U.S. Guilt

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Apr 25 15:14:20 PDT 2002


Micheal Ellis wrote:
>
> >
> U.S. fascist/colonial/hegemonic
> agenda.
>

I have yet to see one single appropriate use of the term "fascist" in discussion of contemporary politics. There are a number of reasons for its non-utility, but the major ones are:

1. It utterly obscures the repressive power of bourgeois democracy.

2. It blurs the actual ways in which that repressive power is usually exercised.

3. It confuses the task of seeing in what ways bourgeois democracy can become an authoritarian state. It blinds us as surely as it would blind us to keep shrieking that the royalists were coming back to reestablish a divine-right monarchy.

Fascism is past history. _Real_ tyranny of the future will be as different from fascism as fascism was different from the Czarist autocracy. And using the word so often can only generate contempt for leftists.

Carrol



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