>>> "Chip Berlet" <cberlet at igc.org> 11/19/99 01:28PM >>
Charles Brown, however, sees creeping fascism in the Republican Party:
>One piece of evidence is Russ Bellant's book _Old Nazis, the New Right,
>and the Republican Party_ with an Preface by none other than
>Chip Berlet. In that book Detroit Bellant lays out much
>evidence of a very big network of WWII era Nazis and other
>European fascists who were an important component of the
>U.S. Republican Party in 1988. There is no evidence
>that they have been purged.
Well, actually, most of them died.
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Charles: But you don't know whether they recruited youth.
Plus, you fail to consider the fascistoid and fascist friendly politics of the Republicans who welcomed them into the party. This is significant in comparing Dems and Reps for potential for ushering fascism, which is what we were addressing.
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But the point is that citing Bellant to argue that the Republicans under Reagan and Bush were closet fascists is an error of intentional fallacy.
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Charles: I guess I have to call you on the fallacy of misquoting and argument irrelevant to what I was saying. I didn't say they were closet fascists. I was arguing against those who claim that we should be more on the lookout for potential future fascism from the Clinton Democrats than from the Reaganite Republicans. This is ironic but ridiculous. Russ' book very much presents lots of evidence in support of my argument on that.
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Since I not only wrote the introduction to the Bellant book, but was co-editor of the text with my late colleague Margaret Quigley, I can say with some assurance that the theme of the book was NOT that Republicans were closet fascists.
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Charles: Yes, but Russ lives in Detroit, is a fellow city worker of mine, and we have talked many times at anti-fascistic activist events, and I can tell the book very much support the proposition for which I cited it, which was not , as you say, that they were "closet fascists", but that the Republcan Party is just as much a danger as the Democratic Party.
Furthermore, I didn't just cite Russ' book, but mentioned a lot of other evidence that is fairly conclusive along with that book on the issue I was actually talking about: The comparative fascist potential of the Dems vs the Reps.
I don't have to proove that the Republicans are "closet fascists". Only that the Dems are not MORE potentially fascists than Reps. I don't even have to prove that the Reps are more potentially fascists than the Dems. Just that it is about even. That's like shooting fish in barrel.
The proposition "Clinton Dems are more of a fascist threat or potential fascist facilitator than Reaganite Reps is false.
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The theme of the Bellant book was that in the rush to destroy communism the US collaborated with ethnic fascists and Nazis from Europe; that some of these people found a home within the Republican Party under the banner of anticommunism, and that their racist and militarist proclivities (and sometimes rank antisemitism) pulled the Republican Party to the right and distorted US domestic policy as well as foreign policy. A related theme is in the excellent book:
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Charles: That's right, but that supports what I cited the book for on the thread.
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So while recognizing the awful result of the Reagan-Bush years, I would argue that they were not a form of fascism,
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Charles: I didn't say it was fascism. Fascism is open terrorist rule. We did not reach that with Reagan/Bush You are imprecise with your analysis of what I said. It is very important to know exactly what fascism is in fighting it. Knowing what it is, I know we didn't have fascism -yet.
Actually, historically, there was a form of fascism for Black people under Jim Crow.
We were discussing the dangers of FUTURE fascism, anticipating rather than waiting until it is actually upon us. Fascism is too profoundly dangerous to wait until it is here to actually fight it. There is no premature anti-fascism.
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and, at the same time, argue that the coded racism, sexism, and xenophobia of the Democrat Clinton, as well as his infringement of civil liberties through legislation and regulation, has the potential of being far more damaging to democracy in the long run than the Reagan/Bush catastrophe, which at least generated some counter response from liberals.
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Charles: This is false, and you are just asserting it without proof. Also, you only spoke to Bellant's book in my post ,when I cited several other pieces of evidence on fascist influences in the Republican Party - the closeness between the current KKK line and Gingrich's Contract on America, Oliver North's FEMA plan, Engler and other Reganite governors, Guiliani, the Rep. Supreme Court. I left out that they just caught the current Senate Majority leader as the member of a white supremacist organization.
Liberals are not the ones who will fight fascism. They will collaborate with it. Some reactionaries will be active in bringing it about. Anyway, the counter to Bush and Reagan by liberals is not a key factor in making Reps less a potential conduit for fascism than Dems. The Reps put all kinds of fascist friendlier judges on the courts, et al.
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Nor is corporate power, even global corporatism, the same item as fascism, either as a mass movement or in state power. And recall that there were three flavors of fascism in interwar Europe: corporatist, master race, and clerical. Corporatism can be an element of fascism, but it is insufficient alone to establish fascism. Friendly Fascism (Bertram Gross, 1980) is an oxymoron. Clever book title, not very useful analysis. It has been adopted by the libertarian and populist right as an indictment of the liberal corporate state as fascist.
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Charles: That is correct. Fascism is the open terrorist rule of the most chauvinist, reactionary sectors of the financial oligarchy of finance capitalism, which is not the same thing as corporate power ( regular capitalism) or even global corporatism. The normal rule of capitalism is not fascism. It is a bourgeois democratic republic. It is not that all "corporatism" ,in the sense of capitalism, is fascism, but all fascism is a form of capitalism or corporatism.
It is interesting that the Italians , who invented fascism, had a synonym for it which was "state corporatism", as in the article by Robert Naiman that I posted. This is corroboration that capitalism is a necessary though not sufficient part of the definition of fascism.
((((((((((((( Check out amazon.com and you will see that others who bought this book recently also bought books by David Icke (antisemite conspiracist booted out of the Greens), John Robison (1790's conspiracy theorist about freemasons/Illuminati), Murray N. Rothbard (libertarian paleocon racialist), Gary Webb (conspiracy theorist). Here is a good stew for the Third Position concept of "beyond communism and capitalism." In fact, comparing Third Position fascist texts (railing against the corporate state, the tyranny of liberal hegemony, and imperialism) with the writings of Alex C. is a very amusing exercise. Of course Tom Metzger beat Alex C. to the call for a left/right coalition in his White Aryan Resistance newspaper some years ago.
Still, the potential of a mass fascist movement can be damaging to a society that aspires to democratic process, because even if the fascist movement (or repressive right wing populist movement) never gets near to state power, it spreads demonization, scapegoating, and conspiracism throughout the political system.
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Charles: The last here is alright. Outlaw the Nazis and KkK !
All power to the workers.
CB