Fascism

The current political terminology used in the United States is heavily burdened with corrupt ideology. A political term, therefore, will often have two distinct meanings: a dictionary meaning and a meaning used for ideological reasons.

For example, in a recent online article, Ellis Washington, a political commentator and author, wrote, “You must understand that contrary to what you’ve been taught in our fascist public schools, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler were all men of the left, which is why liberals embrace their fascist ideas to this day and zealously seek to implement them into public policy by any means necessary — Obamacare, compulsory unionism, green fascism and regulation tyranny are just the beginning.”  

There is certainly more than one interesting claim made by Washington in the above passage. “Men of the left” who also hold “fascist ideas” is no doubt an utterly senseless assertion to anyone with even basic political knowledge.

Robert Paxton, a political scientist who specializes in the study of fascism and of Europe during the World War II era, defined fascism in his book “The Anatomy of Fascism” as the “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints the goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

However, apparently to Washington, fascism has little to do with “committed nationalist militants” with an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline” and more to do with the government preventing schools from forcing the Christian religion on young, impressionable students.

“Once power was secured, utopian socialists and progressives endeavored to erect their new political religion by corrupting the youth through eliminating prayer and Bible study in the public schools. The school prayer decisions of the 1960s should be viewed as the beginning of the Supreme Court’s role as the crucial force of the American Kulturkampf.”  

People in Europe, old enough to have been around during Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, one could suspect, are not too concerned about the United States becoming a fascist state when a law is passed preventing corporations from dumping toxic waste into the American water supply or when the Supreme Court prevents a public school from favoring any particular religion.   

However, the aggressive militaristic foreign policy of the United States, extraordinary rendition illegally carried out by the CIA and indefinite holding of American citizens without any charges being filed against them, are almost undoubtedly all fair causes for concern.  

­— mardunba@indiana.edu