>> Charles: In this case, we start with symptoms not diagnosis ( upon
>> further
>> analogy to biology). The U.S. recently has made big moves in the
>> direction
>> from a bourgeois democratic republic regime to more open dictatorship,
>> more
>> open terrorist rule by its govenment. As doctors of history we say
>> "where
>> have we seen these symptoms before ? " Fascist Italy, fascist Germany
>> immediately come to mind from our medical history books because the
>> U.S. is
>> a hypermilitarist, state- monopoly , capitalist power like Nazi
>> Germany,
>> animated by severe national chauvinism and racism, war and
>> anti-communism.
>> It is a corporatist state, as Mussolini declared Fascist Italy to be.
>> This
>> could be a genetically mutated virus , or something, I mean in
>> analogy to
>> medicine and biology.
>>
>> This is just a hypothesis. Many hypotheses must compete for explaining
>> the
>> sick U.S. state.
I would be very wary of looking at societies as organisms -- this has usually been the approach precisely of fascist ideologists, not progressives.
But more to the point, the likening of contemporary U.S. to Nazi Germany, or even equation of the two, has become something of an urban myth among some leftists. All I can say about this is that it seems to me that anyone who looks carefully and objectively at Nazi Germany, and tries to get a feeling for what the place was *really* like, couldn't possibly conclude that there was any significant resemblance.
Vague generalizations like "militarism," "racism," and "corporatist state" just don't get at the specific characteristics of the two societies. Yes, both could be called "militaristic," but Nazi militarism was a militarization of the whole society, starting with the SA and SS terrorizing the whole country and ending up with the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht. Nazi racism was the Kristallnacht, the Wahnsee Conference, and Auschwitz. Where are the phenomena of this kind in the U.S. of 2003?
If you want to discuss history in something like a professional, responsible way, you have to get into such specific details.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org