and intimidation program to keep sea lions from venturing up to the locks in my neighborhood and munching on salmon.

More than a few biologists have been concerned about the additional effect of pinniped predation on salmon runs. However, they are under the purview of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and there is little that can be done by humans to limit their population, short of hunting them again.

Seems that Mother Nature has a suggestion of her own.

The Truth Ministry

I've mentioned the Propaganda Remix Project before, which is run by an ex-Ranger and combat vet named Micah Wright. I'm something of an aficionado of old propaganda posters, and this work is first-rate. I went ahead and pre-ordered his book, too.

Fresh militia spoor

Here's an interesting mutation on the domestic-terrorism front, from the Contra Costa Times:

California militias revive their rhetoric

Extremist paramilitary or militia groups have re-emerged in California and other western states, calling themselves a last line of defense but acting like camouflage-wearing vigilantes.

While experts who track such groups said they see little solid evidence of a surge, they agreed that the timing for a resurgence seems ripe.

"It just absolutely fits. From a strategic point of view it makes perfect sense," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

Militias in rural states have gone largely unnoticed since their apocalyptic predictions of a millennium disaster proved ridiculous. Now, the militias claim that the federal government has agitated a world situation it cannot control and that armed Americans must prepare to defend themselves, said Cooper and others.

The problem with this story is that it concludes that the activity has spiked on pretty thin evidence. The experts he quotes all agree that there's been an increase in militia rhetoric but not necessarily in organizing activity. The reporter gets that information from a source that is dubious at best: a self-proclaimed militia leader:

David Martin, a contact for the Militia of Northern California, claimed its ranks have swelled of late as its members learned to operate in small cells that don't attract attention.

He said the armed groups, including "a pretty good and a pretty big one" in Contra Costa and other East Bay counties, stand ready for local governments and law enforcement to mobilize them in coming times of unrest.

One thing I learned over many years of dealing with Patriots and their kin: Don't take their word for anything. Their might well be amorphous cells organizing in the woods out there. Or they might be figments of Dave Martin's self-aggrandizing imagination. If you're going to report that they are being more active, some non-verbal evidence is required. In this case, attending a mere organizing meeting might suffice.

In any case, the thought of such action cells organizing quietly is certainly unsettling, and genuine cause for concern. Moreover, Martin could well be telling the truth. After all, it would be consistent with what we have seen so far elsewhere in the Southwest, with militia vigilantes taking border security into their own hands.

The problem with the northern California militias is that they may find the greatest threat to "national security" in their neck of the woods is not Al Qaeda, nor even border crossers, but rather the gathering storm of antiwar protesters in the Bay Area.

Dean and Dixie

Over at the Howard Dean blog, there's been a little discussion of the concern about Dean's use of the Confederate flag symbology that I raised earlier.

The otherwise amiable Aziz Poonawalla disputes my concern that Dean is signaling the wrong segment of rural society:

Personally, I have to disagree. I live in Texas and I see a lot of Confederate flags myself -- and I think that the perception of anyone who has a C flag on their truck is a closet racist (implied in Orcinus' argument) is blatant Yankee stereotyping. I despise the Confederate Flag and what it stands for but the truth is that it has become a social rallying point for conservatives, not because of racial overtones, but rather in response to the "liberal onslaught" of progressive ideology such as welfare, multilingual education, immigration, secularism, political correctness, affirmative action, etc. When you hear a Southerner speak fondly of Dixie and Southern Culture, they aren't talking about returning to the cotton plantations as massah and boy. They are literally too far removed from that era to really be tied to it.

It's true that many of these people will never vote for Dean anyway. But the point is not to try and appeal to those confederate flag wavin' pickup drivin' gun tootin' whoever they are -- it's to appeal to the moderate conservatives, the ordinary people, who may be attracted by Dean's message of affordable health care but still have closer cultural ties to the more "redneck" (to use the gross stereotype) types. You can't attract Southerners to your platform without demonstrating respect for their concerns -- and Dean's soundbite is (I believe) an honest recognition of this.

FWIW, I see a lot of Confederate flags up here in the Pacific Northwest too. And they are all too frequently a sign of extremist, if not outright racist, beliefs. When you come across them in Montana, they're often a sign of trouble. Not always, of course, but often enough to make one wary after awhile.

Let's put it this way: Back when it gathered at Hayden Lake, nearly every car in the parking lot at the annual Aryan Nations Congress sported one.

And then, of course, there was the case of the manslaughter in Ocean Shores sparked by a hate crime a couple of years ago in which the Confederate flag played a prominent role. (The lead actor in this case was knocking on the window of a convenience store, pointing at the Asian men inside, waving his Dixie flag at them, then running his finger under his throat. At this point one of the men stole a paring knife in shrink-wrap, which would prove the turning point in the case. Later the young white man blocked their exit by standing in front of their car and holding up the flag with both hands. This is what ultimately led to the fatal fight.)

Obviously I'm not going to assume that everyone who festoons their rig with a Dixie flag is a racist; and obviously the symbol will probably have broader meaning in the South. But there are going to be some strong cross-currents as well, which is to say that the flag is obviously claimed by some strong extremist elements in the South as well.

This is something that perhaps Southerners don't quite understand: Their symbol has gained quite a bit of currency outside the South as well, and not among ex-Southerners.

Remember that an extremist is not necessarily a racist. The Dixie flag, as it happens, has become a banner for a broad stripe of right-wing extremists. It also has gained some currency, as one poster suggests, with the hate-PC "Freeper" crowd, though I would argue that this only further indicates their own, vehemently denied but often transparent, inclinations regarding race.

Clearly many supporters of the Dixie flag are part of genuine Southern heritage groups which are explicitly non-racist. On the other hand, I think it's unquestionable that the leading political component of the battle over the Confederate flag, and the most pugnacious promoters of its use, are the leaders of the neo-Confederate movement, whose racist inclinations are largely beyond serious dispute.

Look, I made clear in the same post that I fully understood the thrust of the remark and moreover that I strongly agree with it. I'm just sending up a red flag. The way he is couching this meme strikes a wrong chord with me and many others. It doesn't mean my view of Dean as the clearly superior candidate in the Democratic field has changed an iota.

At least one other poster agrees with me:

Dump it, dump it, dump it. Not only do I find it personally offensive, but in a couple videos I've seen him stumble over the phrase. It's awkward and it makes him look unprofessional and uncomfortable. At the very least, please get him to skip the word "decals."

Another chimes in:

Yeah, decals is lame. go with 'stickers' at least. can anyone think of a better phrase to identify the demographic he means, though? Without using the words poor, redneck, NASCAR, or mullet?

How about just plain old pickup?

Which war are we fighting?

This is from UPI, whose reliability has become suspect of late, but the author is someone with credibility and a history of strong sourcing inside the intelligence community, so it is likely an important story:

Top White House anti-terror boss resigns

WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- The top National Security Council official in the war on terror resigned this week for what a NSC spokesman said were personal reasons, but intelligence sources say the move reflects concern that the looming war with Iraq is hurting the fight against terrorism.

Rand Beers would not comment for this article, but he and several sources close to him are emphatic that the resignation was not a protest against an invasion of Iraq. But the same sources, and other current and former intelligence officials, described a broad consensus in the anti-terrorism and intelligence community that an invasion of Iraq would divert critical resources from the war on terror.

Beers has served as the NSC's senior director for counter-terrorism only since August. The White House said Wednesday that he officially remains on the job and has yet to set a departure date.

"Hardly a surprise," said one former intelligence official. "We have sacrificed a war on terror for a war with Iraq. I don't blame Randy at all. This just reflects the widespread thought that the war on terror is being set aside for the war with Iraq at the expense of our military and intel resources and the relationships with our allies."

This makes both the diplomatic and the intelligence communities now officially up in arms over Bush's Iraq war. And who could blame them? The clearest, most present danger to Americans is Al Qaeda. A close second is North Korea. And we're devoting our resources to unseating Saddam Hussein and rebuilding Iraq?

From the Howard Dean homefront

On another subject, Thomas Stevens writes in from Vermont:

I read your piece, excerpted below, about Howard Dean, and I thought I'd chime in on a couple of pieces. I have lived in Vermont for ten years now, and up until January, Dean was the governor. As I type this, I remember an article by a columnist in Arkansas who told the "real" story behind Clinton before the campaign began in earnest -- how Clinton was not a liberal and not a "doer," but a maker of committees, whose reports would be buried, and so on.

As a candidate, Howard Dean is far more liberal than he was a governor. As a governor, in fact, he was truly a classic Vermont Republican (not unlike Jeffords), in that he was a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. Being a fiscal conservative is a necessity in our state -- our total population is approx.600,000, and at least 150,000 of those are kids 0-18.

You said:

"I've particularly admired both his outspokenness and the content of the things he's said. Lately, however, he has been saying things that have made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Not because I disagree with his basic thinking, but because he expressed it in a way that makes me think he doesn't know what he's talking about."

On the one hand, that is the most accurate statement I have read about Dean's style in a non-Vermont commentary.

Vermont is on its way to becoming a formerly agricultural state. It took until the 1990 census (I believe) for humans to outnumber cows here. The drop in ag is not his fault at all, but he did not fully support agrotourism, or cutting edge crops that could have benefited our culture as a whole (such as hemp). He showed his upbringing by urging relaxation of environmental protection laws in order to attract business at the expense of ag and the enviroment. He wasn't radical about it, and he didn't "end welfare as we know it," as Clinton did, but he frayed the edges and made it possible for a continued attack on a weakened law by the monied developers.

Health care: Instituted Dr. Dynasaur, a fine, Medicaid-based program to insure children, but closed the door on the single-payer system, which, if it is to work at all, would work in a small state like ours. The last study done identified over $100,000,000 in savings to the public if the single-payer were instituted here. As with every other state, the insurance lobby is too strong.

Education: Dean's hand was forced by the Vermont Supreme Court, which ruled that the pre-existing way of funding of education was unconstitutional. In trying to fashion a progressive way of equalizing education funding statewide, legislators were effectively ordered to rely on the property tax when Dean said he would not support using the income tax. Act 60, as it is called, has been a boon to the poorer communities in our state, not that you would know that if all you heard was the kicking and screaming by the richer, or, as we call them, "gold towns" (i.e., towns with a ski mountain or Burlington). The property tax solution is beginning to fall apart, and the fear is that the gold towns will use "reform" to continue to screw the poorer communities. The problem they have is that if the new plan doesn't meet strict criteria, the Supreme Court will rule against them. Finally, Dean has always been good on child-oriented bills.

Civil Unions: Again, Dean's hand was forced by the Court. He immediately ruled out "gay marriage" and left the legislature to come up with civil unions. In the end, it turned out fine, even if we had to put up with Randall Terry for six months. He did, however, sign the bill in a private session with no photos taken.

A lot of Dean's freshness comes from shooting from the hip. But he has been a DLC plus governor. As a candidate, he remained that way, and I envisioned him stripping the plus if he won a primary or two, and becoming another Dukakis, who lost his individuality after the nomination. Dean gives as good as he takes and he found a niche with the anti-war stance. As far as I can tell, it is honest, but what do I know, it wasn't an issue as governor. As for his e-mail treatment, I think it has more to do with the lack of campaign staff he had until recently. Perhaps now they are dismissed, but I imagine up until now they were overwhelmed.

Oh yeah, don't underestimate the whiteness of Vermont. NASCAR is big up here -- Golly, Ken Squier is from my town -- and we have plenty of crackers, but the battle is between natives and flatlanders. That doesn't excuse his use of the Confederate flag -- he's too smart to do that and should be called to task.

If you want more on him, try checking out Peter Freyne, the political columnist for Seven Days, a weekly out of Burlington.

As of today, Dean has my vote. The rest of them are pathetic, from Lieberman to Edwards. I may choose Kerry, but Dean has the rhetorical chops to cut them up. On style alone, I'll vote for him. Substance, well...

Demonizing the left

R. Scott Greacen chimes in with the environmentalist perspective:

Just for your background, I'm a 37-year-old third-year law student at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon, where I'm focusing especially on the public lands environmental issues in which I've been involved since I worked at Oregon Natural Resources Council for a couple of years at the height of the spotted owl imbroglio. Since 1990 or so, I've been involved in conservation issues, mostly but not exclusively having to do with forests or threatened/endangered species, in the Pacific Northwest, California, Arizona and New Mexico, and Montana. I've been reading your series in light of that experience, and especially as it relates to what I've come to see as the increasing marginalization of the environmental movement in the West over that period. Your discussion of transmitters and the relationship between the extreme and mainstream conservative positions has given me some powerful insights into anti-environmental efforts, but it has also helped me to to look at the environmental movement, and progressive political efforts generally, in new ways.

Part 12 is particularly important to me as it reflects on the horrible Flathead situtation, which for me stands as an extreme yet paradigmatic example of the circumstance of environmental advocates across the rural West. In brief, people who work for the protection of public resources, espousing positions well-supported by science and public opinion at large, are consistently marginalized in their communities. They are usually targeted by hate-mongers, not uncommonly subjected to verbal and even physical assault, and yet generally do not receive effective support even for their right to hold politically unpopular positions from leaders in business and politics.

Even on the political left, the fact that environmentalists are directly facing quasi-fascist activists and political techniques denounced as hate crimes in other political contexts has drawn relatively little attention from other activists who so often feel themselves to be the focus of far-right attacks. At a personal level, the links do get made between environmental activists and the folks working on what I think of as the various factions of identity politics, and even between environmental and labor activists in the right circumstances, but too seldom does the partnership get reflected at a strategic level or in the mutual support of state and regional groups. This is sad and very dangerous. One of the ways your work is important is that it can help to show people our common enemies and the necessity of cooperating to face and defeat them.

I had the opportunity to read an unpublicized focus-group study that was conducted in the Flathead Valley last spring or summer at the behest of environmentalists. The study showed two things which startled me, and which stand in stark constrast to each other. First, it showed that Stokes & Co.'s efforts in the Flathead (building, of course, on decades of work by the timber industry and their more-or-less-goonish allies in both labor and "Wise Use" and its offshoots) have been spectacularly successful in encouraging Flathead residents to vilify and despise environmentalists as fellow-citizens. Though I thought I knew how generally disliked activists have become in the rural West, the contemptuous bile was truly frightening to me; it reminded me more than anything of the vicious, just-under-the-surface racism which poisoned the southeastern Virginia towns and cities of my wasted youth.

But the second thing the study showed was that people in the Flathead still love all the things that environmentalists stand for, albeit not necessarily under the politicized labels which enviros fetishize to far too great a degree. That is, while people don¹t express much love for "wilderness," they're absolutely in love with wild country, roadless lands, and with wildlife. They value forests, mountains, and wild landscapes for their inherent value, as well as for habitat, clean water, and non-motorized recreation, just as much as they do for all the consumptive uses that rednecks are stereotyped for. Obviously, this disconnect presents important opportunities to reposition the environmental movement in the public mind.

Equally obviously, it raises disturbing questions about the ability of environmentalists to accomplish such a change given our new pariah status in the public mind. Which takes us back to the success of anti-environmental efforts.

Environmentalists used to be widely trusted as a source of information by the public. (Sorry I can't give a cite for this but I'm certain I've seen some decent survey data to that effect.) The ongoing demonization of environmental activists have done more to poison that perception, and consequently to dimish that singular truth-telling ability of the movement, than all the stupid things environmentalists have said and all the wise responses from our opponents over the last generation. It's essentially a slow-motion, relentless game of shoot the messenger.

Meanwhile, Democrats and lefties generally seem in important ways to be following exactly the opposite path of the comprehensive ideological offensive you've described on the right. Even though we may well have more latent support for our underlying positions in the population, our lack of strategic focus has left progressives constantly struggling to mobilize political support to address particular problems.

Over the last fifteen years of activism, I've been attempting, like many other activists, to straddle the two relatively radical strands of the environmental movement in the West. In thumbnail form, those two currents are:

(1) The locally and regionally-based "major reform" groups centered around fighting bad policy on the ground and and promoting substantially different policy initiatives (i.e., the Swan View Coalition, The Ecology Center, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and Wildlands Project, just for example) and

(2) The direct-action faction which wants mostly the same things but uses less mainstream techniques, ranging from demonstrations to civil disobiedience to full-tilt physical obstruction, to promote its views. This position was once dominated by Greenpeace and the Earth First! (dis)organizing meme, but now includes everything from established groups like the Buffalo Field Campaign and Cascadia Forest Alliance to the Seattle mobilization and the near-infinite local variations targeting specific forest abuses with blockades and tree-sits.

Without going too deeply into a very sticky subject, I think it's worth noting that Anthony and Robbins' observations about the psychological profile of radical groups is amply borne out in my experience. In fact, the most persistent quality of the people who gravitate to the direct-action faction and remain effective within that mileu over time is their ability to tolerate a high level of psychological dysfunction in their comrades while still maintaining the ability to "bridge" back to people in the mainstream.

As I look back, I'm struck by how effectively both strands have been, and remain, marginalized, and how that marginalization has even increased over time. What's this got to do with transmitters, the relationship between the layers of the far right in and out of power, and incipient fascism? Quite a bit, I'd suggest.

First, a wise friend of mine whose work I recommend to you (Jim Britell) once pointed out to me that effective environmental activists come in for such exceptionally virulent treatment from the political/industrial powers-that-be because in many cases (and especially following the near-dismantling of the industrial unions as checks on management power), we are the only effective opposition to their hegemony in rural areas. Thus, I think you're directly on target when you suggest that the manufacture of contempt in the Flathead valley might represent the experimental deployment of a model of political control which might be more broadly deployed in circumstances like those which seem now at hand.

Discussions of Alterman's What Liberal Media and your series have helped me to see that the political right continues in effect to "work" society as it has the press (as in "working the refs"), pushing so hard on key issues and themes that they succeed in shifting the center of political discourse in the direction of their preferred framing and solutions. People in politics for the usual mixed bag of ideological and power-seeking reasons generally adapt to this pressure by dropping the "hot" issues as much as possible, if only in order to free their time and energy to work on problems which don't attract such high negatives and vocal opposition. This can mean effective disconnects between political leadership and public desires on hot issues.

I see this in spades with environmental issues in the West. For example, recent polling data shows that even in rural areas, more than 60% of respondents in the Pacific Northwest favor protecting all remaining old growth forests. Similarly, even in Idaho, the state with the largest areas of roadless federal lands, substantial majorities of the state's residents supported the Roadless Rule. Needless to say, only the safest and most progressive Democrats will even approach those positions, and Republicans in Idaho are as absolutely opposed to the wholesale protection of roadless lands as they could possibly be. Meanwhile, the tendency of moderates in both parties to respond to far-right offensives on environmental issues with the kind of contemptuous neglect that failed to stop the Aryan Nations and company has had the same predictable result: nothing.

Demographic changes joined with far-right ideological offensives and timid Democratic response have largely stripped the West of its environmentally progressive political leadership over the last two decades. The tattered remnant is often bizarrely hostile to the efforts of the radical currents outlined above. Witness, for one example, Daniel Kemmis' efforts to cast zero-cut advocates in Montana as beyond the pale of civilized resource management discourse during disputes over salvage logging following the Bitterroot fires of 2001. (See his posting at Headwatersnews.org for example).

Confronting fascism

My old friend John McKay writes:

This weekend I had an opportunity to hear John D. Keliher, who is the Grand Chaplain of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of Washington. He was speaking on the topic of responding to professional haters (my term, not his). As someone who is familiar with conspiratorial literature and professional haters, you can imagine how hot this topic is among serious Masons. The conspiratorial community is divided as to whether the Masons are tools of the Jews (as stated in the first Protocol of the Elders of Zion) or vice versa.

In short form, his advice for confronting haters was: Don't; they thrive on attention, let them wither away in the darkness. He recounted the story of a brother who called him asking how best to respond to a professional hater who was making a well-supported presentation in his community. Keliher recommended not even attending the presentation. He continued: if you must attend the meeting, remain silent. If you must say something, don't confront him. If you must confront him, don't get personal. If you must get personal, keep my name out of it. Sadly, the brother ignored his advice at all levels.

Unfortunately, Freemasons have their own variety of fundamentalists who feel that all attacks must be vigorously combated, regardless of the tactical harm it does. This is the essence of our problem.

I think that the natural follow-up to your fascism series would be some thoughts on effective ways to combat this ugly trend in America. Too many liberals tend to conduct political discourse in the same old shrill and ineffective tones. In Seattle, the usual idiots rush out and block the freeways. Sometimes, this is useful to rally the faithful, but in the face of the current mean-spirited and triumphal conservatism, we can no longer afford such self-indulgent nonsense. As you have pointed out, ignoring the radical right is no longer a reasonable or safe response. But many are ignorant of effective ways to express their opposition.

When you began your series, anything resembling real fascism still seemed remote. Since then, Chris Matthews, Michael "Savage," and a slew of conservative bloggers have expressed themselves in the clearest brownshirt terms. Even in my most paranoid moments, I would never have believed our country could go so far to hell in so short a time.

I love America, and what I thought it stood for, too much to let it go this easily. John Keliher and millions of others feel the same. While many are ready to go into the streets for the usual theater, a larger number are not willing to. They need a means to express their feelings. The (I hesitate to use the phrase) silent majority must speak while they still can. We need a dialog on the best means to do this.

I think there's an obvious contradiction between my analysis and Keliher's, in that I obviously advocate standing up to the haters in our society and shining a spotlight on them. My own experience made very clear that simply ignoring them in the hope they'll wither on the vine is a good way to have your home overrun with vines.

On the other hand, I strongly agree with the thrust of his point, and it's one well worth exploring further.

The choice isn't merely between ignoring and responding; there are smart ways to respond, and there are dumb ways that make matters worse. James A. Aho, in his This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy, explores the way opposition to hate groups and assorted Patriot activities often contributes to extenuating the cycle of paranoia and violence that is their raison d'etre.

Hate groups are built around the demonization of some class or clan of people. Though the common caricature of most people drawn to such groups is of a loathsome scumball, in truth these people see themselves as heroic, which is hardly an uncommon thing in our society, as Aho puts it: "To use Becker's phraseology, human beings need to know themselves as heroes." The worldview of haters is such that the marginalization they receive at the hands of broader society is actually confirming evidence of the rightfulness of their beliefs.

Moreover, the whole enterprise of becoming heroic entails the naming of the Enemy:

The warrior needs an enemy. Without one there is nothing against which to fight, nothing from which to save the world, nothing to give his life meaning. What this means, of course, is that if an enemy is not ontologically present in the nature of things, one must be manufactured. The Nazi needs an international Jewish banker and conspiratorial Mason to serve his purposes of self-aggrandizement, and thus sets about creating one, at least subconsciously. By the same token, the radical Zionist locks himself in perverse symbiosis with his Palestinian "persecutors," the Communist with his "imperialistic capitalist running dogs," the capitalist with his Communist "subversives."

Aho goes on to explore the way that heroes and their enemies have a symbiotic relationship. Each needs the other. And after awhile, each comes to resemble the other. They are locked in a Manichean struggle of "us vs. them" that seems never to cease, unless the cycle itself is broken.

The classic case of this was the (now hopefully defunct) Jewish Defense League, which used to send a pack of howling banshees out to the Aryan Nations' annual July parade in Coeur d'Alene to scream epithets at them. Meanwhile, the locals simply organized a "celebration of diversity" on the same day elsewhere, and the townfolk always obliged by showing up there in droves, and otherwise simply shunning the AN.

The AN marchers loved seeing the JDL screamers (who of course saw themselves as heroic iconoclasts). Got their blood going. And they hated that no one else turned up to watch.

The KCHRTF approach's success was instructive, and indicates the solution suggested by Aho [though this was published in 1994, it obviously has great currency]:

The first step in breaking through the logic of enemies is to posit a now widely acknowledged fact: The world of radical dualism, of us and them, is in crisis, its splitting evident in a series of contradictions. There is the contradiction between military security and domestic (national) security, as exploding military expenditures to protect ourselves from "them" consume the wealth of our common household. There is the contradiction between the survivability of weapons systems -- "survivability," a term in technostrategic jargon referring only to weapons systems -- and the viability of the "collateral resources" (us), whose lives these systems were originally designed to protect. There is the contradiction between individual freedom and the legion of priests, therapists, and moral entrepreneurs (which is to say, us), poised and armed to correct, "heal," order, regiment -- in a word, "militarize" -- the bodily orifices of "them": their mouths, their anuses, their pores, and ears, and their endlessly "perverted" tastes, hungers, appetites, drippings and effusions.

...

Here, too, we grasp a sobering answer to the question of whether in our struggles against evil we can avoid becoming infected with it ourselves. If we believe what the ancient texts relate, this is simply impossible. We cannot engage in political fighting without tasting the bitter fruit from the tree of knowledge and losing our innocence. Max Weber once referred in his writings to the biblical warning that those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword (Matt. 26:52), commenting that "fighting is everywhere fighting." But there is a big difference between going into battle either clearly recognizing our family resemblance to the opponent or blindly denying it, rendering us automatically into the malleable tools of what Weber calls "the diabolic forces lurking in all violence."

Nor is consciousness of our own evil important in just a negative sense. A close reading of the hero myths reveals that the champions all acknowledge the futility of attacking the monster directly. Rather, they are advised by an elfin helper to employ wiliness, to sneak up on her as she sleeps or in some other way is distracted, searching for the chink in her armor. In other words, to defeat the serpent the hero must become serpentlike himself; slippery and mercurial. The proud refusal to do so would only render him the enemy's victim. This is consistent with the ancient Chinese military admonition that acknowledgement of one's own envy, vengefulness, lust, dishonesty and greed is the very precondition to victory. For without this wounding self-knowledge, one is defenseless against the enemy's traps and ploys. "Know the enemy and know yourself," says Sun Tzu, the fifth century B.C. military theorist, "and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril."

In a practical sense, I think breaking the cycle entails breaking out of the dehumanization process that occurs on both sides. This entails not only acknowledging but stressing the humanity of everyone involved, including the haters.

I try to explain to community groups like the Kalispell gathering I referenced earlier that standing up to hate does not require confrontation, and in fact is more effective when it eschews conflict for simple factual rebuttal and clear-eyed rationality. Counter hateful speech with non-hateful speech. Counter crazy theories and wild-eyed accusations with calm common sense. Recognize at all times that they have a right to speak, and try to respect it, even if they do not respect yours. At all costs, don't descend to their moral level. Contempt for your rights is the cornerstone of their actions and beliefs, and it's important not to reciprocate. At the same time, it's important to be persistent. Every opportunity at which they present themselves -- from letters to the editor to public meetings -- should be met with a response.

A different aspect of the same problem arises in journalistic coverage. Most often news reportage of extremist activity is handled by a local cops-and-courts reporter, or perhaps a political features writer, who has little or no background on the nature of some of the groups they're called on to report about. So you'll get stories about either crimes or organized events by right-wing extremists that present their claims without the benefit of any kind of context explaining to readers the agenda behind the claims. Worst of all are those stories which try to "balance" them out by presenting, as the "left wing" counter to right-wing extremists, such identifiably mainstream organizations as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL -- as though the truth were somewhere in between.

This kind of shallow journalism indeed worsens the problem, since it in fact gives the right-wingers precisely the kind of coverage they love. Unfortunately, it comprised the bulk of most reportage about the Patriot/militia movement in the 1990s.

What they hate is informed, in-depth coverage that exposes their agendas and the logic (such as it is) behind their cockamamie theories and recruiting strategies. They hate having their longtime connections to radical ideologies exposed. Most of all, they hate journalism that not only takes a skeptical approach to their agenda and their ideas, but gives it any kind of serious critical examination.

They hate having the light turned on. It makes them scatter.

In a larger sense, that's the approach that has to be taken now, if we're to have any kind of hope to break the truly vicious cycle into which we are descending.

Those rural roots

Dipping into the mailbag today ...

I have to say that the quality of the mail I received on the "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" series was outstanding. If I'm proud of anything about the blog so far, it's been the first-rate, thoughtful responses I've managed to get. Most of them speak for themselves, so I'll just run them with minimal commentary.

Here's the first of several, from Edward Cowardin:

Just one comment comes to mind regarding your list of "disturbing trends" that are "beginning to coalesce" in regards to fascism. It does seem like all the ingredients for an authoritarian government have now been set out on the counter in full view, even if the actual cooking hasn't started yet -- although Mr. Ashcroft certainly seems to be sporting his apron.

Of all the trends you list, I think the economy could prove to be most dangerous. Op-ed columnists often note how unemployment is a breeding ground for terrorists in the Middle East. They neglect to note that the same holds true for America. Our economy, with its millions of uncounted unemployed, its unprecedented corporate, consumer and government hyper-debt, and its soaring trade deficits, would still be in serious trouble even without 9/11 or Bush's reckless Iraq adventure. Job destruction continues unabated in the USA. Globalization and NAFTA may have been a temporary boon to financiers, CEO's and some of our trading partners, but the new "service" economy bred by transnational corporatism has been a catastrophe for millions of American workers. We have fewer workers making less and fewer farmers farming less. What happens to those economically displaced persons?

Many in rural areas, small towns and cities across America, have lost all hope of ever knowing again the dignity and self-respect that comes from doing skilled work and earning a living wage. These growing numbers of the hopeless and the jobless are especially vulnerable to extremist religious groups and political demagogues. Just as they have been in every period of economic shock and decline.

Besides being a service economy, ours is also an increasingly militaristic economy, teetering toward empire and away from being a republic. And the armed forces offer one of the few avenues left for young people who can't go to college but still hope for upward mobility. Unfortunately, all enlistments don't have happy endings. One enlistee in the first Gulf War was Timothy McVeigh. Like many homegrown terrorists, McVeigh hailed from a depressed rural area where family farms were being replaced by corporate factory farms. His tale, I fear, is a cautionary one.

P.S. I promised earlier that I'd be compiling the "Rush" series in a PDF format, which is still in the works. However, I've decided not to post that until I've really completed the series and can edit the material into a cohesive whole. It's a bit scattered, and badly needs editing right now. Not to mention: After I wrapped it up, I realized that there were at least two more components of my analysis that need exploring further, so I'll probably have a couple of supplemental posts in the next week or two, along with my concluding remarks, which I hope to post in the next day or so. After all of which I will edit the thing down and make a nice PDF file out of it.

Some readers have suggested I try to sell it as a 'mini-book' -- it actually stands now at about 25,000 words, which is the usual length for such a thing -- but I'd be skeptical of its chances of finding a publisher. Most likely I will test the waters of selling it as a PDF 'mini-book' through an Amazon box. In any case, regular readers here, if nothing else, get to watch a work in progress of sorts.

Extremism at the White House

Joe Conason nails the vice president for playing the role of extremist transmitter:

Dick Cheney performs straight off of a John Birch Society script

The former Wyoming congressman is an unreconstructed, old-fashioned right-winger with about as little respect for multilateral organizations and alliances as that old John Birch Society bumper sticker, circa 1962: "Get the U.S. Out of the U.N."

Of course, as I noted earlier, President Bush himself has expressed his own high level of comfort with the worldview of the Birchers:

"I don't listen to this noise that goes on around here, and I don't pay much attention to those people who want to stay here, he said. I came from Texas, and I'll go back to Texas. And in Midland, Texas, when I grew up, there were more signs saying Get us out of the UN' than there were saying God Bless America.' And there were plenty of God Bless America' signs."

I remarked a couple of days ago that one of the keys to combating the intermingling of extremist and mainstream conservatism will entail calling out those reputedly middle-of-the-road Republicans when they promote far-right worldviews. Joe, as usual, has a nice head start on the rest of us.

Are they nuts?

Dipping into the mailbag ...

Steve Coffman writes:

I enjoy reading your blog, but your latest chapter [11] in the [Rush, Newspeak and Fascism] series was somewhat disappointing.

Many conservatives' belief in the importance of tradition and social institutions is predicated on a belief that individual human nature is more evil than good. Such a belief does imply self-loathing, which is not exactly a hallmark of mental health. However, I don't think you can generalize conservatives as less mentally healthy than liberals, even when you fall short of labelling them mentally ill. It's a bit self-serving to not be suspect reasoning.

Also, and I'm oversimplifying, but you imply that all conservatism is tainted by the existence of its extremists. However, I rejected this argument when Ann Coulter said the same thing about liberalism.

Well, of course, these are in some ways rough drafts, and perhaps not as clear as they could be. Let's see if I can reformulate to make things clearer:

1) I wouldn't say that all of conservatism is tainted by the existence of its extremists, anymore than the same for liberals. What I would say is that each is tainted by the extent to which it traffics in the agendas and ideas of its extremists, and the extent to which those extremists are made to feel welcome (see the above post on Dick Cheney). This has clearly been occurring on a near-massive scale with the GOP, while similar cross-pollination with mainstream liberals and extreme leftists has been increasingly minimized in recent years. If Democrats were echoing the rhetoric and ideas of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, I would not hesitate to criticize them just as harshly.

2) The right-wing extremist worldview is in many ways demented, and certainly inclined to totalism, but I did not intend to suggest that conservatives are more or less mentally healthy than liberals. I'm no psychiatrist nor a psychologist, and rather despise those journalists (see Andrew Sullivan) who pretend to have the ability to render a psychiatric diagnosis. I was careful to cite that part of the Anthony and Robbins study that said:

We do not necessarily view the members of exemplary dualist groups as mentally ill or deeply disturbed relative to average levels of developmental maturity in the general population. We do believe that such groups appeal to individuals with certain identity constructions and difficulties. Nevertheless some degree of splitting, projective identification and polarized identity may be 'normal' for most people in mainstream culture.

Nonetheless, I think I can safely characterize extremism of all kinds as a destabilizing and corrosive influence on the public discourse in a democratic society, particularly if the variants of extremism at work are explicitly anti-democratic. That isn't psychology; it's reality, especially if you've witnessed it in action.

3) Thus, the extent to which extremist memes becomes part of the fabric of mainstream conservatism will directly affect not so much the mental health of conservatives but their own contribution to the overall health of the body politick. If they are pursuing extremist-inspired agendas and mouthing extremist memes, then that contribution will be corrosive and destabilizing.

4) The dualism to which I alluded is an important indicator of the gravitational pull being exerted by right-wing extremists, and ultimately the extent to which this venom is planting itself in our midst. As mainstream conservatism develops more observably dualist features -- particularly as it approaches an us-or-them mindset in defending Bush's war, and projects an image of a "divinely inspired" president -- the more dangerous the tide becomes.

5) I did suggest that liberals were more inclined to resist this dualism -- though of course they are hardly immune from their own brand of dualism. Nonetheless, their resistance to right-wing dualism does seem a likely suspect in the extreme hostility and projection being directed their way currently.

How we got here

Speaking of Rachel Corrie ...

It is now clear that once-promising chances for peace in the Middle East are evaporating like so much naphtha fuel, thanks in no small part to the utter failure of the Bush administration to make any kind of contribution to improve matters. Indeed, Colin Powell's mission last year demonstrated with utter clarity the complete impotence of the Americans to make any kind of positive difference because of Bush's calamitous policies. And now the few Americans who are trying to fill that vacuum are being killed.

Many of us recall how painfully close Bill Clinton came to eking out a workable Middle East peace agreement. But his efforts fell short -- in no small part, as it happens, because of interference from the very same faction now in power.

Here's a blast from the past, in case anyone needed to remember how we got here:

Richard Perle sabotages peace talks

Richard Perle, a veteran cold war warrior and former assistant secretary of state, urged the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, not to agree to any settlement which left the future status of Jerusalem unresolved, according to the New York Post website.

The website quoted a message received by Mr Barak yesterday from two of his emissaries, Yoram Ben-Ze'ev and Yossi Alpher. The two men said Mr Perle "asked us to send a clear message" to Mr Barak that it would be a "catastrophe" if the Jerusalem question was not dealt with, and urged him "to walk away" from the Camp David negotiations if faced with that outcome.

The Perle camp's argument was that it would be unfair to burden any incoming administration with the task of settling the Jerusalem issue or underwriting future negotiations. Of course, it seems unlikely that this was a task at which a Gore administration would have chafed.

The War on Dissent : Marching Onward

Atrios has been doing a bang-up job (per usual) recording the rising tide of thuggery and eliminationist hatred being aimed at anti-war protesters and liberals in general, something I warned a couple of days ago was the kind of phenomenon that represents a very dangerous undercurrent in the body politick.

The reports are starting to roll in from all over. I'll be trying to keep track of them here. Here are the Atrios links:

A letter calling for "doing away with" Democrats

"Go back to France"

A poem of hate for liberals

Rhetoric at pro-war rallies

This is an important point. The supposedly "pro-war" rhetoric is remarkably thin on actual expressions of sentiment in support of the war or the troops, or against Saddam Hussein, and very heavy on demonization of liberals.

Over at Shock and Awe, Kynn remarks on the hateful expressed by right-wingers about the death of Rachel Corrie, the young Olympia woman who was killed by a bulldozer in Palestine the other day:

Next time someone asks, "Why do they hate us?", I'll just point them in the direction of the gleeful gloaters -- a kind of mockery of human suffering, pain, and death that was legitimized by the Republican party's embrace of Rush Limbaugh and his sadism.

And Eric Muller over at Is That Legal? points out the story of the young rodeo attendee who was assaulted merely because he refused to stand for that gag-inducing Lee Greenwood song, "Proud to be an American," and sums it all up nicely:

These are dangerous times.

Is Bush already a war criminal?

Not sure why I missed this, but better late than never ...

This letter by Professor Joan Fitzpatrick of the University of Washington School of Law was posted on the American Society of International Law listserve. Fitzpatrick, who is an expert on international law regarding human rights, evidently wrote it as a letter to the editor of the New York Times, in response to the Times' March 4 piece on the use of torture on Al Qaeda prisoners; however, she doesn't expect the Times will publish it, and gives permission for anyone to circulate it.

To the Editor:

The "interrogation" techniques described in "U.S. Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody" (March 4, 2003, A14) violate basic norms of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions require humane treatment of all prisoners, whether POWs or "unlawful combatants," and regardless of the nature of the conflict. All acts of violence or intimidation, outrages upon personal dignity, and humiliating and degrading treatment are strictly forbidden. Does the Department of Defense argue that chaining naked prisoners to the ceiling, in freezing weather, and kicking them to keep them awake for days on end, are practices consistent with the Geneva Conventions? Is the DOD prepared to tolerate this treatment of American POWs in the Iraq war?

These practices also violate human rights treaties to which the United States is a party, specifically the prohibitions on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The United States may not transfer Al Qaeda suspects to other states to facilitate their torture; that too is a violation. Moreover, there is no state on earth "that does not have legal restrictions against torture" ("Questioning of Accused Expected to Be Human, Legal and Aggressive", March 4, 2003, A13). The prohibition on torture is a peremptory norm of customary international law binding on all nations. The torturer is the enemy of all mankind.

If President Bush has commanded these practices, he has committed serious international crimes and crimes against the laws of the United States that are impeachable offenses. Congress must investigate immediately.

Secretary Rumsfeld last Friday again revealed his complete ignorance of the laws of war by suggesting that Iraqi POWs could be tried before military commissions. They may be tried only by court martial, under rules identical to those applicable to U.S. forces. As Bush and Rumsfeld are poised to launch a major war in Iraq, the world stands appalled by their utter disregard for the most fundamental norms of humanity in wartime. Heaven help our "enemies" and our own soldiers.

Sincerely,
Joan Fitzpatrick

Joan Fitzpatrick, Jeffrey & Susan
Brotman Professor of Law
School of Law, University of Washington,
Box 354600
1100 N.E. Campus Parkway, Seattle WA
98105-6617
phone (206) 543-9368, fax (206) 685-6617

It occurs to me that there were perhaps many reasons behind the Bush administration's longtime hostility to the International Criminal Court.

[Thanks to Global Texts and Criticschism.]

Bad blood on the border

The L.A. Times tackles the Arizona militia border patrols:

Patriots on the Borderline: Toting guns, cameras and mighty convictions, small bands of Americans are patrolling the Southwest in search of illegal immigrants [registration required]

So far, no one has been reported hurt in a confrontation. Another new outfit called American Border Patrol is planning to send volunteers equipped with Webcams and satellite uplinks to the border to stream live online video of immigrants crossing illegally into the U.S. The groups differ in tactics, but all three share an apocalyptic vision of an America under siege. "We cannot let [the Mexicans] export their failures," says Glenn Spencer, the 60-something organizer of American Border Patrol, based in Sierra Vista, Ariz. "They are a threat to our entire culture."

None of these organizations can produce more than a handful of supporters, and an informal poll--in restaurants, gas stations and on the streets of southwest Arizona--turns up few ready to strap on a gun and join them. Illegal immigrants "come through our land all the time, but so what? They're not doing any harm," says Cathy, who declines to give her last name when I meet her at a Chevron station in Bisbee, four miles from the border. She then uses a popular obscenity to describe Simcox and others like him.

Joanne Young, who tends bar at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Tombstone, says "Simcox doesn't have 10 people in this town on his side." Tombstone lives on tourism, she says, "and visitors are down this year from last. People are calling and saying, 'I don't want to bring my children there; it isn't safe.' "

Still, few in Arizona dismiss the border militiamen. While reporters are drawn by the photogenic firearms, fiery Rambo quotes and a morbid certainty that sooner or later somebody's going to get killed, locals know Simcox and his allies are on to something. In their half-baked, xenophobic, scary-screwball way, they've identified a real problem: The U.S.-Mexico border is a disaster.

Two things about this passage are strikingly familiar. 1) These guys are relatively few in number, but they're more than capable of wreaking a ton of havoc. 2) This is, of course, a classic Patriot movement type of opportunity to exploit a genuine problem and in the process grossly distort it -- a la Ruby Ridge/Waco, as well as such incidents as the Klamath River water dispute, which was exploited in a similar fashion by the Patriots. The outcome of that interference -- a fish kill of Biblical proportions -- seemed frighteningly apt. Not to mention portentous.