Harpers Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State

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Harpers Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State

 

 

 

 

Harpers Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State

 

http://www.bushstole04.com/harpers_fascist_state.htm

 

 

 

 

 

Harper's Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State

 

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:34:38 -0700

 

The article below appears in the current issue of Harpers and was written

by Lewis H. Lapham

 

Knowing the source of this piece makes it all the more disturbing. It

is not every day that the editor of a respected national magazine

publishes an essay claiming that America is not on the road to

becoming, but ALREADY IS, a fascist state.... or words to that affect.

 

To help prepare you for what follows, here are the final sentence from

this piece.... [i think we can look forward with confidence to

character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling

cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police.]

 

http://organicconsumers.org/Politics/harpers101205.cfm

 

On message By Lewis H. Lapham Harper's Magazine, October 2005, pps.

7-9 " But I venture the challenging statement that if American

democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and

night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then

Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory

Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land. " - Franklin D.

Roosevelt , November 4, 1938

 

In 1938 the word " fascism " hadn't yet been transferred into an

abridged metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous

crime, and on coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in

one of Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of

poetry -- a reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or

the pit of Hell but to the political theories that regard individual

citizens as the property of the government, happy villagers glad to

wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that

placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more emphatically, as

Benito Mussolini liked to say, " Everything in the state. Nothing

outside the state. Nothing against the state. "

 

The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering crowds,

rousing band music, splendid military uniforms), and in the United

States they numbered among their admirers a good many important people

who believed that a somewhat modified form of fascism (power vested in

the banks and business corporations instead of with the army) would

lead the country out of the wilderness of the Great Depression -- put

an end to the Pennsylvania labor troubles, silence the voices of

socialist heresy and democratic dissent. Roosevelt appreciated the

extent of fascism's popularity at the political box office; so does

Eco, who takes pains in the essay " Ur-Fascism, " published in The New

York Review of Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to

translate fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from

our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist

tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at

Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that

sustained the tyrant's rise to glory. The several experiments with

fascist government, in Russia and Spain as well as in Italy and

Germany , didn't depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in

search of their common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle

or a standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a

habit of mind, and on sifting through the assortment of fantastic and

often contradictory notions -- Nazi paganism, Franco's National

Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc. -- he finds a set of axioms

on which all the fascisms agree. Among the most notable:

 

The truth is revealed once and only once.

 

Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't

represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.

 

Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.

 

Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who

betray the culture and subvert traditional values.

 

The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.

 

Argument is tantamount to treason.

 

Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of

fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of " the

people " in the grand opera that is the state.

 

Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy as it

has since become to see the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the

character of an American government. Roosevelt probably wouldn't have

been surprised.

 

He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to his

belief in such a thing as a United Nations to judge the force of

America 's racist passions and the ferocity of its anti-intellectual

prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it happened. The American

democracy won the battles for Normandy and Iwo Jima, but the victories

abroad didn't stem the retreat of democracy at home, after 1968 no

longer moving " forward as a living force, seeking day and night to

better the lot " of its own citizens, and now that sixty years have

passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn't take much talent

for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is fascism,

not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's " Greatest

Generation, " added to its weight and strength on America's shining

seas and fruited plains.

 

A few sorehead liberal intellectuals continue to bemoan the fact,

write books about the good old days when everybody was in charge of

reading his or her own mail. I hear their message and feel their pain,

share their feelings of regret, also wish that Cole Porter was still

writing songs, that Jean Harlow and Robert Mitchum hadn't quit making

movies. But what's gone is gone, and it serves nobody's purpose to

deplore the fact that we're not still riding in a coach to

Philadelphia with Thomas Jefferson. The attitude is cowardly and

French, symptomatic of effete aesthetes who refuse to change with the

times.

 

As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political endearment

are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them

already accepted and understood by a gratifyingly large number of our

most forward-thinking fellow citizens, multitasking and safe with

Jesus. It does no good to ask the weakling's pointless question, " Is

America a fascist state? " We must ask instead, in a major rather than

a minor key, " Can we make America the best damned fascist state the

world has ever seen, " an authoritarian paradise deserving the

admiration of the international capital markets, worthy of " a decent

respect to the opinions of mankind " ? I wish to be the first to say we

can. We're Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed

where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not

given to the early pioneers.

 

We don't have to burn any books.

 

The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on

the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own

good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it

as a blessing that we don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry.

The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems

over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under

administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market

for the sale and distribution of the government's propaganda posters.

The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee

their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even

truthful), but to people who don't know how to read or think, they do

as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond.

 

We don't have to disturb, terrorize, or plunder the bourgeoisie.

 

In Communist Russia as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the

codes of social hygiene occasionally put the regime to the trouble of

smashing department-store windows, beating bank managers to death,

inviting opinionated merchants on complimentary tours (all expenses

paid, breathtaking scenery) of Siberia . The resorts to violence

served as study guides for free, thinking businessmen reluctant to

give up on the democratic notion that the individual citizen is

entitled to an owner's interest in his or her own mind.

 

The difficulty doesn't arise among people accustomed to regarding

themselves as functions of a corporation. Thanks to the diligence of

out news media and the structure of our tax laws, our affluent and

suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring

serial killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard

Business School -- think what you're told to think, and not only do

you get to keep the house in Florida or command of the Pentagon press

office but on some sunny prize day not far over the horizon, the

compensation committee will hand you a check for $40 million, or

President George W. Bush will bestow on you the favor of a nickname as

witty as the ones that on good days elevate Karl Rove to the honorific

" Boy Genius, " on bad days to the disappointed but no less affectionate

" Turd Blossom. " Who doesn't now know that the corporation is immortal,

that it is the corporation that grants the privilege of an identity,

confers meaning on one's life, gives the pension, a decent credit

rating, and the priority standing in the community? Of course the

corporation reserves the right to open one's email, test one's blood,

listen to the phone calls, examine one's urine, hold the patent on the

copyright to any idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it

not? As surely as the loyal fascist knew that it was his duty to serve

the state, the true American knows that it is his duty to protect the

brand.

 

Having met many fine people who come up to the corporate mark -- on

golf courses and commuter trains, tending to their gardens in

Fairfield County while cutting back the payrolls in Michigan and

Mexico -- I'm proud to say (and I think I speak for all of us here

this evening with Senator Clinton and her lovely husband) that we're

blessed with a bourgeoisie that will welcome fascism as gladly as it

welcomes the rain in April and the sun in June. No need to send for

the Gestapo or the NKVD; it will not be necessary to set examples.

 

We don't have to gag the press or seize the radio stations.

 

People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement have no

further use for free speech, which is corrupting, overly emotional,

reckless, and ill-informed, not calibrated to the time available for

television talk or to the performance standards of a Super Bowl

halftime show. It is to our advantage that free speech doesn't meet

the criteria of the free market. We don't require the inspirational

genius of a Joseph Goebbels; we can rely instead on the dictates of

the Nielsen ratings and the camera angles, secure in the knowledge

that the major media syndicates run the business on strictly

corporatist principles -- afraid of anything disruptive or

inappropriate, committed to the promulgation of what is responsible,

rational, and approved by experts. Their willingness to stay on

message is a credit to their professionalism.

 

The early twentieth-century fascists had to contend with individuals

who regarded their freedom of __expression as a necessity -- the bone

and marrow of their existence, how they recognized themselves as human

beings. Which was why, if sometimes they refused appointments to the

state-run radio stations, they sometimes were found dead on the

Italian autostrada or drowned in the Kiel Canal . The authorities

looked upon their deaths as forms of self-indulgence. The same

attitude governs the agreement reached between labor and management at

our leading news organizations. No question that the freedom of speech

is extended to every American -- it says so in the Constitution -- but

the privilege is one that mustn't be abused. Understood in a proper

and financially rewarding light, freedom of speech is more trouble

than it's worth -- a luxury comparable to owning a racehorse and

likely to bring with it little else except the risk of being made to

look ridiculous. People who learn to conduct themselves in a manner

respectful of the telephone tap and the surveillance camera have no

reason to fear the fist of censorship. By removing the chore of having

to think for oneself, one frees up more leisure time to enjoy the

convenience of the Internet services that know exactly what one likes

to hear and see and wear and eat. We don't have to murder the

intelligentsia.

 

Here again, we find ourselves in luck. The society is so glutted with

easy entertainment that no writer or company of writers is troublesome

enough to warrant the compliment of an arrest, or even the courtesy of

a sharp blow to the head. What passes for the American school of

dissent talks exclusively to itself in the pages of obscure journals,

across the coffee cups in Berkeley and Park Slope, in half-deserted

lecture halls in small Midwestern colleges. The author on the platform

or the beach towel can be relied upon to direct his angriest invective

at the other members of the academy who failed to drape around the

title of his latest book the garland of a rave review.

 

The blessings bestowed by Providence place America in the front rank

of nations addressing the problems of a twenty-first century, certain

to require bold geopolitical initiatives and strong ideological

solutions. How can it be otherwise? More pressing demands for always

scarcer resources; ever larger numbers of people who cannot be

controlled except with an increasingly heavy hand of authoritarian

guidance. Who better than the Americans to lead the fascist

renaissance, set the paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? The

existence of mankind hangs in the balance; failure is not an option.

Where else but in America can the world find the visionary

intelligence to lead it bravely into the future -- Donald Rumsfeld our

Dante, Turd Blossom our Michelangelo?

 

I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made brave

strides forward. By matching Eco's list of fascist commandments

against our record of achievement, we can see how well we've begun the

new project for the next millennium -- the notion of absolute and

eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in

the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity

provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by

the fiat of " intelligent design " ; a state of perpetual war and a

government administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of

fear; two presidential elections stolen with little or no objection on

the part of a complacent populace; the nation's congressional

districts gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty

years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news

media devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting images of

corporate executives like those of the emperor heroes on the coins of

ancient Rome.

 

An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to

expect from the innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early

twentieth-century fascisms didn't enter their golden age until the

proletariat in the countries that gave them birth had been reduced to

abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of

eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy. On the evidence of

the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration

with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say

nothing of expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we

can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies,

picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed

motorcycle police.