You're being more than creative with the concept -- you're being highly imprecise. Fascism is first and foremost a theory of the state. It dispenses with democracy in favor of an emotional, non-rational relationship between a "volk" and a charismatic leader who not only feels their pain but knows their aspirations and personifies their "genius." It believes in turning the state into a militaristic order for conquest and suppression of the volk's enemies, both domestic and foreign. As Goebbels used to stress when the RAF was raining down bombs overhead, it believes that purification can only be achieved by going through the fire of warfare and destruction. None of this remotely applies to the political situation of the US during the worst of Jim Crow or, for that matter, South Africa under apartheid. If both societies were hateful, violent, and oppressive -- and they certainly were -- it only goes to show that violence and oppression can take place under bourgeois liberalism.
By the way, the most successful effort at genocide occurred not in Europe under the Germans or in Armenia. Rather, it occurred in 19th-century Tasmania, the island off th south coast of Australia, where every last member of the aboriginal population was wiped out by white settlers. Hitler was nothing more than a second-rater in comparison. Yet I don't think that was fascism either. <
Dan Lazare wrote:
>
>I still don't see how you can have fascism within the context of a
bourgeois-
>liberal republic.
Well, I am being a little creative with the concept, but did Black
people have the full panoply of bourgeois democratic rights, civil
liberties ? Did they have the full protection of the Bill of Rights ?
When a huge fraction of the population are systematically denied these
do you just say, oh , but this is a liberal republic, so , this is not
fascism ?
Was South Africa with apartheid a liberal republic because it had a
constitution and elections ? or was it a mixed republic and
anti-republic ?
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