A good clarification of exactly what a Fascist is.
Based on the following line, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton
are Fascists.
"Fascism...is a specific form of capitalist rule that the capitalist
class brings forth when
it can no longer rule with the consent of the vast majority."
However it seems to me that we are close to the fine line between
Oligarchy and Fascism. If we accept that actually less than 50% of
Americans eligible to register to vote, do not, and if we grant that
the Ruling Class has constructed our political system to channel
voters toward candidates from the two approved political Parties, that
are actually two sides of the same Party, then perhaps we have already
passed over the line and are living under a Fascist Government
disguised as an Oligarchy pretending to be a Republic with democratic
leanings.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/9/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2016/08/08/is-hillary-clinton-a-fascist/
Is Hillary Clinton a fascist?
/ 11 hours ago
By JEFF MACKLER
Let’s assume for the moment that a fascist is an extremely evil
person. Indeed, in the muck and mire of U.S. politics today the term
fascist has been used quite often, but virtually always to describe the
“extremely evil” candidates of the Republican Party. Recall Richard
Nixon and Barry Goldwater or the Bush family candidates, or Republican
right-wingers Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. Very evil men to be sure!
All warmongers, mostly racist, anti-union, witch hunters,
anti-immigrant, some (like Buchanan) even flirting with more overt
neo-fascist and anti-Semitic rhetorical outbursts.With regard to all
these “fascists,” or “neo-fascists,” or “wannabe fascists,” liberals and
many progressives sternly warned that we had to vote Democrat to keep
them from running the country. They invariably and dutifully marched in
line, or better, rushed to the front of the line to support capitalism’s
latest “lesser evils,” sometimes vehemently denouncing all who refused
to tow the line.
The liberals’ “lesser evils” included the 1960 Kennedy/Johnson ticket,
with the millionaire cum billionaire JFK clan of Papa Joseph Kennedy
Sr., the eighth richest man in the country, backing his son John F.
Kennedy. Kennedy Sr.’s resume included service in the FDR administration
as the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, from which position he had
to be recalled because of his steadfast preference for Hitler, with whom
he tried to organize personal and unapproved meetings while Hitler was
slaughtering Jews and bombing British cities. Said Kennedy Sr. at the
time, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here” (Boston Globe,
Nov. 10, 1940).
JFK’s running mate was LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson), the Texas
segregationist who was added to the Northern Democratic Party-led slate
to balance JFK’s liberal image with one more familiar to the racist
Democrats in the Southern states, almost all of whose top elected
officials were KKK and White Citizens Council supporters. But again,
they were also and always touted as lesser evil than the Republicans.
Next came the 1964 LBJ vs. Barry Goldwater election context, when
liberals were told that they had to vote for LBJ because Goldwater was a
fascist who threatened to use nuclear weapons. LBJ, whose pre-election
promise was that “American boys would never be sent to Vietnam,”
proceeded to send over and maintain, on average, 500,000 troops per year
to pursue the U.S. genocidal war that killed four million Vietnamese and
58,000 American young men.
Then we were told that the anti-fascist cause required us to vote for
Southern segregationist stock like Jimmy Carter (Georgia) and Al Gore
(Tennessee). Carter’s racist history was recast as a liberal small
farmer. He was perhaps the last holdout, almost to the end, urging the
disgraced President Nixon to never resign over the Watergate scandal.
In all these cases and others, when it came to running the country,
election time rhetoric aside, the twin parties of capitalism followed
their ruling-class one-percent patrons in implementing whatever the
multi-billionaires and near-trillionaires desired. Such is the case
under the reign of the Great Deporter, warmonger, world’s leading shale
gas fracker, and National Security State top dog, President Obama, who
oversees the all-pervasive government surveillance monstrosity.
Clinton’s reactionary record
With this in mind, let us return to my admittedly provocative opening
statement or question implying that Hillary Clinton is a fascist. Her
record as a warmonger is undisputed, having been among the top leaders
of the central government agencies and institutions that approve, if not
administer, all the wars waged by imperialist America in recent years
and decades, including overt and covert wars, privatized death-squad
wars, sanction and embargo wars, and all the Middle East wars as well as
the secret wars waged in Latin and Central America. This was seen with
Clinton’s role in the military coup that removed the elected president
in Honduras, and Clinton’s support for the U.S.-backed Egyptian military
coup that removed the elected president of that country.
I might add here that with perhaps a single exception, Bernie Sanders’
support for U.S. imperialist wars parallels Clinton’s, as does Sanders’
support for the election of Obama, John Kerry, and Bill Clinton in 1992
and 1996—not to mention Sanders’ 98 percent Democratic Party voting record.
On the critical issues of racism, prisons, and the police, Clinton’s
record of support to most of the major racist laws proposed and
implemented by the Democrat Party ranks her as high as any Republican.
Clinton’s record includes support to each and every reactionary and
bipartisan law, from those that aimed at filling the prisons with Blacks
and Latinos to work at near slave labor “wages” (the average prison wage
in the U.S. is 50 cents per hour) to the elimination of “welfare as we
know it” legislation proposed and implemented by Bill Clinton.
Clinton lobbied for passage of the notorious Violent Crime Control and
Law Enforcement Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1994. Addressing the
“Women in Policing” awards that year, she lauded the act, arguing for
more police, more prisons, and tougher prison sentences: “We will be
able to say, loudly and clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal
offenders—three strikes and you’re out. We are tired of putting you back
through the revolving door.”
Hillary Clinton has never disassociated herself from support to AEDPA
(Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act), a bipartisan law
signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, which gutted basic civil liberties and
obliterated the historic presumption of innocence that previously
guided, or was supposed to guide, all legal proceedings. The AEDPA, for
the first time in the modern era, compelled federal judges to grant a
“presumption of correctness” to the factual findings of state court
judges in death penalty and related cases.
The law was enacted because, prior to it, a full 40 percent of state
court convictions in murder cases were reversed on appeal to federal
courts, usually based on findings of police and prosecution planting of
evidence, intimidation of witnesses, outright corruption, racist
practices, and more. Today, the new law requires that in appeal
proceedings the “facts” used by racist state courts must be presumed to
be correct.
Today, few doubt that Hillary Clinton is the ruling class/Wall Street
candidate that has dutifully served a capitalist class in major crisis
due to the inherent contradictions in this profit over people inhumane
capitalist system, itself. Clinton’s near historic high negative
approval ratings are close Trump’s. That’s why the ruling class decided
to give Bernie Sanders a shot at sheepherding the unwary and questioning
back into the Democratic Party fold, Sanders “political revolution” and
“socialist” proclamations notwithstanding.
Inevitably, when the dust cleared, Sanders, dutifully leaped on board
the Clinton bandwagon. His Democratic Party convention speech
pathetically burnished Clinton’s standing by attributing his own
“left-sounding” rhetoric and platform promises to Clinton, as if she had
adopted them. The same with “left-wing” Democrat and former Republican,
Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the liberal apologists for capitalism.
For both of them, their criticism of Clinton as Wall Street’s nominee
evaporated instantly after their sheepherding assignment was completed.
Clinton’s “credentials”
Let’s be frank here and explain why Hillary Clinton is not really a
fascist, despite the fact that her deeds—her support to every key
ruling-class policy during her lifetime of “service” to capitalist
America, demonstrates that she is and has always been the compliant
ruling-class and Council on Foreign Relations think tank-approved choice
of imperialist U.S. capitalism.
And Clinton’s lesser evil credentials today?—the reasons daily put
forward by her kept corporate media pundits and paid advocates? Could it
be because she has a better smile than the crooked looking Trump? Pardon
my subjectivity! A better haircut? A nicer family?
Or that she now states, as opposed to yesterday, that she is for free
state college and university tuition? Or that she is for improving the
very health-care system that she previously tried to gut when she headed
her husband’s corrupt and failed 1992 attempted health-care revision?
(See “Clinton’s Health Care Fraud: A corporate cure at workers’
expense,” 1993, by this author.) Or maybe that she is supported by
Michelle Obama and a host of other African-American apologists for
racist capitalism?
Indeed, Clinton’s most precious “credential” is that she is running
against a man who verbalizes what Clinton has actually put into
practice. In this regard, rarely a day passes when the front page of The
New York Times, and multiple inside pages as well, coupled with related
corporate liberal media propagandists across the country, bash Trump
with abandon, while trumpeting Clinton’s sanity and earnestness.
Trump’s racist, sexist, misogynist, xenophobic, and moronic remarks
about women, Blacks, immigrants, and Muslims, his alleged draft-dodging,
his spurious gambling casino bankruptcies, his rip-off real estate
university scams, his advocacy of violence against protesters, his
claims that he can re-negotiate ruling-class trade pacts by making
better “deals,” his delays in repudiating support from open racists and
neo-fascists like former Klan leader David Duke, his climate crisis
denials, etc. are exposed for all to see. Clinton’s record is
essentially ignored or her poll watching advisers caution her to
apologize for past transgressions and pledge fealty to a better future
performance.
One “important difference” between Clinton and Trump is that Clinton
listens to her pollster advisers and appears to be a relatively
enlightened person, in fact, making a habit of nodding agreement with
Sanders’ “progressive” rhetoric, while the bombastic Trump, almost as if
he has accepted the assignment to lose the election, is presented as a
man who almost literally seeks out new bear traps to stick his foot in.
Indeed, Trump’s poll figures are in rapid decline, with the average of
the most recent 10 election opinion polls of registered voters showing
him behind Clinton by seven points and declining. Perhaps to the past
credit of the American people or in homage to their refrain from
participating in this year’s election fraud, close to half of the
eligible voters decline to register, and another half of those who do
resister don’t vote. It appears that this year’s figures might provide
evidence of an even greater disgust with what is posited as “American
democracy.”
Clinton’s latest campaign effort, supported by Obama, is the accusation
or suggestion that a unstable or volatile president like Trump, with his
finger on the nuclear button, might just start a nuclear war that could
destroy the world. Most media pundits neglect to “research” the facts
that demonstrate that almost all U.S. wars, including the atomic bombing
of Japan, were conducted under the “sane” Democratic Party president’s
auspices.
In this periodically orchestrated election-time charade, Donald Trump
says what Hillary Clinton does. But the blood of millions, the misery of
millions, the lives of millions, are on Clinton’s hands and all her
capitalist associates. There are no pure hearts in ruling-class circles.
And, to be absolutely clear, should Trump be elected, he can be expected
to be the same servant for capitalist America, no less and no more,
because like all “elected” officials, he will become the willing
prisoner of the real policy makers in the U.S., the elite .01 or less
who decide how best to advance their interests and not their elected
mouthpieces, whether their tongues are tempered and polite like
Clinton’s or brutally ugly like Trump’s.
What is fascism?
Aug. 2016 Hillary fascist
Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.,
address guests at a fundraising event in Chicago, Tuesday, Dec. 18,
2007. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Now comes the “fascist question.” Fascism is not just an ugly and
despicable term—a word to throw at all kinds of bigots, murderers,
racists, and even dictators.
Fascism, as with the real thing in Nazi Germany under Adolph Hitler, is
a specific form of capitalist rule that the capitalist class brings
forth when it can no longer rule with the consent of the vast majority.
Fascist rule is implemented by the capitalist ruling class itself when
the working-class struggle and working-class consciousness are
approaching their zenith, and massive revolutionary working-class
parties and powerful unions are fully capable of posing a direct and
immediate threat to the tiny minority ruling class.
Fascism is the deadly weapon implemented by a crisis-ridden capitalist
class whose very existence is in question given the mass forces arrayed
against it and its associated incapacity to continue to profit at the
expense of the working class and with regard to the ceaseless
competition for markets posed by its international competitors.
Fascism, above all, has a mass and armed social base in society, almost
always consisting of alienated middle-class elements whose lives have
been ruined by the larger economic superiority of corporate monopolies
that drive the “little guy” out of business, either back into the
working class or into abject poverty. In short, fascism is the political
form of rule instituted by the capitalist elite when only brute force
and the massive physical extermination of the opposing and organized
working-class leadership and its organizations becomes a necessity to
keep the capitalist system alive.
This was the situation in Germany, Italy, and Spain, when the ruling
classes turned to the fascist option. In Germany, in 1933, “democratic”
President Paul Von Hindenburg appointed Hitler, the leader or “Fuhrer”
of the Nazis Party (National Socialist German Workers Party) as the
German chancellor. The fascists of yesteryear, like today’s would-be
fascists, posed as populists. In Nazi Germany they went so far as to
employ the very name of “socialism” to win popular support. But
yesterday is not today, at least not now.
In contrast, when capitalist society is relatively stable, the ruling
rich actually prefer a semblance of “democratic” or parliamentary rule
rather than rule by force and violence. This is based on the simple idea
that workers tend to be more efficient or comfortable at the workplace
when they believe that are free to sell their labor to the bosses rather
than be forced to endure each and every imposition on their lives under
fascist and overt dictatorial rule. The latter includes the systematic
murder of oppositionists if they pose the slightest obstacle to the
boss’s extraction of profits and the absolute rule of the Fuhrer.
In the U.S. today the ruling rich face no immediate and serious
obstacles to the relatively smooth functioning of their system. Indeed,
today’s unions and socialist and communist parties are smaller and
weaker than at any time in the modern era. In addition, the ruling class
has gone to great lengths to establish formidable firewalls to absorb
social discontent, beginning with the Democratic Party and including the
present often corrupt labor bureaucracy, an unprecedented number of
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). All these consciously function to
channel discontent into safe ruling-class politics and many other
well-established institutions aimed at thwarting the development of
independent and anti-capitalist organization of the working class to
fight for their own interest.
In politics, in capitalist elections in particular, the constant
refinement and pursuit of “lesser evilism” is among the most powerful
and well-honed ruling-class instruments, promoted by tens of thousands
of professional media pundits, newspapers, television and radio shows,
and the vast educational system itself. With regard to all of these, the
objective is to drill into the heads of the vast majority that they live
in a democratic society where an elected government operating under the
rule of law and all its institutions treat all equally.
Today, this fundamental myth is under scrutiny as never before, with the
growing majority coming to realize from their direct experiences that in
truth they live in a society governed by the one percent and that Wall
Street, the major symbol of this one percent, (actually closer to .01
percent or less) makes most of society’s critical decisions. Increasing
majorities have come to understand that this one percent essentially
pays no taxes, steals some 90 percent, (according to the official
statistics today) of all new wealth and otherwise organizes society to
advance its own interests against all others.
The same one percent organizes wars for profit and plunder around the
world that today the great majority oppose. This same one percent
presides over a society where institutional racism in all its
manifestations, is the real “rule of law” and that the horrors
approaching with regard to environmental destruction and global warming
proceed unchecked because capitalists profit from the continued, if not
increased use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost to life on earth itself.
To conclude, neither Clinton nor Trump are fascists. Neither is driven
by the immediate need to crush a mass working-class and
revolutionary-led resistance, which has yet to emerge. Both, however, in
the name of “national security” see the need to put in place the future
instruments of mass repression for when they are needed. This includes
the massive government surveillance operations that reach into every
household in the country and beyond. Both capitalist parties foster the
militarization of the police, the National Guard, and other repressive
institutions, to ready them for action should the ruling class feel
threatened by an insurgent working-class opposition.
Contrary to their belief and expectation that the inevitable and massive
working-class risings of the future can be defeated by brute force and
massive repression of the fascist type, history has demonstrated that
the opposite outcome is the more likely.
When tens of millions—the vast majority—reach the point when they can no
longer tolerate capitalist injustice, exploitation and oppression, the
99 percent can and will prevail and usher in a new social order.
American citizens and their non-citizen allies have two revolutions to
their credit to date—the revolutionary war that ended British colonial
rule and the civil war that ended chattel slavery. Both of these
momentous battles nevertheless left behind large sectors of the
population that remained under the whip of capitalist oppression.
Today, these constitute the 99 percent. Their conscious organization and
education now, and in the course of struggle, will bring forth a mighty
power fully capable of ending minority capitalist rule and bringing into
being a socialist society that will change the face of the earth and
free its peoples from the horrors of the present crisis ridden predatory
capitalism.
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August 8, 2016 in Elections, Vote Socialist Action. Tags: Hillary
Clinton, Trump
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