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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [OT] facism gaining ground in US


From: Pierce T . Wetter III
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [OT] facism gaining ground in US
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:59:37 -0700


- IMO the US has been a fascistic state for half a century!

1954.  Hmm.  20 or 30 years off, I think.



[ long stuff about Tom's view of US history since WWII ]

 I see it differently then Tom, so I'll propose my point of view.

 First, some family background.

 My grandfather was a political prisoner in the US, he was jailed in
Leavenworth Penitentiary for refusing to participate in WWI, which he felt
the US was only getting involved with because some rich eastern bankers
had loaned the Allies too much money. He was a radical trade unionist,
a leader in the International Workers of the World, (called Wobblies by
some).

Some would say he was a radical leftist. Later in life, he hated communism and Russia with a passion, and thought Joesph McCarthy, the guy who led witch-hunts against communism was wonderful. He hated communism because he had friends who went to Russia and were jailed by what he called "the gangsters".

 Recently, I had the pleasure of reading the letters he'd written to his
brother while in jail. They were quite interesting.

The reason I'm telling you this is because I think that Tom's description of Right/Left, etc. is oversimplifying things quite a bit. I don't think my grandfather really changed from right to left, he was always passionate for
freedom.

 Americans in general are very passionate about their freedom. We fought
a civil war not so much about slavery, but about whether the _country_
had a right to tell a _state_ what to do. In school, I was taught that it was about slavery, but from my own reading I've learned that the South was fighting for a way of life. They all knew at the time that slavery was doomed. (Read Battle Cry of Freedom by McPherson for a great book about the Civil
War).

That's not the only things Americans are passionate about though. We're also passionate about: our individual freedom, the strength, power, and prestige of our country, how best to improve the standard of living for all americans, and finally each individual is passionate about how they can improve life for their kids.

What divides us are the individual mixtures of those ambitions, and the beliefs of how those above goals can be met.

So American politics is more then one dimensional. There are two dominant themes: the social, and the fiscal. Predominantly, Americans are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. That means that they believe in the greatest good for everyone, but that they believe also that free market economics is more or less the best way to accomplish that. A social conservative believes that people pretty much get what they deserve/work for, while a fiscal liberal believes that government control is necessary for redistributing wealth. (Of course, I'm grossly oversimplifying here)

 One would think that therefore, there would be a fiscally conservative,
socially liberal party and that most people would join that.

Nope. Instead, we have a party that is both fiscally conservative, and socially conservative, and we have another party that is both fiscally liberal and socially liberal. All of the factions in our political
strata are then sucked into those two parties, and its not always a good
fit. For instance, the "conservative" party was actually founded by
what were at the time, a radically socially liberal faction, the abolitionists. So what we consider now the "right wing" party, was originally "left wing". Similarly, what we think of as the party that felt the strongest about civil rights was originally the one that was willing to let slavery continue.

So what should be two dimensions is flattened into one, the political left, and the political right. To make it even more confusing, the way to win elections in America is to grab the center, so members of the political left always move right, and members of the political right always move left. Generally, the political left pretends to be fiscally conservative, while the political right pretends to be socially liberal. So Kerry talks about how he's going to balance
the budget, while Bush talks about his "Compassionate Conservatism".

Along comes history. Prior to WWII, the political right, threatened by communism and other socialist movements flirted briefly with fascism. This left support for freedom firmly in the hands of the political left.

 Post WWII however, the right to a large extent saw the horrors
of Nazi Germany and "saw the light". They began pointing at Communism as
"just as bad", and began crusading against "totalitarianism". This caused some confusion among the political left, since the labor movements had a long history a flirtation with communism and socialism. So the right to some extent made an about face, though it was a relatively painless transition for them.

So prior to WWII, the "left" was firmly in the "promote freedom" camp. After WWII, things got muddled. That is, many of what Americans think of as the Wilsonian ideals (named after the political leftist Woodrow Wilson) ended up getting picked up and accepted by the fiscal right. Now the disagreement was often more about means. To both the right and the left, the best way to preserve American freedom was to ensure that ALL nations were free.

Things stayed muddled until the Vietnam war. There a politically left president decided to go into a country to prevent its fall to communism. He even lied to promote this agenda.

This completely disrupted the left, especially after the war was completely mismanaged by Robert McNamara. Because the war was so badly run, what in American we think of as the political left became very pacifistic. To the political left, all war was bad, and there was no "good war".

While the right was able to accomplish its about face after WWII, it has been a lot more difficult for the left. For one thing, pacifism is an ideal to be aimed for, but all too rare in history. So the political left has ended up calling for military intervention in the Sudan, Liberia to name just a couple of recent places, while they "tend" to be against the current involvement in Iraq.

Hence what has come to be called the "Neo-conservatives" which are people who are often socially liberal, but believe in the "right wing" precept that the best way to preserve American freedom is to ensure that ALL nations are free.

The Reagan and Bush II administrations have fractured the left along this fault even more, because there are many people like Tom who think that ultimately, the fall of communism brought about by Reagan, and the fall of Saddam brought about by Bush are good ends, even if they were brought about by bad means.

So unlike Tom, I don't see it so much as the right has "organized". They've always been well organized. The type of people who are well organized tend to be socially conservative. What I see is that the left has been disorganized since Vietnam. The right probably could fracture as easily as the left along the fiscal/social fault line, but there hasn't been an issue as potent as Vietnam to do so.


Where does all that leave us?  Especially in the context of a little
news item about DHS seeking the power to suspend elections?

_delay_ not suspend. Delaying an election a week does not a fascist state make. If they were talking about the ability to suspend elections, I'd be joining you at the barricades.

 I think the crimes perpetrated by Janet Reno (Waco, Montana) were much
worse then this news item. For one thing, they were actual not theoretical.

I think that the liberal perspective on world affairs has to be sold
to the military culture as "JuJitso" (a deliberate mangling of the
name of a school of martial arts I'll disrespectfully baudlerize for
this explanation).  Minimize your effort.  Redirect your attackers'
energy against themselves.  This is the clever way, in contrast to the
brute-force way of "boots on the ground; bombs in the air" way.  This
way has the virtue that a _potential_ threat, which is never
actualized, fades away in history as just that:  a potential threat
that never materialized.

Yeah, liberals like to characterize their perspective that way. But I don't think its a "liberal" perspective, I think its one shared by everyone in the foreign policy establishment, they all think that when we have a war, we screwed up.

The disagreements between "liberal" and "conservative" perspective are based on two things:

    How and when to use force when negotiation fails
    How much self interest America should push for in foreign policy.

  As far as "JuJitso" goes, you can take that to an extreme and you end
up with the balance of power politics that led to WWI and the current form
of the Middle East. I'm not sure its really good for America to play
countries off one against the other. In fact, I'm not sure its really possible for us to do it. I suppose we did that in the Iran/Iraq war, and that pretty
much got us in the mess were in now...

There's a long version of the Theodore Roosevelt quote "Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick" that goes something like: "It is always better to use reason and kind words then force, but there are times when reason and kind words will not work. At that point, the use of force becomes necessary." except the real version makes about twice as much sense as what I just said...


Along those same lines, appeal to creativity:  "Surely we can think of
a better solution."

Ah, then the answer is, "I can't, can you"? Most of my friends who were
against going into Iraq couldn't come up with something else for Bush
to do as an alternative once I brought up all the problems with the sanctions,
inspections, and the oil-for-food program.


Paradoxically because: um.... we may very well have "fixed" the middle
   east. We'll know for sure in about a decade.  We fixed it for the
   wrong reasons, with the wrong intentions, with bullshit
   expectations about the outcome and the costs -- but the situation
   on the ground has changed profoundly.  We're going to sacrifice and
   take many lives.  We'll have millenia to contemplate whether there
   was a less destructive path.  But.... things might in general wind
   up better once this settles out.  (This is, in my view, a big
   danger.  I'm confident that there _was_ a better and less
   destructive path.  A good medium-term outcome might cover that
   realization up.)

I think there was a better and less destructive path as well, but I think we needed to take it somewhere between 1991 and 2002. On the other hand:

...the man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic-the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.

So I'm not sure that I see anyone in the political spectrum who could have done better then Bush, just differently.

Pierce





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