Fascism, the Truth

It seems that everyone besides Republicans today are fascists. There are islamofacists, there are those who support fascism and the islamofascists (Cheney and Rumsfeld tell us that, anyway). Let's take a look at fascism's poster child of the last century, Nazi Germany.

First, fascism was great for business, at least at the start. One of Hitler's early successes was getting the trains running on time. Business, the rich and Germany's remaining nobles made out well under the mustachioed one. Meanwhile, the peasants didn't. They were regarded as fodder for the army, which we'll get to next.

Once he'd consolidated his power, Hitler began to use extreme nationalism under the guise of patriotism to keep up his support. Anyone who disagreed was first derided then actually persecuted, either executed or thrown into prisons on weak or no charges, denied due process and access to lawyers. He also generated an enemy in the Jewish immigrants, some of whom had been in Germany long enough to develop their own language - yiddish - based loosely on German. The Jews, it was self-evident, were destroying Germany. They were less than humans, parasites on the German economy and as such, deserved their treatment - extermination of six million of them in the ovens of industrialized slaughter.

War was another of Hitler's devices - see the quote from Reichsmarshall Goering at the top of this blog. By keeping the country at war with some imagined enemy or to attain some needed resource (lebensraum), Hitler kept nationalistic fervor alive despite killing eventually millions of his own people. Business and the rich at least financed Hitler's wars by donation of treasures and by serving.

Internal espionage was also an industry under Hitler. The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolezi, or secret state police) brutally persecuted anyone dissenting with Hitler or working against the regime. They used any form of espionage and required no oversight, instead they just acted, often against even Germany's laws. And there was no defense against them, legal or otherwise.

In short, those calling their enemies fascists seem to have more in common with fascism than those they accuse. Our leaders support the rich at the expense of all others, wage war for resources and to whip up nationalistic fervor, invent enemies and use those real ones for propaganda, violate national law in an effort to spy on and control their own citizens, neglect the fiscal health of the country and ignore the rights of citizens, all in the name of security.

Which, by the way, was Hitler's reason for everything he did.