[lbo-talk] weimar shadows

[Carrol Cox]

Bertell Ollman read a paper on the flag at the Marxism 2009 conference.
(In that paper he compared Israel, Hitler's Germany, and the U.S. as
analogous nationalisms.) It's pretty hazy in my mind now, but what I
remember is his treatment of the flag as a fetish, as in "I pledge
allegiance to the United States and to the flag for which it stands."
For the extreme right the flag _is_ the nation, but it needs to be
intgerpreted for them, and the person who interprets it is the
President. But that creates a huge psychological problem when the
president is Blac. I haven't checked to see if the paper is on line or
published yet. There was a lot more to it than my little distorted
fragment here.

Carrol