wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>
> I would accept the first statement, but I don't think that there is
> any real example where the second works. robert wood
If Mussolini or his movement was racist, it was only in the sense that _all_ European & u.s. politics is pervasively racist; it did not depend on an overt racism at its core as did National Socialism. So I think Doug's second sentence is quite defensible.
Mostly I am concerned by having a kneejerk analysis of "fascism" preclude concrete analysis of (a) the repressive nature of "bourgeois democracy _at its best_ and (b) also preclude an analysis of (and opposition to) the ways in which u.s. bourgeois democracy _is_ being cabined, confined, and undermined. We are losing political margin that (for all its core viciousness) u.s. democracy offered us. That needs to be analyzed without the fog of fascist-mongering interfering.
And a concrete point: the label "fascist" always serves as a cover under which irrelevant comparisons to Germany in 1932 are used to excuse a surrender to the Democratic Party as the best that we can hope for.
Carrol
>
> > Also, racism is not inherently fascist and fascism is
> > not inherently racist.
> >
> > --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Sorry to sound like a broken record (does anyone
> >> know what that means
> >> these days?), but this sort of shit is as American
> >> as apple pie.
> >> Eugenics has been around in this country for a
> >> century, and Hitler
> >> took inspiration from our Indian reservations. Why
> >> future? Why fascist?
> >>
> >> Doug
> >> ___________________________________
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