> But that's partly the point - the Bush admin is trying to construct a
> master narrative of permanent war, and with some success. Newspaper
> references to him as "a wartime president" are routine. We're on a
> state of constant terror alert, gradations periodically and teasingly
> altered. The right to counsel is under attack, critical opinions are
> met with more than usual hostility, there's massive detention without
> charge, and there's talk of stripping people of their citizenship.
> Yet we're supposed to go on with "normal" life. I understand the
> risks of linguistic inflation, but this is not ordinary stuff.
That's why I refer to this situation as "luke-warm" war. There was the event of 9/11, which shocked probably the great majority of the American public in somewhat the same way Pearl Harbor did -- an unexpected (and in their minds unprovoked and unjustified) attack on the homeland. The neocons in the Administration, who had had their militaristic, world-dominating agenda for years, seized on 9/11 to put it into operation. One can almost hear them singing an English version of the Horst-Wessel-Lied ("today America is ours, tomorrow the world").
On the other hand, the atmosphere doesn't quite feel to me like a "hot" war; much of it is like the "cold" war. And the neo-cons, repulsive as they are, are by no means neo-Nazis. They don't have that cold and chilling hatred of a group of people downgraded to the status of "rats/cockroaches/bacteria" and, while they are determined to accomplish their agenda, they don't seem (so far at least) to be willing to destroy, or rather simply ignore and bulldoze through, all the legal barriers to total domination that were evident in the Nazis.
The fluctuating levels of "terror alert" and the legal tactics you mention (denying right to counsel, habeas corpus, etc.) seem to me evidence that the Administration is floundering around looking for some kind of response to Al Qaeda -- very shadowy groups who have proven their hostility to the U.S. and their ability to inflict great damage on U.S. civilians in the home territory, but who can only be seen through the very cataract-clouded lenses of Washington's spy agencies.
Of course, it is also very handy for the holders of government power to keep a low-grade war fever burning in order to make the populace more docile and easier to govern -- as was the case with the "Commie threat" of the Cold War period. And whenever it is possible to heat up the luke-warm war to a fairly hot one, as with Iraq, they are certainly eager to seize the opportunity (one can smell a lot of them lusting for an attack on Iran, absurd as that would be even in practical terms, with a large part of their military machine bogged down indefinitely in Iraq).
But all this still doesn't make them Nazis. So far, at least (and I don't pretend to be able to predict their future any more than anyone else's), I see them as playing a very determined and clever game of poker on the table of the existing U.S. political system, rather than getting ready to knock over the table and chop it into kindling wood, the way the Nazis and the (real) Fascists did. Perhaps that's just because, up to now, they have been spectacularly successful working "within the system." Where will they go when they start losing?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _____________________________ Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx