Fascism: 1975 and 1993
According to Dead Horse, the definition of “fascism” has made an odd shift between 1975 and 1993, with some interesting parallels to the recent bail-out. Here are the two American Heritage definitions:
From 1975: “A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.”
From 1993: “A system of government marked by a totalitarian dictator, socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition, and usually a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.”
Dead Horse writes:
Notice what’s missing in the 1993 definition? “[M]erging of state and business leadership…” And that fascism is an extreme right phenomenon. By removing “extreme right” from the definition clowns like Goldberg were free to write “Liberal Fascism”, a most moronic combination of two antithetical terms.
An addition to the 1993 definition is “socioeconomic controls”. What form of government doesn’t have socioeconomic controls? Sweden has socioeconomic controls. Someone who didn’t know anything about fascism could grab onto “socioeconomic controls” and presume that fascism was against free markets, you know, like liberals.
Of course, fascism is against free markets. But then most people who proclaim that they are for free markets are against free markets. The question is never about the existence of socioeconomic controls. It’s about what kind of controls and who benefits. The same class of people who benefited from fascism in Germany and Italy are the same kind of people who benefit from the execution of Paulson’s plea.
It’s the merging of state and business leadership that is becoming official with this proposed bailout.
(Via A Tiny Revolution.)
Statist Olympic Problems Are Bigger Than Beijing
Mike Soron:
The reinvention of the Olympics in the late 19th century happened at the height of the nation-state’s ascendency. Since 1894, the Olympics have been used not to celebrate sport, but to celebrate the idea of the nation-state.
The Olympic experience is consistently used to violently change a human and ecological region. The system, in the wake of Olympic oppression, is shocked — in economic terms, human terms, in political terms. Rights suspended, social housing destroyed, a comprehensive reallocation of public and private resources towards corporatism, and forced fanfare for the primacy of the nation-state.
The “Politicization” of the DoJ
Posted at 4:39 PM
Today the Justice Department released a report concluding that Bush loyalists at the DoJ broke the law by allowing “politics” to influence their hiring decisions. The way this ongoing scandal has been reported has often been in the context of “politicization,” of how the administration sought to bring in like-minded yes-men in order to promote executive sovereignty. I think there are two problems with this: (1) I don’t think you can call what the administration did in regards to the DoJ to be “politicization,” properly so-called; and (2) the tacit assumption on behalf of most pundits has been that “politicization” is something that should be condemned.
It’s obvious that the administration’s intent in carrying out this policy has been to allow for them to push through controversial legislation as quickly as possible and with as little debate as possible. Moreover, the administration has used the pretext of an amorphous, all-encompassing threat vis-a-vis the “War on Terror” to legitimize their extra-legal maneuvering. By exploiting shock and then establishing its subsequent lacunae within the juridical order as the norm, the Bush administration has successfully strengthened the power of the executive branch to an unprecedented degree.
What they haven’t done is “politicization” proper. In fact, you could even say they did the opposite: they depoliticized the Justice Department by extricating it from the political domain. By placing it under the subordination of the executive branch, the Bush administration was able to ignore public opinion on issues such as domestic wiretapping, torture, and internment. They’ve justified their actions on the basis of the omnipresent threat of terrorism, which confronted them with a “crisis” that had to be met with “objective” measures. All of this was done under the visage of “security,” “neutrality,” and “objectivity,” just as neoliberalism attempts to paint its fundamentalist market-oriented view as a “science.”
Admittedly, Bush’s tactics have been highly partisan, but that doesn’t mean the same thing as “political.” Perhaps one of the reasons why the word “politicization” continues to be misused is because both parties have allied against it. For conservatives, depoliticization involves the hollowing out of government by replacing all public services with outsourced private sector alternatives, as well as the continued efforts to promote sovereignty over democracy. For liberals, depoliticization involves the discourse of human rights, the reduction of structural violence to atomized incidents, “tolerance” over class struggle and “green capitalism” over deep ecology. Hence, not only is the Bush administration’s so-called “politicization” of the Justice Department in fact depoliticizing, but the very acceptance of the common usage of “politicization” in reference to the incident is a depoliticizing political decision.