Debunking Bush and Taliban as fascists
So last week or the week before or something, Bush called Islamic extremists 'fascists." Then the lefty blog world retorted that actually Bush is a fascist.
For my Under the Volcano chapter, I had to do much research into fascism, so the fact that this world is enjoying some currency caught my attention. In brief, Fascism is/was an idealistic European political system based on yoking an aristocratic value system of cultural/racial supremacy to the machine age, a la Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Extreme Islamic theocracies reject the machine age, so the word fascist doesn't fit.
On to Bush. Why do lefty bloggers call Bush et al fascists? The main charge is the administration's close ties to corporations. Fascism is/was corporatist, they say. But Hitler, one prominent Fascist, did not take orders from Volkswagon, the way American corporations dictate public policy: Enron wrote energy policy; Bacardi's lawyers drafted sections of the US embargo against Cuba, to name but two examples.
If you live in a country in which corporations have far too much political power and you admit to living under an economic system called capitalism, in which the bottom line is money, then shouldn't you take out Occam's Razor and conclude that maybe the problem is not fascism but CAPITALISM?
For my money, fascism, communism, capitalism and religious extremism are all seriously fucked up ways to approach life, but the point is that they are not all the SAME fucked up way to approach life. Sign/signifier is arbitrary of course, but that doesn't mean we need to allow ourselves intellectual sloppiness. Idiots!
For my Under the Volcano chapter, I had to do much research into fascism, so the fact that this world is enjoying some currency caught my attention. In brief, Fascism is/was an idealistic European political system based on yoking an aristocratic value system of cultural/racial supremacy to the machine age, a la Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Extreme Islamic theocracies reject the machine age, so the word fascist doesn't fit.
On to Bush. Why do lefty bloggers call Bush et al fascists? The main charge is the administration's close ties to corporations. Fascism is/was corporatist, they say. But Hitler, one prominent Fascist, did not take orders from Volkswagon, the way American corporations dictate public policy: Enron wrote energy policy; Bacardi's lawyers drafted sections of the US embargo against Cuba, to name but two examples.
If you live in a country in which corporations have far too much political power and you admit to living under an economic system called capitalism, in which the bottom line is money, then shouldn't you take out Occam's Razor and conclude that maybe the problem is not fascism but CAPITALISM?
For my money, fascism, communism, capitalism and religious extremism are all seriously fucked up ways to approach life, but the point is that they are not all the SAME fucked up way to approach life. Sign/signifier is arbitrary of course, but that doesn't mean we need to allow ourselves intellectual sloppiness. Idiots!