See (way) below...
= = = = = = =
-----Original Message----- From: mike larkin [mailto:mike_larkin2001 at yahoo.com] Sent: Sat 7/5/2003 9:32 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Cc: Subject: [lbo-talk] Today's "Comparison of U.S. to Fascism": From Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/BR28.3/gleason.nclk
= = = = = = = =
The Hard Road to Fascism
Today’s antiliberal revolt looks a lot like 1920s Europe.
Abbott Gleason
The United States is at a turning point in its history. Some intellectuals and journalists have compared the destruction of Saddam Hussein with the fall of the Berlin Wall or even the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others—looking to the origins of the Cold War rather than its end—have compared the momentous political and economic changes now underway with the period between 1946 and 1948, when the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union broke down.
But current changes seem deeper, more far-reaching, and at the same time less conclusive than either of these analogies suggests. American power today dominates the world in quite a different way than it did even at the end of the Second World War, when the United States and its European allies faced a powerful and implacable enemy across an increasingly polarized Europe and elsewhere around the globe. At the same time, the American Leviathan is only at the beginning of its crusade—the word seems well chosen—to democratize the world and ensure its harmony with American interests.
A more apt (and troubling) comparison is with the 1920s, when an earlier liberal order collapsed and was replaced by imperial and mega-state regimes.
<<SNIP>>
= = = = =
-----Original Message----- From: Carrol Cox [mailto:cbcox at ilstu.edu] Sent: Sat 7/5/2003 10:46 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Cc: Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Today's "Comparison of U.S. to Fascism": From Boston Review
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
= = = = = =
Hi again,
The article is hardly banal, and Gleason is a well-known scholar. Gleason is not calling the Bush II regime fascist, he is talking about the similarities in the antiliberal, promilitarist moment. His distinctions regarding Spain and Romania are nuanced.
I am trying to find a middle ground where calling the Bush II administration "fascist" is recognized as hyperbolic and factually flawed rhetoric, but that analyzing the moment and some of its forces for "fascistic" elements is seen as reasonable and based in historic fact.
The Gleason article seems very thoughtful and reasonable. There is no hyperbole, there are no fallacies of logic, there is a distinction between fascist movements and fascist regimes, there is recognition of Nazism as an ultra-racialized form of fascism, and the concept of the nature of interwar fascism is sound. Shouldn't these be the criteria for judging articles on the topic?
Chip Berlet
-------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 6898 bytes Desc: not available URL: <../attachments/20030706/83873fb4/attachment.bin>