Revisualizing Fascism
Fomenting social insecurity through fear and misinformation has been the stuff of repressive regimes since the beginning of bad governance. The objective being fundamentally twofold: A) To enable a regime to act with impunity through the institutionalization of policies aimed to weaken the rule of law, democracy, civil liberties and human rights, and B) To deflect attention from real insecurity, such as critical socio-economic issues, which the regime is unwilling to solve or is inherently incapable of solving.
The political success of the misinformation fabricated by a regime is highly dependent on the complicity of a subservient media feeding it to the public. Additionally, it also relies on the systemic erosion of public education and civil participation institutions to further curtail the citizens’ ability to participate and exercise critical analysis of information. Once a society is robbed of its ability to empirically analyze and challenge information, there is little left standing between the system’s fabrication of the lie and its capacity to act with impunity in response to it.
In the US, we have always identified these social and political conditions with foreign regimes. Preferably those who presently oppose US policies or those that, in dramatic black and white vintage war footage, were defeated by the just hand of our armed forces. We have been “educated” in our schools and through the media about the qualifying criteria for these repressive/totalitarian states: The absoluteness of their imposition of ideology and values, control of political information production and dissemination, the murder and persecution of anyone considered an enemy of the state, the mass incarcerations of all political opposition, etc. What we are not being taught at school, or by the History Channel, is how the methodologies of these supposedly textbook repressive regimes have informed the governing methodology of our own modern capitalist “democracies”.
In light of the historical lack of long-term sustainability of ideological totalitarianism, the corporate state has instead aimed to produce a system that is not dependant for its survival on any sort of absolutist value system or ideology, like Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain were in their time. The new rhetoric is not aimed at blind and obedient adherence to a state’s orthodox ideology, or else. No. The modern capitalist system is instead fueling repression through the ethos, logos, and pathos of the free market; i.e. the rhetoric of selling political ignorance and mindless consumerism.
In other words, for as long as it can be sustained, capitalist repression will not come to us in echoes of macabre black and white footage of goose-stepping evil Nazis marching into our neighborhoods. The new Gestapo at the service of global capital does indeed visit our homes from time to time, and selected subversives are regularly disappeared into the dark corners of our judiciary system or secret torture facilities, but the bulk of the disempowerment of the common citizen comes at us through corporate-controlled mass communications marketing a steady diet of mindless entertainment, misinformation, and bigger and better lies aimed to keep the spectacle of fear, mistrust and ignorance alive. Without a single mass concentration camp or extermination campaign, political leaders and PR firms at the service of the corporatocracy have successfully managed to impose a complete redefinition of democracy, freedom and progress on our society.
Mass propaganda tools have been perfected to secure the stage for the capitalist state to misgovern, oppress, and wage war with complete impunity while most of our fellow citizens think they have exercised democracy by voting in no choice elections and by making goods and services purchasing choices (preferably through debt). A regime that has mass-conditioned most of its citizens to be more worried about the house arrest of some filthy rich decadent celebrity or the unveiling of the I-phone than about the omnipotent power corporations exercise over their lives, makes Goebbels propaganda achievements in Nazi Germany seem to me like child’s play.
Price vs True Cost
In one of his many witty aphorisms critical of late Victorian English society, Oscar Wilde wrote: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I thought that if we were to add a new variable to best connect this aphorism to post-modern capitalist society, it might have to read something like: “Nowadays people know the price of everything, but the true cost of nothing”.
For instance, what is the true cost of goods produced in a neighboring state for close to slavery wages? We know the price tag of such goods at the store, but do we understand its true costs? To the worker’s family not earning a living wage? To that society’s social instability? To our own nation’s poisoned experience with immigration? We are bombarded by political pundits in the media with the price tag of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but do we know its true cost? To public education, public health, environmental protection, food autonomy or a sustainable economy? To our own long-term real security as a nation? To our place as a people in the eyes of the world? We know the price tag for bailing out corporations and financial institutions that sent millions of us into economic demise, but does anyone know the true costs of placing these agents of a failed system back in the driver’s seat of the economic and social directives of our society?
Sadly, and with horrible consequences, most people do not know the answer to these questions and are not being educated to learn how to ask them either. A clear understanding by the citizen of the true costs of an imperialist corporate state does not serve the interests of those who benefit from and thrive in this type of system. After all, our political class is “the corporation”. Our media outlets are “the corporation”. More and more, our public institutions are also fast becoming “the corporation”; from public schools, to universities, to hospitals, to the military. What is important, we are told, is not that we live under an oppressive, war mongering, fear mongering, Orwellian corporatocracy set on using the state to impose the interests of the few over those of the many. What’s important is that GDP indicator figures grow along their projected trajectory. Are the policies of the regime we voted for producing the necessary “economic growth” numbers to keep our system alive? If yes, then there is nothing to worry about. Keep silent. Don’t ask at what environmental or social true costs did that 5 growth come. Watch some more TV and be patient. Those economic growth figures may never translate into improvements of social services or infrastructure for our communities, or an increase in real wealth of the average family, but sooner or later, it is sure to trickle down into new lines of credit for us to keep buying and consuming more than we need. After all, that’s what makes the system work. What keeps us happy and what we value as a culture. That’s what we are conditioned to kill and die for. We must always be able to buy and consume more crap no matter what.
In order to secure the pursuit of this neoliberal nirvana, we need enemies, not knowledge. We need threats to the future happiness of our children. But threats which have nothing to do with the real ones to their futures, like global warming, the lack of functional and just public education institutions, a media that keeps them addicted to junk food and violent video games, or a society alienated from the world community and living in constant fear and state of war. No. Not those threats. To secure the stability of the modern capitalist state regime we need to fabricate others. We need a constant flow of new enemies and challenges to our security that cannot be defeated or solved by good policy and comprehensive governing directives. We don’t need a threat solved by comprehensive investment in the protection and conservation of our resources and strengthening of our communities, scientific research that places nature and people before profits, or by implementing foreign policies which advance global sustainability and the ability for all nations to exist in peace and self-determination. No. What we need is the threat of millions of non-existent Al Qaida crazies setting up camp along the Canadian border ready to blow themselves up and kill our children just to upset out trip to Whole Foods. We need a culture of hate and intolerance. We need chaos. We need just the right measure of fear to keep us pathologically purchasing useless goods that fabricate security and enrich the ones engineering our real insecurity.
Bi-Partisan Deceptions and Fear Mongering
The “honest” right holds no punches. They blame the poor for their own condition and believe the wealthy and privileged are better off because they are simply born better people. They deny institutionalized oppression and believe their class and race privileges and access to power as inherent, and are willing to send others to wars to die for it. They also understand that to keep their supremacist status quo they need numbers and must appeal, not just to their own class, but also to disenfranchised whites who are suffering economically but don’t know exactly why. These politics of white race solidarity over working class solidarity have been largely successful (in large part thanks to the failure of white progressives to organize their own communities instead of trying to “help” people of color fight oppression in ours*) In this context then, poor whites become the displaced victims of minorities, of big government, of international law, of immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks, environmentalists, unions, the imaginary liberal media, secularists, gays, other whites that disagree, and of the countless dangerous foreign governments set on destroying our way of life… It’s never Monsanto, General Electric, institutionalized injustice, or their own elected neoliberal governments’ economic agendas that destroyed the profitability of the family farm, moved good paying blue collar industrial jobs to another country, or made the costs of a decent education forbidden to most families. No. The enemy is Juan, the undocumented laborer stealing a job most whites would never want. The culprit is the single mom in Detroit who keeps having children to get more welfare! So says Fox News, so it must be true.
The “dishonest” right practices a slightly more convoluted, but similarly deceptive strategy. They market a rhetoric that implies to serve the interests of our society as a whole. To serve as a just economic broker in a free enterprise society between the interests of the rich and powerful and those of the working person. To advance a culture of tolerance, justice, fairness, peace and understanding. Yet, a little digging from the left or a little push at their positions from the honest right, and the progressive pretenses of these “fascists with a heart of gold” soon dissipate. In other words, the actual commitment of the liberal intelligentsia is to the sustainability of the capitalist status quo, not to the interests of the people. Their idea is to advance only the change that is necessary to make capitalism more functional and sustainable long term. To “fix” capitalism, and make it safe from mass revolt, but without really ever challenging the dominant political and economic power paradigm.
As their cheap, populist rhetoric becomes exposed and discredited every single time they gain power, they too must then resort to the fabrication of false threats and enemies to distract the electorate’s attention from their unwillingness to generate any real change. As proven in the last year alone, neither criminal financial institutions, exploitative and polluting multinational corporations, war criminals, the enemies of public health, or the agents of the military industrial complex inside their own administration have anything to fear from this “most progressive” of liberal administrations. Quite the contrary, the Obama administration brought us The New Deal Part Two: Where Keynes meets Reagan. Capitalism is saved again through government intervention, but not by stimulating the economy from the bottom up though government investment in public works and social infrastructure development projects this time, but by funding and rewarding the culprits of the economic meltdown so they could save themselves first and trust that their good fortunes would then trickle down to the rest of us.
Only the truly fanatic or blind can’t see that those posing as friends of the working class and as promoters of a new culture in national and foreign policies have shamelessly continued to serve as loyal agents of the corporatocracy. If the intention for REAL change had ever been part of the Democratic Party’s agenda, the opportunity could not have been better than after two Republican engineered failed wars and biggest economic crises in the nation’s history. The present administration has instead capitulated by surrendering the struggle for economic, environmental and social justice against corporate power at home, and by advancing ever more aggressive war efforts and regressive foreign policies abroad.
This betrayal and capitulation of the Obama administration has delivered a death blow to whatever real progressive momentum might have been there in the mainstream after the fascistic fiascos of the Bush administration. Of course, according to those in power it is not them, nor their party that have failed to challenge corporate dominance and the failed policies of previous administrations. They have simply not been allowed to decisively end the illegal war an occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, or to stop building military bases in Colombia, or to normalize relations with Cuba, or stop killing civilians in Pakistan with drone attacks, or prosecute the criminal activities of the CIA, or improve access to higher education by the poor, or protect the rights of immigrant workers, or launch a truly comprehensive and progressive economic recovery plan, or promote a truly effective climate change policy, or, or, or… The fault for all of this impotence is the Enemy. The Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, McCain, Newt, Beck, Fox News, and other pesky racists, right wing extremists and neo cons set on undermining the noble intentions of the new administration. Not only are they to blame for everything they have not done (and done), but if we do not vote for the democrats again in November our nation will surely be overrun by these dangerous right wing enemies of reason, world peace, and class and racial harmony. For sure we’ll be doomed then…So says MSNBC, so it must be true.
As American as Apple Pie
In addition to the fears and lies being fabricated by both sides of the capitalist status quo against each other as they jockey for political position, there are also the jointly manufactured ones needed for the perpetration of Empire whose expansion and survival is the mandate of both parties. Of course, in both sides of the mainstream political discourse the astronomical price tag for the Defense Department budget (a record high $708 billion for 2011 in the middle of an economic recession!), is not at all meant to advance US military and economic hegemony and for making the world safe for Exxon, Lockheed, Boeing, and Halliburton profits. Not at all. According to the political class and their punduits in the media, this is a critically necessary expenditure to fend off domestic terrorists determined to burn down every ski resort in Colorado, Islamists trying to take over the public school curricula of Texas, the imminent Iranian drone missile attack of Salt Lake City, North Korea’s clear intentions to nuke American Samoa, and to nip in the bud, Hugo Chavez’ intentions of becoming the 45 president of the United States by mobilizing a Chinese armed army composed of nothing but undocumented workers presently encamped somewhere in Arizona and feasting on food stamp purchased fajitas!...and then some.
Bring it down a couple of notches and the actual justifications given by the regime for the build-up of an imperial army are no less ridiculous in their premises than what I’ve stated. Fear mongering by the whole of the US political class, including Hilary Clinton’s State Department, has not only enabled the build up of our military for foreign conquest and intervention, but has also served as the core justification to assault civil rights and political liberties at home. Bipartisan implementation (or tacit support) of draconian national policing policies such as the militarization of our borders, the infiltration and surveillance of legal political and civic organizations by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, the persecution and intimidation of non-violent political activists suddenly reclassified as domestic terrorist threats, and the mass arrests and trials of undocumented workers have become the rule and not the exception in the regime’s strategy to deal with domestic political and social pressures.
There are no accidents or miscalculations in the running of Empire. The criminal and repressive policies that the capitalist state institutes and that when exposed the complicit media frames as random cases of bad policing, poor policy decisions, bad information or intelligence based decisions, abuses of governmental power by a few rotten apples, or misinformed law enforcement directives are no such things. Torture, assassinations, spying on its own citizenry, false incarcerations, illegal wars and interventions in the affairs of other nations, are not accidents! They are the results of an intentional political strategy based on lies and fear and created by both Republican and Democrat administrations over the course of our nation’s history in order to advance and protect US capitalist interests abroad, and an unsustainable culture and economic system at home.
Policies and practices instituted by the state and aimed at physically controlling, intimidating and eliminating any resistance to Empire at home and abroad, are as American as apple pie. It just happens that these practices become much more blatant and brutal whenever capitalism and US hegemony falls into one of its inevitable periodic crises-as we have now- and Empire then needs to come out swinging for its very survival. The Empire is corrupt and it is collapsing, but it is far from dead. Change will come. Some believe from the inside, others from the outside, but I’m afraid not before the wounded beast does a lot more damage to humanity and the planet in its desperate struggle to keep madness alive.
By Adrian Boutureira
Houston, October 25, 2010
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