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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , JULY 2002
WAKE UP & SMELL
THE BOOT POLISH
BY JOE URIS
Everyone knows what Old Time Fascism looks like:
high-strutting, chin-jutting IL DUCE; flash, flags and order;
Nazis at Nuremberg; sudden night raids — friends, neighbors,
loved ones disappeared forever. Old Time Fascism: a rightwing
totalitarian social order that exalts the state, takes over indivi
dual rights, and, together with the military/industrial complex,
forms a one-party government that creates a mythic past and
present designed to justify a vicious program of state terror
and national expansion.
But consider New Age Fascism: modern, friendly, high-
tech. Gone is the paraphernalia of Nazism. Unlabeled, Friendly
New Age Fascism, full of nostalgia for a mythic small town
America, is accepted, even loved, by an apathetic, confused
and disillusioned public.
Unlike Old Time Fascism, today there is little resistance
and no alternative — no Social Democrats, no Communists to
block it. Friendly Fascism is almost in place, certainly on the
way. It rarely shows its violent heart or oppressive nature. It
does not need to seize power for we already have a political,
economic and social system that offers two parties, but no
choices.
Instead, we are served helpings of sensation instead of
thought: a human interest story, perhaps of a child in pain, a tale
of an evil Arab leader somewhere far away, a story of a gang
killing just around the block, and a fast flash of some wide-eyed
radical crazies killed by Glock competent cops.
New Age Friendly Fascism will use the domination
and control of ideas, images and behavior that corporate wealth
have had in place for years — advertising; the sound bite; news
unreported or interpreted rather than presented; the fine-tuned
reinterpretations of spin doctors; the growing confusion
surrounding the ever more common practices of docudrama,
infotainment and infomercials. These have already created both
distrust of all information sources, and paradoxically, a belief in
almost anything that is movingly presented. Patriotic nonsense
and patently false information goes unchallenged by the press
and most people.
With the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet system,
conservative ideology survives as the only legitimate belief. And
what passes for the center today not so long ago was regarded
as the right. Meanwhile the citizen Is more important for her or
his function as consumer and worker than as participant and
creator. In a consumer-based system, the possibility of modern
consensual fascism delivered through sensual imagery and the
MTV moment seems quite reasonable.
And always, just in sight, but safely outside of most
people's experience, the iron fist awaits. Even in the Nazi era,
most Germans never had to feel the weight of government
oppression.
Today, government response to resistance both on the
Right and Left serve both as warnings and examples of the iron
power of the state. Police spying, an old habit of government
nationally and locally, continues. Police intelligence files turn up
in the hands of private groups like the Anti-Defamation League
and others. A local band of would-be anarchists only gets
roughed up, busted and harassed rather than killed. But the
greater the challenge, the greater the state response.
More direct provocations result in state sanctioned
murder, not trial and punishment through protected due process.
Meanwhile the system grows rigid, closed and self
serving. Through time the state has encouraged ruling elites
to gather wealth and power, handing it down to a favored few.
This is as true under Capitalism as it was under Soviet statism.
The domination of government and the economically powerful
grows. And a consumer-based society, addicted to toys and
pleasures, Can be controlled just by withholding or increasing the
toys, reducing or allowing more pleasures, raising or lowering
the prices.
SAUL STEINBERG
In the past, the American Dream depended on military
industrial spending and an unending patriotic cold war against
communism. With the collapse of the mythic enemy a crisis of
purpose looms. To what source will the national ideology turn?
And without a cold war, from where will the big buck jobs come?
Today, industry, seeking higher profits in third world
markets, flees America for lower cost locations all over the
world The North American Trade Agreements (and the World
Trade Organization) destroy still more industry
Well-paying jobs grow scarce; the rich grow richer and
more and more Americans are poorer.The government, because
of staggering national debt and continuing conservative ideology
cannot, or will not, create new and needed well-paying services
such as high-speed rail, national health insurance and a better
education system. The result is reduced competitiveness, lower
standards or living, and growing ignorance.
Meanwhile resources dwindle, prices rise and environ
mental chaos threatens. As problems mount and no national
consensus or improvement materializes, Americans become
more cynical, either fighting each other over ever more scarce
resources or demanding simple solutions.
Like Germany in the years between the wars, America
will increasingly turn to the sort of scapegoating, victim blaming
and nationalist neo-religious ideology that, in its most extreme
form characterizes the beliefs of people like Timothy McVey and
Lon Mabon.
A SHORTFALL OF CANDOR
Long before she committed suicide Jean Seberg
claimed the FBI had destroyed her film career by spreading
false and malicious rumors about her because she supported
the Black Panthers. The FBI denied it. Finally, a week after
the actress overdosed on barbiturates, the FBI was forced to
change its story and release documents that proved she told
the truth all along.
The FBI decided to discredit her in 1970 because of
her public support of the Panthers. Agents spread the rumor
among Hollywood columnists that a Panther had made Seberg
pregnant. By many accounts she never had much of a career
(her major role was as Saint Joan in a film adaptation of
George Bernard Shaw’s play), but the planted rumor could
not have helped Hollywood had never recovered from the
McCarthy era when it blacklisted its best writers and performers
And what the FBI did to Seberg it did to thousands of others.
The FBI constantly broke the law in its mission to
destroy any organization or any individual who practiced beliefs
different than the standard beliefs. Its agents lied, slandered,
broke into private homes, stole from, assaulted and even
murdered American citizens.
After conceding that it had committed high crimes
against Jean Seberg, the FBI insisted that the country take
its word nothing of the sort will happen again.
Of course we will believe the FBI that it will reform
itself, like we have countless times before. We have not yet
been abused that one time too many, it seems. We will raise
holy hell that our freedoms are being taken away when a city
council wants to keep cars off the beach, but when it comes
to opposing the powerful forces destroying our most vital rights
and freedoms, we bow and scrape and allow them to deceive
us again, to kick us again.
218 WEST MARINE DRIVE
ASTORIA, OREGON 97103
(503) 325-8708
- michael M c C usker
(NOTE 9/14/1979)
How is the New World Order of post-Cold War America
different than that of the world orders of past Fascisms except
for the persistence of nominal notions of freedom and dissent?
Nominal, that is, in name only, because no meaningful choices
ever gain public attention unless they are at the same time
discredited Naive totalitarianism is sure to flourish when there
is no informed discussion of ideas.
As the Right/Center consensus dominates public
discourse in everything from advertising and politics to social
policy and civil rights, the Liberal and Left communities grow
more confused.
In the world of personal politics, for example, concern
about the objectification of women and children as sex objects
intensifies But as good jobs disappear, as alienation grows, and
anger reaches the flash point, real world violence grows as well.
The combination of violent images in the media and real
violence at home and in the streets captures the attention of
politicians and social critics. The New Puritans of the Christian
Right and Dworkinist Left respond with rage. And here the
government can respond. It is easy and costs nothing to wage
war against the ugly images that free speech allows.
In the arts, both commercial and fine, the exaggerations
that fear engenders increase pressure for a safe, meaningless
middle path that cannot threaten or cause questioning. Guilt and
repression feed hopelessness and desire for a quick cheap fix.
And that fast fix waits in the wings, singing the siren song of
control and order.
As in the time of Hitler, each of us hears a different
message with similar themes: state control and personal guilt
coupled with the comfort of certainty, and the armor of right
eousness. When the center does not hold, fascism offers simple
solutions And fascism comes to us needing no change of
government, no real change in the economy, only the calm
acceptance of an ignorant and ever more anxious nation.
Were a Constitutional Convention held today the Bill
of Rights would be revoked. So scared are most Americans that
many would give up civil liberties hoping to defeat fear.
Joe Uris is a famous Oregonian. He wrote this article for
PDXS (“The Pulse of PortlancT) , then gave it to the NCTE (The
Pulse of the North Coast). He lives in Portland, teaches and
hosts radio talk shows.