The United States is rapidly goose-stepping its wa...
Published: Sunday, November 04, 2007
VHeadline.com guest commentarist Mateo Owen writes: The United States of America (while not quite yet a fascist dictatorship), is rapidly goose-stepping in that direction, thanks as much to Democrat cooptation as to neo-con Republican leadership.
True, we see think-tanks like PNAC, lobbying organizations like AIPAC, etc. having their day in the sun (and as an unfortunate byproduct, giving the Zionists' evil twins and occasional partners, the anti-semites, ammo for their spurious undertakings), but we do need to step back and see the larger picture...and presentations such as Naomi Wolf's “Path Toward Fascism” help us to do that, to a point.
Beyond that, we cannot rely uncritically on any single source of antifascist information: we need to study, compare, analyze, come to our own conclusions, and act on those conclusions.
For my part, I think that the neo-cons are down, but not out, as they have worked with the AIPAC to thoroughly co-opt the Democratic leadership far more than either the Social Democrats or Communists were co-opted by their respective leaderships in order to fight one-another rather than the Nazis.
The present Democratic leadership has some brilliant cooptees, and Hillary Rodham Clinton tops the list. I was stunned by the sheer ingeniousness of her call demanding Congressional approval for any attack on Iran: why should this extreme hawk now second-guess the sitting President?
Simple, really: she knows that such a motion would probably pass, but not be veto-proof; once Bush's veto was sustained, and he ordered the attack on Iran, Clinton and those who voted with her could be absolved from any responsibility for the consequences of the attack, which she now knows would be dire. She could put herself before both the AIPAC and the peace movement as their champion without irony, hence vouchsafing her election.
Splendid! Well-played! And we, the people of the US, get screwed again (with the balance of the world suffering even worse...)
At base, there is a contradiction in liberals' simultaneous allegiance to democracy and capitalism that looms at least as large as the stupendous cognitive dissonance that underlay Soviet socialist thinking, which we who stand for socialist democracy found rendered both sides in the Cold War incapable of understanding it or making accurate predictions about it or anything else.
Decades ago, we predicted the fall, first of the USSR, then of capitalism via a fascist phase that would put socialist revolution irrevocably on the agenda: we are more than halfway along that predicted course. Would that we could stand with the liberals to resist fascism...but, faced with the choices of armed struggle, flight from the US, or silence, we just saw where Naomi Wolf would stand. Her presentation bore out how the liberals' allegiance to capitalism would trump that to democracy, silencing them: those of us who actually seek the application of democracy to political economy don't have that problem, hence, would either undertake armed struggle or flee the US (Venezuela is the most logical destination at this point for many of us) ... or both.
We, too, believe in the US Second Amendment ... not to terrorize anyone, but to resist state and para-state terrorism. Preparations are being made for both fight and flight, for, at that point, we would be fighting not to rescue democracy, but to overthrow a fascist state.
Naomi Wolf is right: we are already far along the road to fascism, but not yet there; would that the people of the United States of America were to rise up to stop it, but, alas, too many don't know how far along they are, hence regard antifascists such as Ms. Wolf as crackpots ... and will till the hammer comes down ... to stand in the way of the stampede to fascism.
Once that happens, we antifascists can't simply smugly and self-righteously cross our arms and cluck "I told you so:" Ours were truths told in a sea of lies, endlessly repeated.
Once the choices are narrowed to fight or flight, we must work with the people to combine both options in a well thought-through strategy to defeat fascism and replace it with real democracy, in the economic as well as political sense of the term.
To do less ... as was done at the end of the Second World War ... is to leave fascism down, but not out; defeated, but not destroyed.
Hasta pronto, y a la victoria, siempre,
Mateo Owens
