Chip Berlet wrote:
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> The use of "fascist" as an epithet is tiresome. I agree with Doug on this.
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> Bush is an apocalyptic, messianic, authoritarian militarist and imperialist who supports the myth of a "Free Market," while pursuing a regressive social agenda that seeks to justify and expand privilege and power for the wealthy and straight white Christian men.
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> An ugly agenda, with echoes from some of the same components found in fascism.
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> But it is not fascism....
I agree. I would add that in terms of its longrange impact it is conceivably worse than fascism, insofar as fascism is a less stable but no more destructive state form than 'bourgeois' democracy' as it has been developing in the U.S. over the last 50 years. Surely the Bush-Clinton-Bush troika has destroyed more human lives worldwide than Mussolini and Franco combined ever touched. This may be what Chavez was aiming at, but I would regard it as a verbal error in him (or any other third-world liberation leader) but a serious error of analysis when considered as an element in political organizing in the 'first' world.
Carrol