FASCISM

A guest blog by Robert Lee Hefter
NOTE: I am determined to teach you guys how to use this blog! - The Dictator


I never thought I'd have to admit it, but Donald Rumsfeld finally got something right when he charged recently that some Americans haven't learned from history.

Most Americans, for example, probably don't know about the Reichstag Fire: the German Pariliment building was torched and the usual suspects - Jews, Communists and other undesirables - were rounded up. But the Nazis had committed the arson themselves, and Chancellor Adolf Hitler used it as a pretext for suspending civil liberties for all Germans. This bold fraud was the key that unlocked the horrors of World War Two. Indeed, history is replete with examples of rulers fabricating events to shock and terrorize their subjects into submission.

But Rumsfeld was all wrong when he claimed we're facing a new kind of fascism.

The word means what it has always meant: the fusion of state and corporation (think Krupp, I.G. Farben and Bayer in 1931, or Halliburton, the Carlyle Group and Bioport in 2003)

"Islamofascism" exists nowhere except in the desperate depths of the neocon think tanks. Fundamentalist Muslims, like fundamentalists of any stripe, believe that religious law should be enforced by the state; that's theocracy, not fascism.

Constitutional democracy requires a secular state, as the Founders knew only too well. If it's to survive in the 21st Century, it also requires that we stip corporations of all political power, especially their disasterous legal personhood. - Robert Lee Hefter, NJ