For nearly eight years, I’ve tried without success to describe the radical shift that has taken place in our government.
Each time I’ve approached the task, I’ve had to throw up my hands in frustration because the only model that makes sense to me is the one called fascism.
But that word doesn’t go over too well in polite conversation. It evokes horrors too horrible to imagine. The reality, however, is that fascism isn’t just about jackbooted thugs and state-sponsored industry built on slavery and death to one’s enemies.
The danger of fascism is its seemingly benign mechanisms of control - fear, conformity, the state’s intermingling with religion and corporate enterprise - for keeping a populace in check, for making its people feel content with the way things are and never quick to protest occasional violations of human rights and infringements on their or another’s liberties.
The danger of fascism is its seemingly magical ability - through brilliant propaganda outlets like Fox News - to keep a people resigned to whatever the government does in their name, making them feel secure through its adventures in endless wars and policing the globe and the homeland.
The other great thing about fascism is its capacity for supporting, even indulging, denial on the most massive scale: “We don’t torture. …You can trust us. …If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about….”
Our phones are tapped, elections rigged, bogus wars planned and executed, real and imagined enemies created, and police acquire more powers to intimidate and harass while more rights are taken away from citizens.
Churches pray for the end of the world and offer their children as sacrifices for the war machine, and collude with the government colluding with the corporations and financial institutions - promising blood, anything, for National Security.
Soon, we who protest have been silenced, or marginalized. The Supreme Leader has the right to put anyone he considers a threat - U.S. citizens included - into prison indefinitely, without access to an attorney, or the right to confront his accusers, merely by declaring that person an “enemy combatant.”
The whole drama and theater of the fascist play draws its action from the government wedding itself to corporate interests - in the U.S., a nationalist religious fervor is thrown into the mix to make it all palatable.
Eventually, we all do what we are told - or suffer the consequences. The real danger of fascism is its creep factor. It creeps up on us, and before we know it, we’ve become model citizens in the state that runs secret prisons and gulags around the world. We accept, approve and justify state-sponsored kidnapping, torture and preemptive war. Fascism is creepy.
Historically, by the time citizens realize what’s happened to the country they love, it’s too late.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/15/8315/