- "Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically."
- William L. Shirer
-
- Long before the unsavory American politician, Patrick
Buchanan, was accused by the just-ever-so-slightly less unsavory American
politician, William Bennett, of "flirting with fascism," the
country had a rich history of doing that very thing.
-
- There is a keen and almost pathetic sense one gets from
the words of many liberal American commentators insisting Mr. Bush's war
measures represent a heart-wrenching departure from the nation's traditions.
I beg to differ.
-
- Flirting with fascism has been an important historical
current since the founding of the Republic. Certain underlying attitudes
and tensions, almost like buried toxic sludge, have regularly bubbled to
the surface over two and a quarter centuries.
-
- As to thinking that the election of a Democrat will change
everything, well, that is twinkly-eyed, "Look what the Tooth Fairy
gave me!" stuff. Mr. Gore doesn't raise his voice against the ugly
excesses, and Mr. Clinton set a dreadful, bloody precedent in Kosovo. And
where is the indignant voice of major newspapers and broadcasters, the
self- anointed, Fourth-Estate protectors of rights, over the murder and
torture and mistreatment of prisoners?
-
- It has often been observed that there is a kind of perpetual
adolescence in America, and there is an peculiarly adolescent quality to
fascism. Whether it's in the emotions that center on uniforms, puppy- love
hero worship, and drum-crashing spectacles, or in the belief that there
are easy answers to society's difficult problems, especially through the
application of force. Fascism is generally associated with the notion that
a people are special in some way and have a destiny or birthright to claim,
given only the necessary, daring leadership. Hyper-patriotic, chest-thumping
displays are typical behavior. Fascism lingers in the territory of misty,
adolescent dreams about power, courage, and invincibility.
-
- The observed niceties of Mr. Bush's snatching and torturing
people only outside the boundaries of America's Constitutional protections,
for example, is part of a long tradition of brutality-under-legalism where
it's convenient or profitable. During the first century of the new republic,
the Supreme Court deemed the Bill of Rights as applying only to federal
matters. Since individual states at that time were responsible for virtually
everything touching people's lives, the Bill of Rights was pretty much
a parchment nullity. Which is exactly how it was treated by slaveholders
and others, including Andrew Jackson, the president closest to being a
genuine madman, when he practiced large- scale ethnic cleansing of native
Americans.
-
- Right at the country's founding, some tendency towards
what we now call fascism was evident. Of course, there was slavery. Dr.
Johnson's apt remarks about "drivers of Negroes" speaking of
liberty and patriotism's being "the last refuge of scoundrels,"
were shafts aimed directly at Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other
Virginia "gentlemen." And lest there be any misunderstanding
on that, the incomparably-honest Johnson hated both imperialism and slavery
decades before America even thought about being a separate country.
-
- The American Constitution avoided the glaring issue of
slavery, only quietly allowing the small population of slave-holders to
enlarge their representation in Congress by counting each slave as three-fifths
of a person represented. To further secure the interests of slavery, the
Senate was designed to give disproportionate power to states with small
populations. One might call this the backwater bias of the Constitution,
and, to this day, it assures that truly parochial, uninformed politicians
fill many important committees, committees that are the real power in Congress
(For non-American readers, this is so because rural Congressional seats
often tend to become lifetime sinecures, and appointments to committees
are based on tenure).
-
- Contrary to a common belief, the intellectually-advanced
world of the late 18th century had already passed judgment on slavery.
It was not an acceptable institution among the thoughtful and morally considerate.
Men like Jefferson understood this, being in communication with many thinkers
in Europe, and that's why he felt compelled to write some noble-sounding
rhetoric against slavery while continuing all his life to enjoy its benefits.
Even with two hundred slaves, Jefferson was so addicted to luxury that
he died in debt, often buying new silver buckles or a fancy new coach rather
than paying old debts.
-
- So too Madison, although his words on the subject ring
with considerably-less nobility than Jefferson's. The "father"
of the Bill of Rights advocated all his adult life the mass deportation
of black slaves to Africa (as did Jefferson), if and when by some miracle
they were liberated and only providing their owners were fully compensated
for lost property. Never mind that many slaves had been born in the United
States, some going back more generations than many planters, or had grown
to have attachments in the course of their lives of forced exile, off they
all would go to Africa.
-
- Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence
(amended by other committee members and edited down mercilessly by members
of the Continental Congress) actually included a lengthy, whining effort
to blame Britain for imposing the slave trade on the colonies, as though
there could be a trade without ready buyers. Of course, by the late 18th
century, the slave trade was beginning to put downward pressure on the
value of Virginia's human holdings. After all, breeding slaves itself would
become a business, and the laws of supply and demand worked even for human
commodities. When Congress later put a moratorium on the trade, it was
with this economic reality in mind, and not with any urgent sense of morality.
-
- Thomas Jefferson conducted one of the most ruthlessly-oppressive
policies ever undertaken by an American President. Determined not to go
to war with Britain over grievances that, afterwards under Madison, caused
the War of 1812, Jefferson imposed an embargo on trade with Britain. It
was a foolish policy and a vivid example of Jefferson's intense single-mindedness
where he believed he was right.
-
- The embargo crippled New England, most of its trade being
with Britain or the British colonies of the West Indies and Canada, and
drove hundreds of established businesses into bankruptcy. Opposition to
the law was determined, as one can imagine with people's very livelihoods
at stake, indeed it started a serious movement towards New England's secession
from the Union. Jefferson only became enraged and demanded ruthless enforcement.
He came down extremely harshly on people who were only trying to earn a
living, treating them as though they had committed crimes against the state.
-
- Now, this was the same Jefferson who during an earlier,
ineffective, colonial embargo, insisted on ignoring it to import the special
English windows he wanted for his pet project, Monticello. This was the
same Jefferson who had come to power accusing the John Adam's administration
of tearing at the very fabric of the Republic with its Alien and Sedition
Acts, laws intended to prevent the hot embers of the French revolution
from starting a fire in America.
-
- The Alien and Sedition Acts were indeed ugly laws, typical
of what any American today would think of when he or she thinks of fascism,
including the power to throw people into prison for saying or writing anything
disrespectful of the national government. Ironically, the Alien and Sedition
Acts were never enforced in the same ruthless fashion as Jefferson's embargo.
Only a small number of people suffered seriously under them, while Jefferson
put New England into a great depression and arrested anyone who opposed
his doing so.
-
- Jefferson was a great admirer of the French Revolution,
and he did not cease admiring it even when it started being very bloody.
This man who never lifted a musket during the Revolution and who as governor
of Virginia dropped all the state's business to gallop away as the British
approached Charlotttesville (there was actually an official investigation
into his behavior) was always writing lurid stuff about the need for "blood
to fertilize the tree of liberty." Conor Cruise O'Brien has quite
accurately compared some of his expressions admiring what was happening
in France to someone admiring the statecraft of Pol Pot.
-
- When the slaves of Haiti rebelled against the French
revolutionary government, Jefferson, then Secretary of State, was horrified
at the idea of a republic run by ex-slaves. Later as President, he imposed
an embargo against Haiti and supported Napoleon's bloody, unsuccessful
effort to restore French control. So much for the Jeffersonian "Empire
of Liberty" where blacks were concerned.
-
- So that I may keep this piece to a reasonable length,
I'm going to skip to the Twentieth Century, although in doing so I leave
behind some rich examples of America's continuing, lurching dance with
fascism.
-
- General Douglas McArthur, who later distinguished himself
as a general who would challenge directly civilian control over the military,
first achieved some note for leading troops in Washington in 1932, exceeding
his authority to beat in the heads of bonus-marchers, veterans of World
War l who had fallen on hard times and sought early payment of a Congressionally-authorized
bonus for their war service.
-
- During the early Twentieth Century, eugenics became an
important movement in the United States. There were many dreadful laws
passed that required the involuntary sterilization of those considered
unfit to reproduce. The program during the 1930s was huge with tens of
thousands of legal victims. It may surprise many Americans, but the program
was larger and more developed than one that existed in Hitler's Germany
at the same period. Indeed, it was admired by many Nazis.
-
- If you want to get a real flavor for what was a very
prominent strain of American thinking of the time, you should read the
startling words of Henry Ford, a truly hateful man. Or you might sample
the wisdom of Charles Lindbergh on Nazis.
-
- Speaking of Nazis, there was a Bund movement in America.
This organization was popular in the 1930s. At a 1939 rally in New York,
the Bund drew 20,000 people. These dashing fellows held special summer
camps and marched around in dark uniforms and jackboots just like Ernest
Roehm's gang of thugs, the SA, had in the years leading up to Hitler's
taking power.
-
- The Pledge of Allegiance was given throughout the 1930s
with a salute exactly like that of the Nazis with the right arm extended
out and slightly upward. Only in 1942, when the pledge first gained some
official status in being incorporated by Congress into the flag code and
the nation was at war with Hitler, was this practice stopped.
-
- Of course, there were the various massacres of blacks,
especially during the 1920s. These were horrific events, complete with
hidden mass graves, every bit as terrible as the kind of acts we associate
with Kosovo. The Ku Klux Klan became a powerful movement, estimates of
its membership in the mid-1920s are 4 to 5 million, at a time when the
U.S. population was less than 40% of what it is now, although participation
dropped quickly after a series of financial scandals and the start of the
Great Depression.
-
- Brandies University in Massachusetts was founded in 1947
with the aim of creating a Jewish institution for higher learning that
would one day compete with Harvard and Yale and the other ivy-league universities.
Why would this be necessary? Because at that time these eminent institutions
of learning only reluctantly accepted Jews and in small numbers. How did
they know people were Jews? The same way the Nazis did, you asked them.
And where you didn't believe the answers, you made assumptions. And note
that date, 1947.
-
- After Word War II, it was common to hear American ex-servicemen
say that the U.S. had fought against the wrong side. How anyone could say
this, after the revelations of the death camps, is almost unbelievable.
Yet I have heard this said by men who otherwise seemed decent, ordinary
citizens.
-
- Guilt over America's treatment of Jews was part of the
reason for the government's postwar support of the new state of Israel.
Before the Final Solution - which only started when the 1941 invasion of
Russia provided an environment of total chaos to hide the unspeakable work
of the Einsatzkommandos - Hitler was willing to deport all the Jews, just
as Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain had done in 1492.
-
- Of course, one of the most logical places for them to
go was the wide open spaces of the United States, but Americans wanted
no part of that. It was political anathema during this period to advocate
accepting Jews from Europe. A boatload of Jews, seeking asylum in the U.S.
before the war, was turned away. Although killing Jews at that point in
the Reich was not common, treating them as less-than human was a matter
of law. America's behavior very much served to confirm Hitler in his belief
that no one wanted the Jews.
-
- America's postwar support for Israel also had a dark
underside. American politicians gladly embraced the benefit of large numbers
of Jews migrating from war-ravaged Europe to any place other than America.
It was one of those happy opportunities in history, much as with the moratorium
on the slave trade, when you can do something utterly selfish while taking
credit for noble motives.
-
- The traditions of the American Bund come right down to
the militia movements and Aryan "church" movements of our own
day. There is absolutely nothing exceptional about these people in American
history. Timothy McVeigh has been reincarnated many times in American history.
And one should recall that Mr. McVeigh's most cherished ambition had been
to become a Green Beret, the brave fellows who murdered at least twenty
thousand civilians - yes, that's civilians, not soldiers - as part of Operation
Phoenix during the war in Vietnam.
-
- The FBI never took a determined interest in these bizarre,
violent groups before events in Oklahoma City, an observation which brings
me to the dramatic civil-rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Hollywood often portrays the FBI as having been at the forefront of the
fight for human rights and dignity. This is utterly false. J. Edgar Hoover
hated blacks, would not allow them to become FBI agents, and acted as though
a few pitiful communists were a vastly greater threat than the club-swinging,
church-going lunatics in the South. Only under intense political pressure
did the FBI become more actively involved in the violence against blacks
and civil-rights workers.
-
- Still, despite the FBI's turnaround, Dr. King, one of
America's authentic modern heroes, later was the victim of an ugly FBI
project, part of COINTELPRO, reminiscent of the kind of thing South African
secret police practiced under Apartheid. Intimate tapes and suggestive,
threatening letters were sent to the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with
the intention of shaming him and hopefully inducing his suicide. Visitors
to the nation's capital will notice that Mr. Hoover's name yet remains
in big, shiny letters on FBI headquarters, much as the Confederate battle-flag
still waves from official flagpoles in parts of the South.
-
- Some of the Southern states, right into the 1960s, actually
had secret state agencies that operated very much like the Gestapo in gathering
information about, and intimidating, people concerned with civil rights.
-
- The Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest fundamentalist
churches in America, was founded in 1845 by extreme, pro-slavery interests
and has never since been a voice for tolerance or broad human rights. Recently-released
recordings of Billy Graham, the nation's most famous Southern Baptist,
talking with the late President Nixon, reveal not only anti-Semitism but
an unblinking willingness to see nuclear weapons used on Asians.
-
- There have been many debates over the ethnic-origin questions
in the American census. Despite the fact that most Americans are of mixed
descent, and despite the fact many are not even aware of their ancestors
beyond a generation or two, they are still asked in every census to identify
their ethnic/national origins.
-
- After two hundred years of slavery and another hundred
years of de facto servitude, breathes there one black person in America
without European genes? Are there Hispanic people without American Indian
genes, or, going back centuries earlier to Spain, without Moorish genes?
Even the English are a hybrid people of early Britons, Romans, Scandinavians,
Germans, Norman French, and other bits. Indeed, since it is quite possible
all the world's peoples originated out of Africa, what can be the meaning
of such questions? Is ethnicity defined by some arbitrary length of time?
Is it defined only by a last name whose national origin almost always hides
an immensely-complicated past? What do these intrusive questions achieve
that is of genuine scientific or social value?
-
- The same kinds of questions are routinely asked by potential
employers to comply with certain federal regulations. Somehow, America
has managed to turn an effort at insuring equality of opportunity into
another collection of statistics about race. Totally inappropriate forms
are supplied by potential employers to be filled with information about
the applicant's ethnic origin/race. They are blunt and insulting, but always
come with the official assurance that the information has no bearing on
your employment and remains confidential.
-
- That is just a brief reflection on some dark, violent,
and unmistakably- fascist events and attitudes that helped shape American
history, and there is every indication they will continue shaping it for
many years to come. What's more, William L. Shirer in making his famous
remark about fascism and America perhaps never anticipated the possibility
of people cozy with fascism coming to power without actually being elected.
___
-
- John Chuckman encourages your comments: jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
-
- Reprinted from YellowTimes.org: http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=176&mode=thread&order=0
|