Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion
Chapter 3 – Multi-Party Democracy
Chapter 4 –The Right-Wing Brain
Chapter 5 – Choosing Government Leaders
Chapter 6 – The Theology of Politics
Chapter 7 – The Theology of Elections
Chapter 8 — Rubber-Stamp Parliaments
Chapter 9 – Democracy and Universal Values
Chapter 10 – Myths of Democracy
Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy
Chapter 12 – Bernays and Democracy Control
Chapter 13 – Democracy to Fascism
Chapter 14- The Non-Imperial Empire
Chapter 15 – China’s Democracy Experiments
Chapter 16 – China is Not the West
Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion
13. Chapter 13 – Democracy to Fascism
BULGARIAN CHINESE ENGLISH ESTONIAN POLSKI ROMANIAN
Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion e-book
Fascism is a political ideology fundamentally authoritarian in character, with a strong nationalism and an essentially belligerent militaristic outlook. Fascism carries primarily a corporate perspective as opposed to a socialist view, directed to satisfying the needs, values and objectives of finance and corporations, organising both the economy and the political system according to this agenda. A fascist government actively suppresses any objection to its ideology and will crush any movement which opposes it. In keeping with their belligerent nature, fascist governments generally view violence and war as stimulants to national spirit and vitality. Being politically Right-Wing, they maintain their position through firm control or compliance of the media, and most often engage in a vast array of lies and deception. These governments tend to be bigoted, if not racist, invariably require “enemies” to achieve public solidarity, and are often supremacist or at least ‘exceptional’ in their self-assessment. They either believe, or pretend to believe, that they have a license on truth. Large military budgets, the creation and demonisation of fictitious enemies to propagate fear and maintain population control, are all typical characteristics of a fascist regime, as is massive public surveillance.
In 1995 the Italian Scholar Umberto Eco produced a paper titled ‘Eternal Fascism’ in which he examined the characteristics of fascist regimes. In 2003, Laurence W. Britt did an excellent and scholarly work in dissecting and categorising past fascist regimes, in which he revealed common threads that linked all of them in “patterns of national behavior and abuse of power“. He wrote that “Even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi, (which is) not a revelation … but useful … to shed needed light on current circumstances.” I am including here a composite of edited extracts from these two papers with additional commentary of my own. Significant statements by these two authors are in quotation marks. This is a list of the characteristics of fascist states, taken from Britt’s original article:
13.1. Early Warning Signs of Fascism
- Powerful and continuing nationalism
- Supremacy of the military
- Obsession with national security
- Obsession with crime and punishment
- Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
- Disdain for human rights
- Corporate power is protected while labor power is suppressed
- Controlled mass media
- Rampant cronyism and corruption
- Intertwined religion and government
- Fraudulent elections
- Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
- Rampant Sexism
If we examine the US on these categories, we find an almost perfect match. Certainly, the US has the most strident nationalism of all nations today, with the hysteria of patriotism and flag-worship unabated and even increasing, with the delusional theory of American Exceptionalism as virulent as ever. There is no question about military supremacy, with the US spending almost twice as much on its military as the rest of the world combined and being by an order of magnitude the world’s largest arms manufacturer and dealer. President Obama stated flatly that for the US to remain ‘peaceful and prosperous‘ it needed the world’s largest and most powerful military to maintain an overwhelming military supremacy. Obsession with issues of national security is so common in the US today it has become an object of ridicule. Every manner of information is withheld, every manner of lie is told, every manner of crime is committed, all with the excuse of ‘national security’. Britt noted that a national security apparatus was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints, with its actions always justified under the rubric of protecting “national security”, and that questioning these oppressive activities is now often portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
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