The following are excepts from a very interesting article. I condensed it with what I thought were the most important sections of the article and omitted much of the world history of Fascism. I think many of you who read this will recognize a lot of the fascism we have been experiencing in this nation over the past years and especially what is going on these days in American politics.

The 14 points of Fascism

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism

Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights

Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause

The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military

Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism

The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media

Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security

Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined

Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected

The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed

Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts* The Republicans today use the term "elitest" desdainfully for intellectuals and call themselves the "mainstreet."

Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment

Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
* consider how the Republicans under Bush/Cheney stacked the Supreme Court that just gave the elections over to their corporate cronies

14. Fraudulent Elections

Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

*Ugh!! that's why we have the horrible smear campaigns, swift boating, character assassination and outright lies we have to endure these days that passes itself off as politics. Of course we don't have to worry about them messing with the election results any longer because they just handed the elections completely over to the corporations who will determine the leadership of our nation from now on.

to be continued.....

What is Fascism?

Sept. 27, 1992 by Chip Berlet

http://remember.org/hist.root.what.html

This article is adapted from the author's preface to Russ Bellant's book "Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party," co-published by South End Press and Political Research Associates.

"Fascism, which was not afraid to call itself reactionary... does not hesitate to call itself illiberal and anti-liberal."
_Benito Mussolini

Reactionary concepts plus revolutionary emotion result in Fascist mentality."

_Wilhelm Reich

One element shared by all fascist movements, racialist or not, is the apparent lack of consistent political principle behind the ideology_political opportunism in the most basic sense. One virtually unique aspect of fascism is its ruthless drive to attain and hold state power. On that road to power, fascists are willing to abandon any principle to adopt an issue more in vogue and more likely to gain converts.

Hitler, for his part, committed his act of abandonment bloodily and dramatically. When the industrialist power brokers offered control of Germany to Hitler, they knew he was supported by national socialist ideologues who held views incompatible with their idea of profitable enterprise. Hitler solved the problem in the "Night of the Long Knives," during which he had the leadership of the national socialist wing of his constituency murdered in their sleep.

What distinguishes Nazism from generic fascism is its obsession with racial theories of superiority, and some would say, its roots in the socialist theory of proletarian revolution.

Fascism and Nazism as ideologies involve, to varying degrees, some of the following hallmarks:

*** Nationalism and super-patriotism with a sense of historic mission.

*** Aggressive militarism even to the extent of glorifying war as good for the national or individual spirit.

*** Use of violence or threats of violence to impose views on others (fascism and Nazism both employed street violence and state violence at different moments in their development).

*** Authoritarian reliance on a leader or elite not constitutionally responsible to an electorate.

*** Cult of personality around a charismatic leader.

*** Reaction against the values of Modernism, usually with emotional attacks against both liberalism and communism.

*** Exhortations for the homogeneous masses of common folk (Volkish in German, Populist in the U.S.) to join voluntarily in a heroic mission_often metaphysical and romanticized in character.

*** Dehumanization and scapegoating of the enemy_seeing the enemy as an inferior or subhuman force, perhaps involved in a conspiracy that justifies eradicating them.

*** The self image of being a superior form of social organization beyond socialism, capitalism and democracy.

*** Elements of national socialist ideological roots, for example, ostensible support for the industrial working class or farmers; but ultimately, the forging of an alliance with an elite sector of society.

*** Abandonment of any consistent ideology in a drive for state power.

It is vitally important to understand that fascism and Nazism are not biologically or culturally determinant. Fascism does not attach to the gene structure of any specific group or nationality. Nazism was not the ultimate expression of the German people. Fascism did not end with World War II.

After Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, the geopolitical landscape of Europe was once again drastically altered. In a few short months, some of our former fascist enemies became our allies in the fight to stop the spread of communism. The record of this transformation has been laid out in a series of books. U.S. recruitment of the Nazi spy apparatus has been chronicled in books ranging from by Hohne & Zolling, to the recent by Simpson. The laundering of Nazi scientists into our space program is chronicled in by Bowers. The global activities of, and ongoing fascist role within, the World Anti-Communist League were described in by Anderson and Anderson. Bellant's bibliography cites many other examples of detailed and accurate reporting of these disturbing realities.

But if so much is already known of this period, why does journalist and historian George Seldes call the history of Europe between roughly 1920 and 1950 a "press forgery"? Because most people are completely unfamiliar with this material, and because so much of the popular historical record either ignores or contradicts the facts of European nationalism, Nazi collaborationism, and our government's reliance on these enemies of democracy to further our Cold War foreign policy objectives.

This widely-accepted, albeit misleading, historical record has been shaped by filtered media reports and self-serving academic revisionism rooted in an ideological preference for those European nationalist forces which opposed socialism and communism. Since sectors of those nationalist anti-communist forces allied themselves with political fascism, but later became our allies against communism, for collaborationists became the rule, not the exception.

Soon, as war memories dimmed and newspaper accounts of collaboration faded, the fascists and their allies re-emerged cloaked in a new mantle of respectability. Portrayed as anti-communist freedom fighters, their backgrounds blurred by time and artful circumlocution, they stepped forward to continue their political organizing with goals unchanged and slogans slightly repackaged to suit domestic sensibilities.

To fight communism after World War II, our government forged a tactical alliance with what was perceived to be the lesser of two evils_and as with many such bargains, there has been a high price to pay.

"The great masses of people. . .will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." _Adolph Hitler


Fascist political movements are experiencing a resurgence around the world. In the United States, the 1992 presidential campaigns of David Duke, Patrick Buchanan, and H. Ross Perot echoed different elements of historic fascism.

Duke's neo-Nazi past resonates, in a consciously sanitized form, in his current formulations of white supremacist and anti-Jewish political theories. Duke has embraced key elements of the neoNazi Christian Identity religion.

Buchanan's theories of isolationist nationalism and xenophobia hearken back to the proto-fascist ideas of the 1930's America First movement and its well-known promoters, Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin. In his Republican convention speech, Buchanan eerily invoked Nazi symbols of blood, soil and honor.

Perot's candidacy provided us with a contemporary model of the fascist concept of the organic leader, the "Man on a White Horse" whose strong egocentric commands are seen as reflecting the will of the people.

These three candidacies were played out as the Bush Administration pursued its agenda of a managed corporate economy, a repressive national security state, and an aggressive foreign policy based on military threat, all of which borrows heavily from the theories of corporatism, authoritarianism, and militarism adopted by Italian fascism.

Duke, Buchanan, and Perot all feed on the politics of resentment, alienation, frustration, anger and fear. Their supporters tended to blame our vexing societal problems on handy scapegoats and they sought salvation from a strong charismatic leader. See the prescient article on "The Politics of Frustration" by conservative Republican analyst Kevin Phillips in April 12, 1992, pp. 38-42. In this article, Phillips, (remember, he is an anti-Bush conservative Republican) raises the issue of similarity between the current campaign and the Weimar period in Germany when the fascists were organizing under the banner of national socialism and popular discontent.

Another way to look at fascism is as a movement of extreme racial or cultural nationalism, combined with economic corporatism and authoritarian autocracy; masked during its rise to state power by pseudo-radical populist appeals to overthrow a conspiratorial elitist regime; spurred by a strong charismatic leader whose reactionary ideas are said to organically express the will of the masses who are urged to engage in a heroic collective effort to attain a metaphysical goal against the machinations of a scapegoated demonized adversary.

In any case, in most definitions of fascism the themes of conspiracism and a needed scapegoat emerge.

In recent years the four main centers of paranoid conspiracism and scapegoating on the right have been the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby, the LaRouchians, and the right-wing Christian fundamentalist sector of the movement known as the New Right.
*this group of extremists completely took over the Republican Party 10 yrs. ago. And I do not put it past this group to have both orchestrated and carried out the 9/11 attack on the WTC so they could easily begin their fascist takeover of America and the World to follow.

The most useful general sources of information on U.S. right-wing conspiracy theories and the basis for understanding the role of reductionism and scapegoating in these movements are: Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (New York: Knopf, 1965); George Johnson, "Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics" (Los Angeles: Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin, 1983); and Frank P. Mintz, "The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture" (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).

For a lengthy discussion of scapegoating and witch hunts, see the September/October issue of with a special section on "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism,> which includes the author's article on the far right's scapegoating of secular humanism.

For a deeper understanding of fascism and its use of scapegoating, see: A. J. Nichols, "Weimar and the Rise of Hitler" (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), Daniel Guerin, "Fascism and Big Business" (New York: Monad Press/Pathfinder, 1973), James Joes, "Fascism in the Contemporary World: Ideology, Evolution, Resurgence" (Boulder: Westview, 1978).>

-Chip Berlet, analyst Political Research Associates 678

Massachusetts Ave, #702 Cambridge, MA 02139

Write for our list of publications including bibliographies


Love, Connie