[lbo-talk] Of Farmers & Flying

Leigh Meyers leighcmeyers at gmail.com
Sat Mar 11 12:27:28 PST 2006


Carrol Cox wrote:
> Sigh! A baby cobra doesn't turn into a tiger just by growing bigger
> fangs. All rabbits are mammals but not mammals are rabbits. It can get
> much much worse. It can get much worse than Hitler's Germany, and still
> not be fascism but some other species of the genus despotism.
>

You just never quit. When *WILL* it be fascism?

...or is it obsolete because Benito Mussolini is dead?

You seem to believe that if it's not *exactly* something, nomenclature-perfect, it's a logical fallacy.

Wrong.

Word... <...> And one will find a deeply troubling question raised: Is fascism a foreign (in both senses of the word) excrescence grafted on the main body of Western liberal democracy, made possible only by the weakness of the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression, rejected and combated tooth and nail by the Western democracies, or might it be an outgrowth of tendencies internal to those democracies?

<b>*There is even an undercurrent in the analysis which suggests fascism as the logical further development of democracies within the prevailing social and economic systems.*</b> Those hints, of course, arose with the context of the fall of Weimar, the strong fascist tendencies in Italy, France, Spain, even Britain, the ambiguities of the war and the incipient cold war, and McCarthyism in the United States.

My father always strongly rejected any suggestion that conditions in the United States, at their political worst, should be labeled “fascist” or compared to Nazism. Yet the question of whether authoritarian tendencies (or chaotic tendencies as in Neumann’s Behemoth) are integrally linked to other aspects of existing Western-style democracies remains an open and troubling one today. 1

1 Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, ed. Douglas Kellner, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1998) x, Questia, 10 Mar. 2006 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=103000442>.



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