1. Can we fairly use the term "Christofascist" to describe the modern tendency toward Dominionism or theocracy?
2. What, exactly, is fascism?
Readers offered thoughtful responses. One in particular deserves additional attention:
Some months back Lewis H. Lapham made an interesting case that the present Bush regime is fascist, using the essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt by Umberto Eco...I would put a double check after the "Cult of heroic death" tab. After all, the entire religion got its start with a heroic death.
I think it's a pretty good definition. I particularly like its reference to four apparently diverse regimse that most people would say are "fascist:" Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin. I would also point out that it predates (1995) the current American administration.
Christofascist?
Cult of tradition: check.
Rejection of modernism: check.
Action for action's sake: Not sure.
Disagreement is treason: check.
Fear of difference: check.
Appeal to a frustrated middle class: check.
Obsession with a plot (War on Christmas, anyone?): Check.
Humiliation by ostentatious wealth of the enemy (Hollywood?): check.
Life is permanent warfare: not sure.
Contempt for the weak: not sure.
Cult of heroic death: not sure.
Obsession with sexual matters: check.
Selective populism: check.
Newspeak: check.
Not as compelling as the case Lapham made for GWB, but not far off the definition.
Contempt for the weak? Nearly all Christians would vehemently deny that they feel any such thing. But recently we have seen the growth of ministries espousing what has been called the "gospel of prosperity" -- the belief that God financially rewards the faithful and thus (presumably) punishes those on the lower end of the economic scale.
Life as permanent warfare? Certainly the theocrats view mortal life as permanent spiritual warfare. Beyond that, I think no-one can deny that the areas of the country where theocracy has the greatest appeal also tend to be the areas with strong military traditions.
Action for action's sake? I think we can make a case. Certainly, we can all admit that in the world of the televangelists we often see drama for drama's sake. There is always a new cause, a new crusade, a new goal, a new challenge, new reasons for hostesses with massive hairdos and an overabundance of makeup to weep and to caterwaul and to beg for coin.
Obsession with putative evil plots? Oh yes, and we can go far beyond that nonsense about a "war on Christmas." Indeed, this is the area where we can point to definite links between the Nazis and our modern fundies. Old-school fascists such as Nesta Webster and Gerald Winrod propagated the conspiratorial myth of the Illuminati -- a myth resurrected after the war by the John Birch Society. Tim LaHaye, a leading JBS member in California, injected that mythos into modern evangelical Christianity. Pat Robertson quoted Nesta and Eustace Mullins (a disciple of Pound) in his book The New World Order.
And then there's the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" hoax. Back in 1995 or 1996, when the world wide web was still quite young, I made the experiment of typing the term "Christian" into the AltaVista search engine (the best search function of that time). Of the first ten web sites that came up, eight of them either contained some version of the Protocols or contained a link to another site that referenced the Protocols. That is no longer the case, of course. Still, I think of that experiment every time I read about Christian Zionism.
Of course, we can never identify fundamentalist Christianity with fascism. Two circles can overlap without being congruent. There is an even larger degree of overlap between fascism and what was, until recently, called the "New Age" underground -- a subject which should one day give rise to a very long and very weird book.
We still have not addressed the question of economics. Fascists have always had wildly divergent economic views, a fact which both fascists and anti-fascists hate to admit. Disciples of any given economic doctrine are thus free to denounce opponents as fascists. Soviet propagandists decried fascism as "the final stage of capitalism," while far-right propagandists in this country denounced Bolshevism and Nazism as two branches of the same tree. Most post-war fascists have embraced the ideology of unrestrained capitalism -- but a little-known fascist strain, best espoused by Francis Yockey (author of Imperium) considered American-style capitalism even more despicable than Soviet-style communism. I'd hate to be the economist tasked with convincing that world that the economic system now in place in China differs markedly from what we saw in the Third Reich.
Despite Eco's highly useful list, we still lack a proper definition of the term fascist. Until we have one, people will continue to use that word to describe any individual, movement or concept they don't like.
9 comments:
J says.."while far-right propagandists in this country denounced Bolshevism and Nazism as two branches of the same tree".
Wilhelm Reich, the disciple of Freud (sp?) who went on to dive deep into the bio physics of the human potential with his discovery of what he named orgone energy wrote volumes on the fascist personality because he was a victim of it in Europe before immigrating to the US.
Without going to far in that direction of explanation of his theories and conclusions I will say that he saw the form that communism and Naziism had taken in the thirties as two heads of the same beast. He called soviet communism red fascism and Germany as black fascism because primarily of the blocked energy displayed in the behaviors of the two giants. He described the fascist personality as a rigid, stiff almost robotic personality disorder of armored bio physical energy systems within the leaders that transferred to the society at large.
This armoring left the people so restricted and constricted that they became puppets in the hands of their tyrannical masters.
Now that does not necessarily explain economic fascism as a an economic system of wealth accumulation and societal employment in the big picture, but it sure connotes the rigidity of tis leaders and followers politically.
Economic fascism is best defined by the man that introduced it to the twentieth century, Mussolini himself even though he was looking at how to best run the trains on time and that is corporatism, or the wedding between the corporations that employ the people and the stae that theoretically is set up to look after their welfare.
That definition is an intellectual construct but leaves out the rights of the individual to be independant and free. Our tattered constitution does that beautifuly but as of late it lies in the basement which is currently being filled with blood. I can see the furniture floating.not much room left to the ceiling.
Would someone dare dive in and save that parchment?
I have to admit, I wasn't very impressed with the one Reich book I tried to read. Maybe I judged too rapidly, but to me, he seemed like one of those guys who try to turn guesswork into doctrine by using a whole lot of polysyllabic words. His personal story is quite interesting, though.
Was Hitler's problem "blocked bio-physical energy" -- or insufficient orgasm, as normal human beings might put it? He dated a lot after he became well-known. I think it was Renata Mueller who said he liked to be shat upon. Subby-boys usually cause few of this world's problems. My guess is that the there's a non-sexual answer to the Hitler riddle.
Let me just add a couple of words to what J says about economic fascism. What can we say about the system in place during the Katrina aftermath? The Bush administration gave sweetheart deals to crony companies, who farmed the actual labor out to subcontractors and then pocketed huge profits for doing no actual work.
That's a ridiculously inefficient system which a Marxist would say exemplifies everything wrong with capitalism. A Libertarian would say it exemplifies everything wrong with the non-Libertarian approach. Both sides would agree -- it's wrong.
But is it fascist? If not, what other word do we use?
Do Republicans do it because they acquiesce to an authoritarian mental disorder, or do they do it because they acquiesce to corruption?
Is there an axis between authoritarianism and corruption, or are they really the same thing?
Can corruption occur without an ideology of authoritarianism?
I am surprised that the idea of permanent warfare is not clearer in our minds for this discussion..."War on Terror, War on Drugs, War on Hunger, Poverty, Crime, Cancer, etc.," By the jargon, everyone is at war with something or someone; and the best method to bind a people is to create a common enemy.
Was Hitler's problem "blocked biophysical energy" -
if his watercolours can be read as manifestations of his personality and his "emotional" state as most artists share that common occurance..his were so tight that you expected the tiny people painted in to scream. whereas the buildings towered over the people and left them quite stericle..looking.
Later in life Herr Hitler was all about bigger and bigger buildings..I mean beyond big..gargantuan, Olympian in fact.
And people..der volks..well you know what happened to them..all of them especially the germans themselves.
Reich appearantly..dicovered an energy system that permeates the body much like what we identify as the system of energetic flow throughout the chakras and the meridians as canals. That flow is so subtle and is disturbed and blocked by a wide variety of childhood incidences and emotional traumas ala Freud.
Reichian therapy probably is primitive and exploratory for now but appearnatly he was able to harness that energy into a motor that was stolen from his laboratory shortly before the feds imprisoned him where he died a broken man. He also claimed to have discovered an antidote for radioactive poisoning in his orgone energy experimentation.
He was battling the fascist mindset (ala Joseph McCarthy) right up to his denmise and might have been a nuisance to the then guardians of the secrets that were assuming positions of power in the post war (ll) era.
Reich distilled his observations about fascism in his little book "Listen Little Man" and another book :The Nurder of Christ" both examining the fascistic temperment.
Anarchists probobly have the best antidote to Fascism
Anarchos the root of the word means simply "self governing". "We don't need no stinking badgers man"
Antifascism "The White Rose Society" exemplifies it.. recognizes the creeping crawl of organized fascism early and tries to sound the alarm to their society. First ignored and rejected as alarmists, then later sort of looked at as a curiosity, then when the iron boot has stomped the society into the mud they are looked at seriously but in the past it was to late.
read Jack Londons book "The Iron Heel" perhaps his last book brfore his death.
Wikapedia says..
by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.
It is a dystopian[1] work about the rise of a proto-fascist tyranny in the United States. It is perhaps the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display.
Contents
George Orwell praised the book and said it influenced his 1984.lqvet
'Anarchos the root of the word means simply "self governing".'
Emily Post --the best guide to effective anarchy.
Studies of the beginnings of German and Italian Fascism showed that
in those countries constitutionalism was first undermined by a 'secret team' and then by the creation of a 'second state' thatwas
anti-constitutionalist and which
while leaving the formal structure
of the old state standing, subverted it by creating a new
totalitarian regime that, when superimposed upon the old state, was able to substitute its anti-constitutionalist decrees for the traditional constitutional law, rendering the latter unable to
forestall the spread of Nazi terror. [see Ernest Frankel, The Dual State, E. Shills, E. Lowenstein & K. Knorr trans., 1941; and
Fletcher Prouty, The Secret
Team, 1973; 1992; Inst for Hist Review; Costa Mesa, CA]
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