CommentsGUEST WORDS--(Note: Both Presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, hold former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in high esteem. Kissinger has also been linked to widespread war crimes, alluded to in Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war film, Dr. Strangelove. In that film, Peter Sellers portrayed Henry Kissinger.)
I offer this follow-up to comments I received in response to a recent CityWatch article on the prospects of fascism in the United States after the November 2016 Presidential election.
One critic noted that the article made some important points, especially that fascism involves both racism and militarism, but it ignored two other important features of fascism:
US Government Support for Fascism Abroad: This critic wrote that I failed to mention that the US government has trained and supported many fascistic regimes throughout the world, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah, Philippines under Marcos, and Chile under Pinochet. In light of these precedents, this critic argued that what has been repeatedly pursued by government officials outside the United States could be readily let loose within the United States.
This comment is well taken, and there are many other examples past and present that confirm it. According to historian William Blum, the long, bi-partisan history of US foreign policy over the past 70 years contains dozens of executive actions and Congressionally funded programs to overthrow democratically-elected governments and support regimes that easily qualify as fascist, authoritarian, or totalitarian.
For example, through the School of the America’s, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), the United States government has trained and equipped the police, army, and security agencies of many authoritarian regimes in Latin America. This record is readily available, including the identities of government officials who advocated this approach, such as Jean Kirkpatrick, the first US woman ambassador to the United Nations.
In fact, some of those actors are currently in high-level government positions, such as Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Others, like Henry Kissinger, are waiting for the phone to ring in order to offer advice on how to continue and implement an openly militaristic US foreign policy, whether the next president is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. According to the late writer, Christopher Hitchens, Kissinger’s long foreign policy record is filled with enough blood and mayhem to justify prosecution at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Nevertheless, both presidential candidates hold Kissinger in high esteem and seek his support.
Authoritarian Work Places in the United States: I was also told that most Americans are already comfortable with a basic feature of fascism at their work places. In Germany Fuhrer means leader, and the organizing principle of the Third Reich was the primacy of the "leader.” In the United States most work places are no different, although we call the leader “the boss.” The constitutional freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights do not apply at work because the boss rules by fiat. This is the same authoritarian leader principle that characterized the Third Reich, unquestioned and unopposed executive authority.
I agree with this comment, too. Nearly all work places in the United States have an authoritarian, hierarchical organizational model. Even in unionized work environments, now employing less than 10 percent of the US work force, unions operate under detailed constraints. Their negotiated labor contracts contain a Management Rights provision in which unionized employees and their bargaining agents acknowledge the authority of management to determine and implement a company or agency’s mission. By their own agreement, unions are restricted to grievances and negotiated contracts related to working conditions only. Their activities at work places are clearly limited and closely monitored so they do not encroach on “the leader principle.”
In practice this means that employees have no right or authority to question any practices of management, other than such mundane categories as overtime pay and sick days.
As for the 90 percent of the work force in the United States that does not have the protection of a union contract, they work at the discretion of management. Such rights, as freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom of speech, stop at the work place door. This leader principle (i.e. the boss might be an SOB, but he is always right) is heavily socialized into all of us from an early age.
False Equivalency of Trump and Clinton: A third criticism of my article was that I was mistaken to call out bi-partisan fascist tendencies and to therefore imply that a Clinton administration would also harbor dangerous fascist practices. Instead, I was told I should have focused my article on Donald Trump because he presents, by far, a much greater fascist danger. These critics then make, what strikes me, as a twisted argument. They argue that we first need to urgently support Hillary Clinton to stop a likely fascist, Donald Trump. But once Hillary Clinton is sworn into office, then we need to immediately build mass movements to oppose the assured military interventions she will unleash, as well as her status quo approach to domestic policy already presented by Clinton surrogates at the Democratic Party’s current Platform Committee.
I realize my bi-partisan analysis took many readers, like this critic, by surprise because they consider fascism to be an extreme right-wing phenomenon, and they therefore attribute it to Donald Trump, including his successful appeals to white supremacists. No doubt about it, Trump’s racism and xenophobia are important features of fascism, but they are hardly the only ones.
Fascism, as I previously explained, also includes the brute power of the state, especially the ability to use its police powers to spy on, surveil, and disrupt the political process, up to the point of incarceration, torture, and murder. This is hardly the monopoly of conservative Republicans. In fact, my inventory of fascistic precedents in modern US history included the Sabotage and Espionage Acts initiated by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson during WWI, the development of Cointelpro under FDR, another Democrat, the anti-Communist Cold War and domestic witch hunts that began in 1946 under Democratic President Truman, and authoritarian legislation partially authored by arch-liberal Democrat Hubert Humphrey (The Communist Control Act of 1954), portions of which were opposed by the Eisenhower Administration.
As for mass and detailed personal surveillance of the US population, it is already extremely advanced, including all-embracing electronic snooping of computers, emails, text messages, voice messages, telephone calls, and snail mail. It is also important to note that much or this spying is not legal, but continues anyway with wide Congressional and Presidential support, despite extensive public exposure of illegal domestic surveillance by Edward Snowden.
The other element of a fascist program, aggressive, preemptive warfare, is only possible through the Federal Government, although major new US invasions and occupations currently face serious political obstacles. Nevertheless, the neocons once associated with Vice President Cheney are hard at work again. They are making their case for more foreign US military interventions in their latest document: Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand U.S. Engagement in a Competitive World Order. Furthermore, some of the neo-cons linked to the second Bush Jr. Administration, such as Robert Kagan, are now supporting and fund-raising for Hillary Clinton.
While one of the primary military tactics of the Obama Administration is an executive kill list implemented through drone assassinations, it appears that like bombing campaigns, these aerial military tactics do not lead to political victories. While bombs, missiles, and drones have an extraordinary capacity to maim and kill, assassinated leaders are easily replaced. Furthermore, death and injury to non-combatants, such as relatives attending wedding parties, supports the recruitment of military irregulars to groups like Al Quaida and the Islamic State. Meanwhile, in the United States, to swing the pendulum back from drone warfare to ground invasions and occupations, the Pentagon will demand more cannon fodder. The occupations on Afghanistan and Iraq cost the US military dearly in weaponry (much of grabbed by ISIS in Iraq), morale, and soldiers. This barrier must be overcome in order to have new boots on the ground.
The logical solution to this impasse is military conscription, but it would now come at tremendous political costs. As recently amended, the Selective Service System no longer offers deferments to students and women. It is difficult to imagine a successful ideological campaign to renew conscription among older teenagers and 20-something’s after a 44-year lapse. At present these young adults do not have the slightest motivation to involuntarily join US ground forces in the two most likely military theaters: Russia’s western flank and in Syria, either fighting Isis, the Assad regime, or fighting these two archenemies at the same time. While the Obama Administration’s Pivot to Asia has not yet led to major troop deployments or military conflicts with China, this would be the third military theater that the next administration would gear up for, regardless of who is elected.
But, as we have seen in many previous US wars, major pretexts for military escalation, such as Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, and 9-11, steadily appear. Could such incidents appear again, either by luck or by design, to justify the draft and renewed major wars? Absolutely. Could they again be used to institute heightened domestic political repression? Absolutely.
Could such a regime prevail more than a few years? Not likely.
This is why the prospects for fascism in the United States should be taken seriously, but why the prospects for counter-movements must also be taken seriously.
(Victor Rothman lives in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected].)
-cw
It is Now Trump vs. Clinton, So How Valid are Predictions of American Fascism? (Part 2)
