"The means employed to spread Democratic ideas make the citizen psychologically a "Totalitarian Man". The only difference between him and a Nazi is that he is a totalitarian man with Democratic convictions."
- Jacques Ellul
...and the post 9/11 US Intelligence Community's "continuity of Government" focus that is attempting this election year to "save democracy from democracy".
We so fascist!
Excerpts from the Video above:
...At the conjunctural level of analysis, I think one of the best definitions, at least operative definitions of fascism, is that put forth by Michael Parenti in his work "Black shirts and reds," he said that "fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher Financial circles. Fascism is a false revolution, it promises a radical transformation of society but what it delivers is actually an ongoing war on working people."
---
...Capital came into this world dripping from head to toe, from every pore with blood and dirt. It came into the world through acts of brutal genocidal colonialism, through the enslavement of major swaths of the population, the indigenous population, the African population. And that this colonial Heritage needs to be understood, as the forms of violent imposition of a capitalist system that predated the conceptual identification of fascism per se, but that resonate very strongly with some of the fundamental impulses that are integral to understanding what fascism is. And the systemic level of analysis that connects fascism to colonialism, and the Deep history of colonialism, also allows us to see the ways in which the real struggle against fascism needs to be a struggle against colonialism. And it foregrounds the extent to which all three of the major fascist countries that are identified as the main forces in World War II, to Italy, Germany, and Japan were invested absolutely and totally in colonial Endeavors.
And so, the colonialism that predates fascism as a concept needs to also be understood as one of the driving mechanisms behind uh fascism, even in its conjunctural sense. The Nazi Rampage in the East against the Soviet Union was actually modeled on the US Colonial Rampage in the West and the Western frontier. And just as the US settlers were genocidally eliminating the indigenous population in order to have living room to the West, so were the Nazis planning on genocidally eliminating the peoples to the East in order to open up their Lebensraum or "living realm" in the East. And this is a very very explicit connection, and Germany was simply one of the countries like Italy.
---
...I think that many people who are familiar with Marxist analysis are very attuned to the ways in which bourgeois ideology often passes a particular off for a universal. So that when the founding fathers of the United States claim that "all men are created equal", what they did not mean was that all people were actually created equal. What they meant is that a particular group of white property owning males were created equal. So they take the particular and they talk in the name of the universal, right, as if that was all people.
What's interesting in the ideology of fascist exceptionalism is that rather than universalizing the particular, this ideological operation transforms the systemic into the sporadic, the structural into the singular, the conjunctural into the idiosyncratic. So it's the same basic ideological move, but in the opposite direction. It is the natural outgrowth of this bourgeois approach to Fascism that conceptualizes Germano-Italian fascism as absolutely unique, and defines it in terms of its epiphenomenal and superficial characteristics and never mines down into the Capitalist Roots, thereby obfuscating the structural parallels with other forms of repressive governance around the world.
---
...The overall kind of depiction of conjunctural fascism (in WWII) needs to be written.
And fortunately, there's great work on this front in terms of a capitalist backing and strong liberal aiding and abetting. I would like to point to the fact that the US backers of Capitalism also included the big Capital within the United States, as well as some of the important forces that were operative within the US National Security State. So, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Dupont had all become deeply involved and invested in Germans weapons production in the inter-War period, and in fact, American Investment in Germany had sharply increased after Hitler came to power. According to Christopher Simpson's excellent work on this front, Commerce Department reports show that the US investment in Germany increased some 48.5% between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in Continental Europe. So in this regard, fascism in Europe was astro-turfed, it wasn't simply a Grassroots movement, and fascism itself. As far as I've been able to see in my research, I've not found examples of fascism that is purely Grassroots. I've always found instances of astroturfing. Astroturfing, of course, means that instead of a Grassroots movement coming from below, there are capitalist ruling class elements that plant the seeds by funding fascist movements and trying to Foster them as much as possible. One of the important legal firms involved in foreign direct investment in Hitler's Germany was Sullivan and Cromwell, which of course was overseen by or part of. The leadership of Sullivan and Cromwell was the Dulles brothers, who would go on to become the head of the US State Department on the one hand, and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency on the other. And they would make sure, in the wake of World War II, that these financial investments were protected.
No comments:
Post a Comment