Anti-Democratic Solutions

On January 8th, 2011, a United States Congresswoman from Arizona was shot in the head at a grocery store.  12 other people were injured in the shooting, including a federal judge.

It is too early to jump to conclusions at this point in time.  Still, the factors surrounding this situation make it look rather grim.

Sarah Palin Target Map

The Representative from Arizona was listed on Sarah Palin’s  target map.  This has all the earmarks of political terrorism.  I have spoken on the instances in the past of acts of aggression on political figures.

This is not how democracy works.  It is anti-democratic.  A public official is elected into a position into government.  When people disagree with them, threats and violence are not a democratic solution.

Is this what we are to expect from the current state of political affairs?  Many of these politicians on the New Right are stoking the flames of social discontent with phrases such as “Second Amendment Solutions” and “Don’t Retreat – Reload!”  When this is the result, what are we to assume?  That it was just a random act of violence?

In efforts of honesty, as I stated earlier, there have been no releases of evidence that this was anything.  All we know currently is that the suspect was apprehended and his name was Jared Loughner.

All I know is that we need to watch as this situation develops.  We also need to hold public figures accountable for their actions, especially when they incite violence.  The only response by Sarah Palin so far has been a tweet to a link, and the following comment:

My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona.

On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.

- Sarah Palin

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Tags: democracy, Gabrielle Giffords, guns, PAC, Rep. Giffords, sarah palin, shooting, targets, terrorism
Category Neo-Fascism |

Patriots, Freedom, Constitution, Rhetorical Vocabulary

There is a virtual plethora of topics to write about today.  But, I decided to vent instead.  There are these ads all over the interweb.  I know you have seen them.  They are on Facebook and YouTube and Google and every other site.  I’m sure, soon, that we will soon be seeing them on sex websites.  They are these Patriotic ads, ranging from support groups to products.  They are all about Freedom and Constitution and every other über-nationalistic, neo-fascist propaganda you could imagine.  During the past election cycle, there were ads on my page for John Boner Boehner, Meg Whitman, Christine O’Donnell and the Kitchen Table Patriots, the Heritage Foundation, and every other indoctrination group for the New Right.

Yesterday, there was an advert on my Facebook page for We The People Bracelet.  On the surface, what’s the problem?  I do not see a problem with bracelets of the US Constitution.  (As long as they are not actually made out of the Constitution.)  I have spent hours studying the Constitution and resulting legislation.  I think it would benefit our society if more people understood their Constitutional rights.   Their site claims, “Every Silver Bead Represents an Amendment to The United States Constitution.“  They sell bracelets, necklaces, cuff links, keychains, pendants, and more!  Good, right?  Well… right on the top right corner of the page, it says “Stop the assault on our Constitution.”  Who is assaulting the Constitution?  And how does buying a bracelet with Amendments on it stop this?

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Tags: bernie sanders, Constitution, far left, fascism, freedom, fundamentalism, Glenn Beck, John Boehner, Kitchen Table Patriots, Koch industries, meg whitman, Neo-Fascism, patriot, sarah palin, We The People Bracelets
Category Neo-Fascism, New Right, Tea Party movement |

No Really, Epithets for Arizona

I haven’t had an entry in over a week.  I wish I could say it was because everything has filled me with a sense of futility, but the reality is that I haven’t budgeted my time very well.

While on hiatus, Arizona made the news again with the mural on a school in Prescott.  An article can be found on the Daily Courier, here. In a nutshell, they hired artists to paint a mural with the students of an elementary school, of the students of the elementary school.  The students were of multiple ethnicities, which prompted some shouting of racial epithets by passers-by for two months.  The artist contributes this hostility to City Councilman, Steve Blair.  On his radio show on KYCA, he stated:

“I am not a racist individual, but I will tell you depicting a black guy in the middle of that mural, based upon who’s president of the United States today and based upon the history of this community when I grew up, we had four black families – who I have been very good friends with for years – to depict the biggest picture on that building as a black person, I would have to ask the question, ‘Why?’”

Then the school decided to “lighten the mural” or, more specifically, lighten the faces of the students.  Then the school decided not to do this, because of the national outcry.

What I find is the real issue here is the attack on “pluralism” and the identification of “who is an American” with a specific image.  This is really fascist.  Not in an attempt to spread a slur around… it really is fascist.  It is a tenant of fascism.  The most notable case was the image of the “Aryan” – the blue eyed, blonde haired German that was the “only real German” according to Hitler’s Nazi Party.  Just like with anything else, there are varying degrees.  Would I equate this to the Nazi platform?  No, not really.  But is it fascism?  Yes, definitely.

This has been a rising tide since the election of the first Black American President.  This rallying cry of the New Right for what it means to “Be an American.”
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Tags: african-american, apartheid, Arizona, chicano, discrimination, equal rights, fascism, fascist, Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, New Right, race, racism, sarah palin, Tea Party, United States
Category Neo-Fascism |

Insinuations abound.

In honor of Tax Day and the Tea Party noise, I’ll let the viewer/reader decide the point of this:





Sorry there are no subtitles. I found a few speeches with subs, but I refuse to link anything to those who blatantly support Nazi propaganda. If you are so brave, there are a ton of misguided souls on YouTube who have translations of speeches they have uploaded. (Talk about living in a foregone era.) If you understand the subtext, that should be enough. If you understand even a little German, the comparison is … well, i said it was up to the viewer/reader to decide.

Category Neo-Fascism |

Brown Shirts and Bullshit – American Political Gumbo

In honor of the planned Tea Party protests tomorrow, I decided to finally put down some observations.  I find this situation is both tremendously horrifying, inane and just plain stupid.

We begin with the American “Left” and “Right.”  These labels are misleading in themselves.  When looking at the political strata of the world, Left and Right mean certain things.

• Right-wing, or Conservative, politics support social stratification, classism, tradition, nationalism, aristocracy and, often, monarchy.  Generally supporting “free market capitalism.”
• Left-wing politics are in support of egalitarian society.  They generally support equality under the law, labor laws, “fair market” and Keynesian economics.
• Ultra-Left is often used to refer to radical socialism, communism, and other far left movements.

In the United States, these terms have been mangled and abused.  THERE ARE NO ULTRA-LEFT POLITICIANS IN THE UNITED STATES! That is just the way it is.  McCarthyism pretty much destroyed any potential for far-left politics in America for at least a century.  The American Right would likely not get on a podium and espouse views of aristocracy, monarchs and reinforcing social stratification.  (In fact, Americans generally dislike monarchs, except the butterflies.)  That said, there is no “Far Right” wing in American politics, either.  I would contend, aside from claiming to support “free market” economics, there is NO Right in American politics.  I also would venture to say most of those who claim to support the “free market” do it verbally while not truly believing that no economic interference is acceptable.  Think about it.  Do Republicans claim they want corporations to run unfettered?  Do they want to destroy labor unions, fair trade agreements, fair wage laws?  (Maybe they do personally, because they stand to profit, but that would be political suicide.)

So, what are we left with?  We are left with center-left moderates who agree to disagree with each other and bicker about minutia.  The American Left is no more Left than the Conservative Party in England.  If the Obama Administration were true leftists, their actions would have been as follows:

• Instead of bailing out failing automotive companies, General Motors would have been seized by the government and turned into the American People’s Motors.  Jobs would have been created to build automobiles.  Government technology would have been used to perfect the vehicles.  Honestly, with the technology the government has, I’m sure they can make a kick-ass car that would destroy German and Japanese cars in the open market, instead of these antiquated Studebakers the American car companies continue to create.
• Instead of bailing out the banks – the government would have seized the banks.  Told them, “you can’t seem to manage this on your own and you fucked up things for the rest of us.”  Made it THE Bank of America.  Employed thousands of people. Guaranteed small business loans.  Set its own interest rates.  And given every citizen the opportunity to use their local, government bank/credit union without having to deal with predatory lenders.
• My final example, some people might take issue with, but I propose a true left government would settle the illegal immigration issue once and for all.  In reality, who do the illegal immigrants benefit?  Who benefits from the drug wars in Mexico?  It’s the conservative elite.  Middle class white people in Texas who live paycheck to paycheck don’t have an illegal immigrant nanny to watch and raise their children.  They aren’t profiting from slave labor conditions that cannot be reported.  Illegal immigrants are cheap labor that undermine unions and labor demands.  It is the “Right” that wants the illegal immigration to continue, not the left.

So, what’s the point of all this?  The point is that all this misinformation results in something that can be very volatile and dangerous – The Tea Party movement.  This movement is so similar to the Brown Shirts in Germany that it is frightening.  It is too simplistic to state that the Tea Party are simply racists.  It is not overly simplistic to state they are reactionary.

Before I go any father, I want to state, I am in no way supporting any Nazi propaganda.  These summaries of events are simplistic and in no way are meant to demean anyone.

The Sturmabteilung (Brown Shirts) existed before the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi movement. I do contend that the Tea Party movement is less like the Sturmabteilung and more like the general population, but I really do not know who is “in charge” with the TP movement.  It seems to me like it is more then some spontaneous reaction to current situations.  There are too many common threads of misinformation.

The Brown Shirts used different tactics than previously to control situations, breaking into smaller groups and infiltrating them to disrupt them.  As Europe was feeling it’s Industrial growing pains in the turn of the 20th century, the fear of “Communists” to depose aristocracy was rampant.  In the Weimar Republic, they had already seen the Marxists creating havoc in France, England, and so on… they found someone to assure them a bit of security from this chaos.  (It should be noted that Germany was a feudal state at this point.)  The Brown Shirts created havoc in the streets while shrewd politicians crafted dialogue on nationalist lines about “freedom” and “opportunity,” while really being the fascist movement.  I think everyone besides Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows what happened next.

Let’s examine the situation of Germany prior to the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.  They were in a situation of economic dire straits.  The people of Germany were literally starving economically and they had just been crushed in a war.  They were also forced into a world in which the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, with little means of production.

Now we have the United States, who has practically fallen into the economic well.  People are losing their homes left and right.  The US has been attacked and tragically injured by foreigners and continues to wage unending war.  The United States is falling behind in the Technology Revolution.

And then comes the rallying cry!  “It’s other people’s fault!”  “They don’t look like us!”  “Limited government and more freedom!”  These are all the things the German people were screaming as the Nazi party enacted a campaign of fascism and brutality across Europe.  The scary thing about it, is that Hitler was a nobody with no future, and his followers were few.  Hitler was probably as respected as Sarah Palin at prior to his appointment as Chancellor of Germany.

So, my point is… The Tea Party is dangerous.

They are not dangerous because they oppose taxes and “big government.”  They are dangerous because they encapsulate everything dark about America.  These are people getting government stipend checks, complaining about the government giving people stipend checks.  They are racist.  They are ignorant.  They are nationalistic.  But its much more complex then just one of these things: they are the foot soldiers of fascism.

Let’s not be too mean, though.  Sympathy and empathy are what makes us better.  These people are scared.  They have been left behind by the world.  WWII was the height of industrial production for the United States.  No one could produce more, faster, than the United States.  Manufacturing jobs could be obtained without a higher education and could provide means to raise a family.  Technology moved so fast, it became cheaper to manufacture in other places.  (Again, this is overly simplistic)  Education became a necessity in America and brown people became citizens.  Now we have a brown skinned president and a phone that can react to touch.  We can read editorials from a newspaper in Moscow or Beijing the same day it was published.

The world got smaller and the American fascist movement was born.

Tags: America, brown shirts, nazi, Neo-Fascism
Category Neo-Fascism |