Tag: fascism

When I first started blogging at dailykos nearly two years ago, I took a lot of grief (and I mean a lot of grief) for some of my assertions (not that there weren’t plenty of others making them), such as:

The US has fallen to a fascist coup.

The American military/political establishment has long been guilty of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

The war in Iraq was always about oil and empire and was planned far in advance of 9/11/2001.

The elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen.

The so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ is bogus.

Failure to impeach will ensure the end of our democracy.

The Democrats have sold us out.

Bush and his cronies and everyone who supports them or enables them are all war criminals and traitors.

We are never leaving Iraq.

We are NOT a democracy.

We are not free.

I don’t make these assertions so often or so vigorously anymore – I don’t have to.  They are made daily by virtually everyone in the blogosphere.  My ‘wild-eyed’ hysteria is now common knowledge.  Reality has sunk in.  In fact, it’s far worse than even I imagined.

Being of a certain age, much of my early worldview was shaped by childhood indoctrination about authoritarian states, I guess you could call me part of the “Duck and Cover” generation.  Taught from an early age about the evils of communism and fascism, we were often told that one of the greatest differences between free societies like our own, and evil totalitarian states, was that here in America one was safe to voice political views or dissent without fear of government retribution. We had no Siberian exile, Gulags, or internment camps. The police did not burst into your home in the middle of the night and arrest you on trumped up charges simply for voicing opinions contradictory to government policy.

Yet given today’s current situation, it is no longer quite so easy to draw such simplistic comparisons.

Under the current administration, no thinking person can honestly say that they don’t feel the slow grip of government overreach extending into the fabric of everyday life. An uneasiness has settled across the nation, somehow instinctively knowing that we are teetering on a precipice from which at any moment we could be sent spiraling down into the depths of  a fascist nightmare straight out of the a futuristic novel.

Ann Coulter, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

I am motivated to edit and repost this diary for several reasons.

The first reason is something that I’ve thought about Ann Coulter ever since I became aware of her rhetoric, some of which is outlined in Coulter on Today: Nuking Iran warms Conservatives hearts.