Guest article: America the Fascist

My friend Steven Kippel wrote this post, and I requested permission to reproduce it here. Just so no one who has a loved one involved with the military will hear this the wrong way, my brother is in the last stages of mission training before going to Iraq – so this is quite a personal issue for me. — Jason

This is originally a discussion on Facebook:

I’ve got an idea though, instead of being insulted because a statement might include your family, how about we think in the abstract for a while.

Just because someone you love and respect is doing something they feel is honorable, does it automatically mean it can’t be put under a critical microscope? Can we not address this issue and tease out certain moral issues?

First we should define fascism, and then we can see how it applies to the USA: Fascism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary (1983) is “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.” Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana read: Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. No less an authority on fascism than Mussolini was so pleased with that definition that he later claimed credit for it.

Paxton defines Fascism as “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination.”

1. Overwhelming crisis: Communism, terrorism
2. Playing the victim: “Attacking our way of life” “attacking freedom”
3. Natural leader: Bush has a “unitary” legal outlook placing himself above the law, and he’s frequently talked about how his judgment should be trusted as he is the decider
4. Dominate others: Nation-building in South America and Asia, et al
5. Foreign contamination: Currently the big thing in politics is the immigration issue.

Now that we have defined Fascism and started to place it into our context of the modern USA, let’s further explore this:

The US leaders – who have placed dictators in power in Chile, Velezuela, Columbia, El Salvador, Vietnam, and all the other places we have crushed public, democratic movements in other countries to sustain our “way of life” in America – will tell you that our nation-building efforts were to maintain US industry and US dominance over world markets. Our military has been used all over the world to support US corporate expansion in the global market. This is nothing our government hides from us, they tell us it is good to have military in place in certain places as it benefits our economy. This is a merger of government and corporations: corporatism, also known as fascism.

Corporations can’t use military force to push their goals, so they have a relationship with the government to do this for them.

If your family is in the military it doesn’t mean they’re bad people. They can have pure motives, but when you look at the macro situation, the US has been using military force for the last 60 years to promote US business in the global economy to “preserve the US way of life.” This means we need to have cheap coffee because the American way of life is to drink coffee, so we go into countries and set up unjust wage systems so the foreigners can’t succeed against our business and we can have cheap coffee at the expense of their wellbeing.

Originally posted by Steven Kippel at Glocks Out.

the difference between heaven and hell

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can read this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2006/10/26/the-difference-between-heaven-and-hell/