CB:
> I haven't said that the U.S. is on the road to fascism or is fully fascist. I have said that the war on Iraq is a fascistic war, as were the wars on Viet Nam and Korea. So, an immediate end of the war on Iraq. A declaration that the wars on Iraq,Viet Nam and Korea were crimes against peace, and prosecution of leaders who perpetrated them. Pay reparations to those countries. Total repeal of the Patriot Act, . Outlaw the KKK. These would be definite indicators of a drastic reduction of the fascist climate
or fascist danger.<
so anything that's a crime against humanity is "fascist"? The Pharoah was fascist? Attila the Hun? Tamurlane? King Shaka Zulu?
CB: >In my usage, it isn't such an either/or thing. Either we are in fascism or we are not. Specific actions or projects can be fascistic without a fullblown fascist state. McCarthyism was fascistic without fullblown fascism. I would say that Jim Crow was fully fascist in the South, and close in the North.<
so "fascist" is a swear-word? it refers to something you don't like?
joanna wrote:
> Well, actually, the story about prisons in the U.S. since the late seventies has been pretty horrific.<
yeah. But does horrific prisons justify the use of the scare-word "fascist"? Fascism is one kind of national capitalist system, along with social democracy and a spectrum in between (including paternalistic rule (à la Japan)). Its establishment is a response to mass revolt.
CB:>... How does calling some heavy repression fascist do any harm to resisting it?<
if you use any word too many times, it loses content. Just as using the word "f*ck" loses its shock value through over-use, calling Dubya a "fascist" or his policies "fascist" or Jim Crow "fascist" simply ends up being overheated rhetoric. When real fascism comes (if it does), then people will have to think up another term for it. Of course they will likely end up doing so anyway.
Instead of a Marxian analysis of fascism as one kind of capitalist rule, the word becomes a general-purpose expletive. This is akin to the 1960s radicals who followed the tradition of Wilhelm Reich to see fascism in terms of a personality type. So every cop on the beat was "fascist" (or most of them were). -- Jim Devine / Bust Big Brother Bush! "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil." -- Alfred North Whitehead