Examining the layers of American neofascism

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

This essay was originally published on Wed Jan 02, 2008 on La Naranja Grande. I have tweaked it somewhat to better represent my current views on the matter.

As a person who has spent a certain amount of time in the belly of the military/industrial complex beast, I figure my observations on the matter are at least as good as anyone else’s.

While there are unquestioned parallels between what’s happening now and the takeover of Nazi Germany, some of the people who object to those comparisons will retort that it’s impossible that their behavior emulates the Nazis, as they are Jewish, black, or whatever. Likewise, some mainstream media corporations will state that comparisons to the Nazis are laughable because they have “an extremely diverse readership/employee base/non-discriminatory policy”, blah blah yadda blah.

The need to hide their agenda, combined with the need to build a powerful support base in an extremely racially diverse nation has required the neofascist movement to approach the construction of their “New American Century” with more strategy and stealth than their predecessors.

The blatant lie that the current version of capitalism is a meritocracy is how the neofascists have managed to (thus far) successfully hide their agenda from the bulk of the American public.

Modern American fascism has levels as clear as any caste system once you look at it closely. However, unlike a caste system, a person can move up or down the ladder based on his or her willingness to devote themselves to neofascist goals – often at the expense (potential or real) of the personal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This more resembles a form of feudalism than fascism at the lower levels. It HAS to in order to facilitate the deception that it’s a form of non-discriminatory capitalism – and it’s also designed to appeal to those who on either a conscious or unconscious level like the idea of corporate feudalism (and, of course, their place in it). “Exceptions to the rule” like Obama’s presidency and Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court are held out as “examples” of how “anyone can succeed in this country”, but the fact that this even still has to be said at ALL should give one pause. Any long hard look will show that the dividing lines are very clearly there. If there is an “exception to a rule”, it logically follows that there’s still a rule.

LAYER 1: Social class. Ostensibly not racist or sexist, the first dividing lines are initially drawn on the basis of social class, which is determined at the corporate level. Certain career fields have been elevated to paramount importance as applied to the neofascist agenda. These are: police, military, intelligence, the judicial system, information technology, telecommunications, finance, the entertainment industry, and the mainstream news media. Some of these are white collar, some are blue collar, but ALL are ascribed a form of elevated social class in the neofascist world, and all fields are busily weeding out liberal practitioners and are heavily padded with conservatives. Politicians are their own particular class and have to be co-opted differently. As we have seen with Sibel Edmond’s recent testimony, owning politicians happens at a level that frequently brings espionage and black ops into the picture, hence the need for the right wing’s dominance of military intelligence and law enforcement.

LAYER 2: Conservative Judeo/Christianity. The next division is that of whether or not you espouse the views of the religious right. Jews are often allowed to participate peripherally on this level as as Muslims are enthusiastically painted as a common enemy. Jews are treated with excruciating care by the neofascist movement. Depending on appropriate timing and current events, their buttons are expertly pushed by the convenient propagation of swastikas at home by expendable “misguided teenagers”, while in the boardroom they are made to feel like they belong so that there can be continued access to their money and power – AND their communal fears. Greed and fear are the primary tools of the neofascist movement, who have learned that they dare not overtly terrorize the Jews (or anyone else) again unless it can be done in a manner that works well with the rest of their machinations. Gay people are treated pretty much like the Jews are at this layer.

LAYER 3: Fundamentalist Christianity and/or Islam. The next layer eliminates virtually all people of color, gays, and any non-Christians, but sellouts – in particular, Hispanics – are allowed to participate as “good Christian soldiers” – often as contracted mercenaries trained in the arts of interrogation and torture. Again, making this an international problem, the South and Central American focus on the so-called “war on drugs” (more properly termed the war FOR drugs) is how most of these people are brought into the mix. This is the level where the real dirty work is done – these are the folks carrying 75% of the country’s guns and they know quite well how to use them. Good luck finding any Jews here, although there might be a few. For that matter, women are pretty thin on the ground here, too. Good Christian women “stay home and bake cookies for their men”. There’s a large contingent of fundamentalist conservative Christian Koreans at this level. Many are the followers of cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon – yes, he’s still around, briefly surfacing a few years back from his own very much under-the-radar theocratic/corporate empire-building to demand being crowned as a messiah-king by various Christian right members of Congress in exchange for thousands of dollars worth of campaign and lobbying donations. Ironically, a similar but separate layer for “dirty work” interaction has been constructed by Bushco for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Pakistan, and other (currently) cooperative Islamic “big oil friendly” nations. Here’s where you see sexism and greed come to the forefront of the neofascist agenda. You’ll certainly also have a large share of atheists and agnostics here as well – after all, when you don’t bat an eye at killing or torturing folks, it’s kinda hard to pretend you really believe in that whole 5th commandment thing. Nonetheless, their ethics are usually so lacking that they’ll mindlessly participate in the agendas of the religious right simply because they are financially expedient and add to their personal comfort.

LAYER 4: White supremacists. The final layer, as it did in the original days of Prescott Bush, transcends international boundaries and returns both money and power to “the master race”. Racists who make a pretense of practicing Asatru (Scandinavian/Germanic heathenry) are tolerated at this level. Just as Hitler and his followers incorporated a convenient mishmash of Christian and Heathen religious values in order to reach out to the maximum number of hardcore followers, within secret societies like Skull and Bones or the Bohemian Grove modern Neonazis dabble with occult practices and symbols which are warped and twisted to suit their agendas. Other more Christian-aligned societies such as the Knights of Malta have been definitively linked with right wing goon squads from Blackwater USA. Many of these societies and organizations have their roots in Freemasonry. Here is where you once again start seeing a lot of caucasian skin tones and Germanic / Scandinavian names. This is the land of seven+ figure incomes. This is where the multinational corporate game is played. Already billions of dollars have been siphoned out of American banks, in part hidden by the same housing crisis that may ultimately destroy America’s middle class. It’s well known that many wealthy people have taken one look at the American housing crisis and started moving their funds into Deutschebank. Why Deutschebank? Why indeed?

I said “destroy”, but it’s actually an attempt to redefine the middle class. The established middle class dating back to the 1950s that has left-leaning liberal values and a generally higher level of education is being weeded out, shoved into poverty by an assortment of discriminatory financial practices, outright scams, and political machinations; to be replaced with those who feel “lucky” to be there and who buy into the lie that they’re actually being allowed to succeed based on their merits rather than where they fit into the neofascist paradigm. The people I’m talking about are in layers 2 and 3. These are the ones you’ll hear yelling the loudest that liberals are “pseudointellectual snobs” and “bleeding heart whiners” who’ve never had to work for what they had, and/or how most of the country’s poor are lazy welfare abusers and drug addicted criminals (and the white ones will never fail to mention they all have better suntans in any situation where their anonymity is preserved). Upward mobility is an illusion in this world. The folks at the top of the heap aren’t going to let just anyone get close enough to grab their stash. They will surround themselves with people who are loyal to them and their interests, and create a situation where the only choice presented to the middle class is to become a servant (perhaps “serf” is a better term?) or a criminal. This isn’t democracy, folks. It’s a sick car accident between feudalism and fascism.

One of the greatest challenges before America today is that at it’s heart the neofascist problem is no longer uniquely an American one. Overt neonazi movements are thriving in places where they once would have been considered completely unconscionable – Bavaria, Switzerland, New York and California. The movement in question is global, and has been for some time. The original Prescott Bush formula to evade the inconvenient laws of a particular nation by moving clandestine, ugly and illegal policies beyond a particular nation’s borders has been well paid attention to by the military/industrial complex and it’s new multinational participants. A look at the international industry that has risen around “security contracting” as it was fostered by the Bush administration shows you that mercenary goon squads are contracted from companies based in Scandinavia, Europe, South America and South Africa. Many of these companies have shady employee histories and some, like Blackwater/Xe and Dyncorp have been publicly linked to blatant theft of the funds they are granted to work with, contractor fraud, graft, child sex trafficking and sanctioned murder and rape. But these are just the ones we can see – the real baddies are the ones who are PAYING them, and “we the people” are often not permitted to even know who they are. In a world where privacy has become a commodity, those who hire these goon squads have the best that money can buy. Tell me how this is a democracy again? Yeah, right.

Even if we do manage to bring today’s specific war criminals to justice, we may not ever successfully bring down the neonazi movement behind their actions. Much careful groundwork has been laid to hide their tracks, completely take over all forms of newsmedia, cover up their alliances and the movement of their finances, and ensure that they can continue to pop up like cockroaches for the next three generations. The world simply does not have an infrastructure sufficiently moral and ethical enough (either within or outside of the United States) to stop those who are currently playing Prescott Bush’s “both ends against the middle” game in their tracks.

The only way to succeed against them is to dispel the pathetic, vicious lie that American capitalism is a meritocracy and that anyone – black, Jewish, Hispanic, female, gay, or “other”(tm) – can succeed in this country based on merit alone. This is not easy in a country whose media is being slowly taken over, but it is still possible. I’ll say it again, because it’s at the heart of the matter: If there is an “exception to a rule”, it logically follows that there’s still a rule.

How much do you belong to the corporate feudal state? Where do you fit into the “New World Order”? These days, it’s not about what you can do – it’s about who you are, who you know, what you have, and how low you’re willing to go for the cause. Your race and religion matter. Your sexuality and gender matter. But most of all… your politics matter, and that would include the amount they can be swayed by fear, greed, or both.

Just ask Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame – and they’re only the best-sung of far too many examples.

I am of the opinion that the eminently wise and gifted author Robert A. Heinlein foresaw what would happen when he wrote “Revolt in 2100” in 1959 – he was just a few decades off and failed to realize that the problem would become global in scope, or that it would have an underlying white supremacist agenda linked to the vestiges of secret societies and secret military/corporate alliances which survived the decimation of the Third Reich.

Disagree with me? Think I’m full of it? Here I am on the front page, thanks once again to EKH. This is a forum for public discussion. I am very, very well prepared to defend my views. Come get some.