``...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
``Then give me an argument and put out an alternative analysis. What are `we' experiencing? And how would you distinguish between nazis and fascists?..'' (CG)
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Okay. I assume you are not going to answer the question, so I'll answer it for you.
Chip Berlet would have gotten overly specific and detailed, ground nazism in the German past, and in the US present in various explicitly named neonazis movements that center on some from of aryanism and its semitic nemesis, the master race hypothesis out to exterminate the evil jewish cabal. This becomes in my view over determined to the point of making nazism difficult to recognize in other contexts with variations of ideology. While that is fine for scholarship, in the more messy and less well delineated political world, it also misses the forest for the trees.
I accept on the other hand, that I over generalized nazism, by making a simple distinction between nazis as forming a central dehumanizing, racist ideology and enacting it into law, and contrasting that to fascists who seem more interested in simply eliminating their political opponents though the usual channels of oppression: the law, courts, and prison, and the propaganda machinery of over ripe nationalism. The use of ad hoc intimidation, thugs, and death squads is always available to both groups. So I can be accused of missing the different species of trees for the general greenery of the forest. Or to use a different metaphor, crying wolf too often and too soon.
So, the argument turns on over specification, losing the general contours of the phenomenon in the details of its historical context, and thereby making it non-reproducible. While the other view threatens to over generalize it to the point of discovering it under every rock.
Never mind. What I am more interested in is highlighting the fact that the Bush administration is now in a legal position to set-up a police state in relation to very large number of people in the US. It now has the necessary tools and nobody seems to care much, or be willing to call this what it is. As far as I can tell, there is no formal or legal barrier between the administration and whoever, whenever, and whatever they want. The argument that the Bush administration is not likely to over exercise its new police powers for various political popularity reasons, really isn't very re-assuring. There is essentially nothing to stop them. The fact that they bullied their way into public office and are now using and manufacturing a war hysteria to legitimate themselves isn't very reassuring either. And then there is the very real possibility that as long as they are not seriously threatened by domestic political challenges, we will probably not know how far they are willing to go on this course. A jail cell isn't confinement, until you grab the bars and shake them---then it's real. Nobody is willing to grab the bars and find out.
I am more interested in focusing on the concrete legal means and the barriers that once existed to stop the development of a nazi like agenda in the first place. Most of those institutional safeguards and protections are either gone or eroded to such an extent that they are meaningless. It certainly doesn't help that the Supreme Court already a rightwing apology is now completely compromised by their own decisions in the Presidential elections. Since Florida, I certainly wouldn't trust them to protect anything but the administration they effectively put into office.
I assume that Chip Berlet on the other hand has spent a great deal of time and effort examining the detailed ideologies of the Right and has come up with a well nuanced criterion for distinguishing the various groups in a spectrum that runs from merely authoritarian and potentially fascist all the way out to the fringe advocates of racist genocide. It would be nice to see that applied to our current condition, if for no other reason than to have some standard to measure our progress. But that probably won't happen.
However, the link that worries me, is between the legal definitions that create the status of non-persons, people with no legal rights of any sort, and their racist identification with a vague label of Islamic terrorist. The other part of this formulary that is disturbing to say the least, is the use of secret court panels, military tribunals, and summary executions. These currently existing US government formalities are clearly parallel to counter parts in the German Nazis regime.
I realise that simply typing `reich' in front of the US government's new office of Homeland Security in google, and getting the official Nazi SS office name with Himmler is not proof of the US going nazi, but it is both hilarious, and frightening at the same time.
It seems somewhat nit-picky or academic to me, to try to keep ideas of what nazism is restricted to the internal nuances of their master race ideology, while failing to recognize the general legal and institutional means developed in their historical or political contexts to carry out these ideologies.
In other words, in my mind, the institutional tools themselves are the essential feature, and not the content of their raison d'etre. These tools in particular include defining a broad class of people as non-persons and identifying them with generally racial characteristics---in this case, middle eastern looking, and subscribing to Islam. Next, there are the broadened police powers of the state to investigate, arrest, and detain people within this designated population, above and beyond the framework of the usual powers given to the police and government of a bourgeois democracy. In addition there are, the availability of military tribunals, closed hearings before unspecified military or government officials, and finally the punishments of indefinite imprisonment and or execution without either review or appeal to any outside authority.
Sure, these are just the usual police state hardware of any self-respecting totalitarian regime. Are we supposed to just wait around for lunatic white supremacy diatribes, mass rallies of nationalism, and posters of hook nosed arabs done up as rat people before we start calling this shit nazis?
But I suppose we can all wait and see if Bush actually uses some of this power to start killing people in Guatanamo. That is pretty much the bottom line empirical test for me.
Chuck Grimes