Doug Henwood wrote:
> I'm still mystified by the curiosity about - I'm deliberately not saying
> obsession with - the risks of incipient fascism in the U.S. I have two
> questions I'd love some clarification on:
>
> 1) How is today's threat a significant departure from more than a
> century of American political violence? To say that the Klan is some
> kind of incipient fascist movement is to drain the term of any specific
> meaning. But over the last 100-150 years, we've had savage repression of
> labor through public and private means, like national guard units, cops,
> and Pinkertons. We had lynching. We had serious suppression of civil
> liberties during and just after World War I. The Panthers were
> essentially wiped out with death squads. I can understand why mainstream
> liberals don't want to admit that U.S. history is full of repressive
> crimes, and want to see George W. Bush or Sarah Palin as some kind of
> scary departures, but that doesn't characterize subscribers to lbo-talk,
> does it?
>
> 2) Why should we worry more about the fascist threat than some real,
> imminent dangers like a) a turn to fiscal and monetary tightening
> (Obama's deficit commission, which could give him cover to cut Medicare
> and SS; the Fed's signaling that it's ready to begin withdrawing its
> extraordinary stimulus) that could sink us back into recession; b)
> Obama's friendliness towards offshore drilling and nuclear power; c) the
> incapacity of the U.S. political system to do anything at all about
> climate change, even something as corp-friendly as c&t; d) escalation in
> Afghanistan, and with it an enormous increase in civilian deaths; and e)
> tightening the screws on Iran, possibly leading to some sort of utterly
> mad military strike. These are all initiatives either led or supported
> by a Dem president and Congress, not some scary possibilities that some
> possible future Rep president and/or Congress could perpetrate. Doesn't
> all the worrying distract from those realities?
>
> Doug
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