[THS] Chris Hedges: Is America Yearning For Fascism?

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25100.htm

Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’

By Chris Hedges

March 29, 2010 "TruthDig" -- The language of violence always presages violence. I
watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of
a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry
mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual
against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic
collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd.
I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other
tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons,
charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and
despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

"We are ruled not by two parties but one party," Cynthia McKinney, who ran for
president on the Green Party ticket, told me. "It is the party of money and war. Our
country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who
have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded."

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal
and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering
unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent
health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give
tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in
real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in
eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to
pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to
save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by
foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The
message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not
work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace
and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our
anemic democracy die.

The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was
not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of
Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and
despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient
scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion
movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation.
There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who
was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or
Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian
militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the
more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the
country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and
they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to
protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and
distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.

"It is time for us to stop talking about right and left," McKinney told me. "The old
political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this
predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the
South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white
supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white
supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not
come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress.
Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme
Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across
traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from
the way the system is organized."

We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from
universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for
quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working
class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-
educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not
misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the
boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs.
The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the
spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows
of legislators' offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt
against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We
created the monster.

When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats,
when she says "Don't Retreat, Instead-RELOAD!" there are desperate people
cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of
megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic
believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts "baby killer" at Michigan
Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the
unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the
violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call
for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate
violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about
the origins of Nazism, "In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism
was invented." It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not
immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy,
giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence
that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown
conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for
Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans
and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white
movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The
hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from
universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and
cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the
Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and
blood.

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