Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I bring up the subject of fascism, I open the paper and read that Donald Rumsfeld spoke of fascism yesterday in his speech to the American Legion.
From The Los Angeles Times:
By likening today’s U.S. foreign policy to that during World War II and the Cold War, Rumsfeld sought to portray skeptics of the Bush administration as being on the wrong side of history. He ridiculed American officials who had hoped to negotiate with Adolf Hitler.
“Once again, we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism,” Rumsfeld said. “But some seem not to have learned history’s lessons.”
Actually it’s Rumsfeld who has not learned history’s lessons.
Hey Rummy! You want a lesson in fascism? I suggest you read Vice President Henry Wallace’s 1944 column for The New York Times titled “The Danger of American Fascism.” You might learn a thing or two and you might recognize who the real fascists are. You work with them.
Excerpt:
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. … They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Read the whole column and read Thom Hartmann’s recent article (in which he quotes heavily from the Wallace column) about how the Bush Administration is trying to change the definition of the word “fascism.”
Hartmann writes:
Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival strategy is to redefine the term “fascism” so it can’t be applied to them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”
In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a fundamentalist theocracy, not fascism.
So Rummy, you want to take on the fascists? Look in the mirror.
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