[lbo-talk] Today's "Comparison of U.S. to Fascism": From Boston Review

[Carrol Cox]

The article seemed banal, but the subject line is interesting. _Of
course_ one can COMPARE the current u.s. to fascism, just as one can
compare oranges to apples _as fruits_ or belts to suspenders (u.s. not
british sense) _as modes of holding up trousers_ or shotguns to 22s _as
modes of shooting rabbits_.

We in the u.s. are confronted by a _serious_ threat to our traditional
civil freedoms, just as the Germans were in 1930 or the Italians in
1920. But squawks about _fascism_ are ways of _avoiding_ the danger to
our freedom, just as someone who fretted about scurvy in the midst of a
flu epidemic would be interfering with the proper public health
measures. The tactics which would have been appropriate to opposing
Mussolini's fascits are utterly irrelevant to opposing the attack
mounted by the Clinton and Bush administrations on civil freedoms in the
u.s. during the last decade.

Carrol