See below
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Ian Murray
> Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 3:19 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: the smartest fascist?
>
>
> Progressive Irrelevance?
> The left thinks of Bush as an idiot. He is, but only in the
> sense of not being
> intellectual. He is the smartest fascist to come down the
> pike in a long while,
> and has completely outwitted the opposition.
>
> Anis Shivani
>
>
<<SNIP>>
This type of hyperbolic rhetoric will ensure that the left remains irrelevant. Capitalist "democratic" systems have always had an ability to use government repression when needed. Bush is an authoritarian, and a militarist, but hardly a fascist. Even if you agree that there is a whiff of fascism in Bush's administration, this analysis sounds like a Weather Underground pamphlet leading towards immeddiate armed struggle now before it is too late, hurry, no time to think, just act.
Political hysteria is often eloquent but seldom useful and never strategic.
-Chip Berlet
For a better understanding of fascism from a militant left position, try reading J. Sakai:
Full text at:
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/fascism/shock.html
THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION: Looking at Hamerquist's “Fascism & Anti-Fascism” by J. Sakai
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“The Superman is a symbol, the exponent of this anguishing and tragic period of crisis that is traversing European consciousness while searching for new sources of pleasure, beauty, ideal. He testifies to our weakness, but at the same time represents the hope of our redemption. He is dusk and dawn. He is above all a hymn to life, to life lived with all the energies in a continuous tension towards something higher.” (1 )
Benito Mussolini
We weren’t thinking about fascism while we watched two 757s full of people fly into the ex-World trade Center. And maybe we still weren’t thinking of fascism when we heard about the first-ever successful attack on the Pentagon. But fascism was thinking about us.
Fascism is rapidly becoming a large political problem for anti-authoritarians, but perhaps moving up so close to pass us that it's in our blind spot. Fascism is too familiar to us, in one sense. We’ve heard so much about the Nazis, the Holocaust and World War II, it seems like we must already know about fascism. And Nazi-era fascism is like all around us still, ever-present because Western capitalism has never given fascism up. As many have noticed, eurofascism even crushed has had a pervasive presence not only in politics, armies and intelligence agencies, but in the arts, pop culture, in fashion and films, on sexuality. For years thousands of youth in America and Europe have been fighting out the question of fascism in bars and the music scene, as a persistent fascist element in the skinhead subculture has been squashed and driven out by anti-racist youth--but come back and spread like an oil slick in the subterranean watertable. It feels so familiar to us now even though we haven't actually understood it.
While the scholarly debates about "classic" 1920-30s eurofascism only increase--and journalists like Martin Lee in his best-selling book, The Beast Reawakens, have sounded the alarm about eurofascism's renewed popularity --existing radical theory on fascism is a dusty relic that's anything but radical. And it's euro-centric as hell. Some still say fascism is just extreme white racism. For years many have even argued that no one who wasn’t white could even be a fascist. That it was a unique idea that only could lodge in the brains of one race! Others repeat the disastrous 1920s European belief that fascism was just “a tool of the ruling class”, violent thugs in comic opera uniforms doing repression for their capitalist masters. Often, both views overlap, being held simultaneously. So we “know” fascism but really we don’t know it yet. Once reclothed, not spouting old fascist European political philosophy (but the same program and the class politics in other cultural forms---such as cooked-up religious ideology), fascism walks right by us and we don’t recognize it at first.
As fascism is becoming a global trend, it’s surprising how little attention it has gotten in our revolutionary studies. Into this unusual vacuum steps Don Hamerquist’s Fascism & Anti-Fascism. (2) This is an original theoretical paper that has in its background not only study but fighting fascists & racists on the streets.
In this discussion of Hamerquist's paper we underline three main points about fascism:
That it is arising not from simple poverty or economic depression, but from the spreading zone of today's protracted capitalist crisis beyond either reform or normal repression;
That as fascism is moving from margin to populist mainstream, it still has a defined class character as an "extraordinary" revolutionary movement of men from the lower middle classes and the declassed;
That the critical turning point now for fascism is not just in Europe. With the failure of State socialism and national liberation parties in the capitalist periphery, in the Third World, the far right including fascism is grasping at the leadership of mass anti-colonialism.
Fascism has shown that it can gather mass support. In many nations the far right, including fascism, has become a popular oppositional force to the new globalized imperialism. In many countries the far right has replaced the left as the main political opposition . It doesn’t get more critical than this. This stands the old leftist notion about fascism on its head. It isn’t just about some other country. Without a serious revolutionary analysis of fascism we can’t understand, locate or combat it right here. And if you don’t think that’s a serious problem, you’ve got your back turned to what's incoming.