"While Charles doesn't think it's possible for a black man to be a representative for a movement that will embrace fascist ideology, we don't have to call it that. It's just hyper-nationalism, hyper-patriotism. "
Shag, Charles, & others:--
What follows is from Wilhelm Reich's 1933 _Mass Psychology of Fascism_, a book he wrote long before making those crazy orgone accumulator contraptions, and which I think dazzles with its moments of extreme clarity:
Reich: "[M]y medical experiences with men and women of various classes, races, nations, religious beliefs, etc., taught me that 'fascism' is only the organized political expression of the average man's character, a structure that is confined neither to races nor to certain parties, but is general and international. Viewed with respect to man's character, 'fascism' is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.
[...]
"The result, indeed, of erroneous political thinking is that even today fascism is conceived as a specific national characteristic of the Germans or the Japanese. All further erroneous interpretations follow from this initial erroneous conception.
"[F]ascism was and is still conceived as the dictatorship of a small reactionary clique. The tenacity with which this error persists is to be ascribed to our fear of recognizing the true state of affairs: fascism is an international phenomenon, which pervades all bodies of human society of all nations. My character-analytic experiences have convinced me that there is not a single individual who does not bear the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in is structure."
--Wilhelm Reich, _Mass Psychology of Fascism_, p. xiii, 1970, Farra, Strauss, and Giroux Publishers, New York
This addresses the notion that Barack couldn't be reactionary, fascist, etc. -- whatever -- since he's African-American & in the US. I still hold to my "look at Thatcher -- a woman, but a patriarchal bigot regardless" answer.
Now, Wilhelm Reich's later, screwy orgone crap, that's another matter, and it's easy and cheap to dismiss everything the guy ever said because he did some crazy cuckoo zany stuff later on. Still, who doesn't feel the need to construct an orgone cannon to aim at flying saucers every once in awhile?
-B.