> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes
> Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2002 12:08 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Going Nazi
>
>
<<SNIP>>
>
> Thursday I didn't have a chance to go into this since I was at
> work. But, I think of the difference between fascists and nazis
> differently. I think of fascism as the criminalization of all
> political oppositional forces, their imprisonment and possible
> execution or disappearance with the goal of reducing all political
> activity to a homogenous, uniform and single party system.
This is simply the definition of a single-party authoritarian dictatorship, it dismisses 50 years of social science research into what is different with fascism. How is your definition different from Stalinism? Was Stalinism a form of fascism? I think not.
<<SNIP>>
>
> Now, returning to US government and its current turns of the
moment. I
> think of the US christian righwing fundamentalists as
predominately
> fascist, particularly in their conceptualization of social
> policy.
All christian righwing fundamentalists are fascists?!?
So there is no difference between a pragmatic election-oriented Ralph Reed, an authoritarian like John Ashcroft, social totalitarians such as the Christian Reconstructionists, and the neonazis as found in Christian Identity?
The wave of authoritarianism and government repression we are experiencing needs to be challenged, but this overly-simplistic level of analysis is not helpful. The US is not going NAZI. There are echoes of fascism in all forms of authoritarian government repression, but the level of state action under fascism to repress dissent is a different order of magnitude from what we are experiencing.
-Chip Berlet