Discrete Fascism, American-Style

Nathan M. Gant

The longer Bush is allowed to control the government operations of
the country, the more dictatorial powers he will assume for himself.
The more dangerous the world will become.

His Attorney General, Ashcroft, made a genuine Freudian slip the
other day when he said that he wasn't going to release the names of
the +1000 suspects he has kept locked up for almost 90 days now. He
said to do that, to publically release their names, they would
be "blacklisted". He meant to make you think he was truly protecting
them. I think the word "blacklist", it had slipped out of his mouth
in a rather non-chalant way.

Blacklists and Blackshirts

The fact of the matter is that, today, there already exists extremely
large inventories, or blacklists if you prefer the old-fashioned
name, that's another word for a database of so-called `enemies of the
state'. One of them is being run by a private investigative agency
headquartered in Chicago. That's just one of them. Most any employer
who wants to access it can do so. The one in Chicago is being
primarily used to target leftists and progressive types. I know
because I have already seen it work (against me!). And that's just
the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of these electronic
blacklists. It's impossible to know for sure how many, because they
all can be used separately or integrated into a greater whole. This
is fundamentally what the Promis software system was designed to do,
to allow widely-different forms of "enemies' lists" to be assimilated
together, based on the particular queries which the employer might
want to use on someone. All in all, these blacklists are designed for
the government or for businesses who have no other purpose but to
disrupt or destroy in one way or another the lives of ordinary people
like you or me. It has nothing to do with Islamic terrorists. When
you talk about blacklisting, that's a form of terrorism sanctioned by
the state. Many people already are terrified in knowing that, by
instinct or by their sixth sense, it is better to keep silent so they
won't be the first to be targeted. Human emotions are generally quite
predictable. That's what the government counts on, to make forecasts
and long-term predictions over how to dominate or suppress our
individualities. These lists aren't that new, and the most recent
ones in use today were designed perhaps five or ten years ago.

All that is being developed at a faster pace right now because the US
is operating under a new type of fascism, one in which Bush is
quickly become the pointman. It will not be an overt, open kind of
fascism which Mussolini and Hitler used, or the blatant fascism which
is found in less-developed capitalist countries that the US supports
with guns and money. No, this is a discrete fascist system. It is too
early to tell how much irreversible damage it will do the social
fabric of the US. Without question, it already has begun. The quickly
deteriorating economy is only accelerating that process.

Many years down the road, people will be scratching their heads in
disbelief and wondering: how could we have let all this happen? How
could we let someone, who was never elected to be the President,
attain powers rivaling that of any ancient and modern emperor, build
oppressive laws above and beyond anything which was ever designed
into the Constitution? Remember it was a Republican-appointed Supreme
Court which cast the final votes in the year 2000 presidential
elections. The majority of the people understandably voted for Gore,
the lesser of the two evils. But those votes didn't count. A court of
8 Associate Justices and 1 Chief Justice, 9 people in all, simply
voted in place of millions of American men and women.

Usually Republicans campaign on the platform of smaller government,
they want more local authority. With Bush, they have now completely
changed their tune. They are imitating the Democrats but without the
petty social crumbs which are tossed to the working class. Now this
is all about corporate welfare, feeding the Pentagon war machine.
Everything will be done in a discretely fascist way.

There is simply no other choice available to use but to have Bush
removed from office as soon as possible. I don't believe in political
violence to accomplish this. But we have to make a fresh start of it
again. We have to have fair elections in which every person vote will
count. We don't even need complex machinery to do this.

The Democratic Case of Cuba

For example, when elections are held in Cuba, they have had a real
democracy since the 1959 Revolution, the people have been organized
and trained to hand-count each and every vote. The population of Cuba
is about 11 million people, that's about the same as Florida, so the
number of eligible voters are approximately the same. Again, the
Cubans hand-count all votes within the course of a single day. They
don't have the electronic machinery to reject "chads" because,
ironically, if there hadn't been the cruel US boycott and embargo in
place for 40 years, we might have already sold them our defective
voting machines by now, at some absurdly-inflated price, of course,
and that would have led to grossly inaccurate voting tallies in Cuban
elections. That's likely the only `silver lining' in the dark cloud
which the US has cast over Cuba. The Cubans would have had another
revolution in the streets if the Cuban government admitted that tens
of thousands of their votes will randomly be thrown away each and
every election day. But in the US, the corporate mass-media have
largely suppressed the implications of that. The final results of it
has brought us into the discrete fascist state which Bush is
implementing.

One cannot really predict the future, especially when we simply don't
have any relevant past events to approximate the direction it might
take. Bush's promise that his war in Afghanistan is only "just the
beginning", that ought to be enough to waken us from our political
slumber and thoroughly repudiate his fiat to rule over us. We can
ignore the beginnings of an American police state at our own
collective risk. I suspect there is only a short window of
opportunity for us to try and organize against Bush, and I don't
think it will be there after a few more months of his quixotic war
against terrorism in the world.

To keep silent so they won't target you, that only makes the work
more difficult for the rest of us.

There won't be any easy victories against Bush and his fascist police
state, you can tell that just by counting the number of feeble-minded
people waving the US flags on their cars on any given day. One
positive note in all this. We can take comfort in the crushing defeat
of the Republican right in the recent New Jersey elections on Nov. 6,
2001 - the Republicans lost majority control of the NJ state assembly
for the first time in 10 years. The implications of that have largely
been ignored by the corporate mass-media. The loser, Republican Bret
Schundler, was a darling of the ultra-right. Some think that the New
Jersey election can be considered as a bellwether of things to come
in future US elections. So perhaps we can breath a sigh of relief,
knowing that fascism, this discrete form of it, this may not be
inevitable for us.

However, no matter what happens, we can't let these people, the flag-
waving zombies you see on the road every day, the ones who are
already hopelessly brainwashed, we can't let them be the ones to
decide whether or not we have an escalation of a war involving
nuclear explosions somewhere distant from our shores. Eventually the
chickens will come home to roost, if this Bush remains in power.
We've hardly had a year of him already. His saber-rattling will only
spill more blood eventually. Yes, Afghanistan is only the beginning
of Bush's discrete fascist war against democracy.