Fascist America

David Rozelle: Drifting toward fascism

By David Rozelle
June 12, 2003

What shall I call this new America in-the-making just three years into a new century?

These days I find myself unable to swallow what I have told myself, in both the best and worst of times, about ourselves as Americans. All the old words have broken loose from reality. They rattle like falsehoods in the nation's throat.

Based upon how our America now conducts itself among its fellow human beings - including us, its own citizenry - what is our nation becoming? What, if we're honest with ourselves, are we to call a system of government that behaves in these ways:

* Taxes its ordinary people into unfathomable national debt, thereby ensuring that its rich revel in even more riches, its poor regress into even more poverty, its military rejoice in even more militarism?

* Devises and enforces policies that starve public services for its most vulnerable citizenry - its children, its elderly, its working poor, its racial minorities?

* Sells national and state legislation to the highest bidders from among wealthy interest groups, while vigorously resisting reforms that would restore democratic power to the individual?

* Exercises its contempt for the collective will of other nations by unilaterally tearing up global arms and environmental treaties, while dismissing both the legal and moral authority of the United Nations?

* Invades and conquers a sovereign country by fabricating military intelligence as a pretext for invasion, then, declares "liberation" as its real intention all along as it expropriates that nation's oil fields?

* Turns one cataracted eye to atrocities in dozens of other countries that have no oil wells to liberate, the other to a report by Amnesty International critical of its own behavior as a "liberator"?

* In a work of egregious TV propaganda, lands its supreme leader "at sea" (costumed as a fighter pilot) on the state-of-the-art USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim victory over a third-rate, enfeebled nation?

* Holds nameless prisoners incommunicado, without counsel or charges, for indefinite periods of time, in addition incarcerating the highest proportion of its own citizens (most of them black) in the world?

* Actively attempts to nullify laws intended to ensure equality for racial and other minorities, at the same time invoking evangelical Christianity as the primary motive for all of its policies?

* Alone among Western nations preserves capital punishment, even seeking to try alleged murderers in states where, upon conviction, the likelihood of execution is most probable?

* Threatens the civil rights of individual citizens by expanding its surveillance and policing powers, including pressuring libraries to release to federal authorities the reading records of library patrons?

* Conspires to consolidate media control - and thereby dissemination of "news" information - among corporate leviathans lavishly invested in perpetuating the incumbent party's political power?

Footnote: Fascism: "A philosophy of government that stresses the primacy and glory of the state ... obedience to its leader, subordination of the individual will to the state's authority ... suppression of dissent. Martial virtues are celebrated, while liberal democratic values are denigrated ... led by charismatic leaders who represented to their publics the strength that could rescue their nation from political and economic conditions." - Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia.

http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/guest/50702.php

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