[R-G] Harper's Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State

[David Mcreynolds]

Thanks Viviane - I may not agree with Lapham, but that such a serious
charge is made in such a respected magazine clearly
needs to have our attention.

David


> [Original Message]
> From: Viviane Lerner <viviane at interpac.net>
> To: David McReynolds <David.Mcr at earthlink.net>
> Cc: RAD TIMES <resist3 at earthlink.net>; COMMON  DREAMS
<news at commondreams.org>
> Date: 10/16/2005 9:54:06 PM
> Subject: Harper's Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State
>
> http://www.organicconsumers.org/Politics/harpers101205.cfm
> Harper's Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State
> Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:34:38 -0700
> The article below appears in the current issue of Harpers and was 
> written
> by Lewis H. Lapham
> www.harpers.org/LewisLapham.html
>
> Knowing the source of this piece makes it all the more disturbing. It 
> is not every day that the editor of a respected national magazine 
> publishes an essay claiming that America is not on the road to 
> becoming, but ALREADY IS, a fascist state.... or words to that affect.
>
> To help prepare you for what follows, here are the final sentence from 
> this piece.... [I think we can look forward with confidence to 
> character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling 
> cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police.]
>
> On message By Lewis H. Lapham Harper's Magazine, October 2005, pps. 7-9 
> "But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy 
> ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by 
> peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and 
> Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory 
> Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land." -Franklin D. 
> Roosevelt, November 4, 1938
>
> In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged 
> metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and 
> on coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of 
> Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry -- a 
> reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the pit of Hell 
> but to the political theories that regard individual citizens as the 
> property of the government, happy villagers glad to wave the flags and 
> wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that placed them in the 
> care of a sublime leader. Or, more emphatically, as Benito Mussolini 
> liked to say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state. 
> Nothing against the state."
>
> The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering crowds, 
> rousing band music, splendid military uniforms), and in the United 
> States they numbered among their admirers a good many important people 
> who believed that a somewhat modified form of fascism (power vested in 
> the banks and business corporations instead of with the army) would 
> lead the country out of the wilderness of the Great Depression -- put 
> an end to the Pennsylvania labor troubles, silence the voices of 
> socialist heresy and democratic dissent. Roosevelt appreciated the 
> extent of fascism's popularity at the political box office; so does 
> Eco, who takes pains in the essay "Ur-Fascism," published in The New 
> York Review of Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to 
> translate fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from 
> our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist 
> tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at 
> Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained 
> the tyrant's rise to glory. The several experiments with fascist 
> government, in Russia and Spain as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't 
> depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in search of their 
> common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a standard 
> text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a habit of mind, 
> and on sifting through the assortment of fantastic and often 
> contradictory notions -- Nazi paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, 
> Mussolini's corporatism, etc. -- he finds a set of axioms on which all 
> the fascisms agree. Among the most notable:
>
> The truth is revealed once and only once.
>
> Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't 
> represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.
>
> Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.
>
> Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who 
> betray the culture and subvert traditional values.
>
> The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.
>
> Argument is tantamount to treason.
>
> Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. 
> Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of "the people" in 
> the grand opera that is the state.
>
> Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy as it has 
> since become to see the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the character 
> of an American government. Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been 
> surprised.
>
> He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to his 
> belief in such a thing as a United Nations to judge the force of 
> America's racist passions and the ferocity of its anti-intellectual 
> prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it happened. The American 
> democracy won the battles for Normandy and Iwo Jima, but the victories 
> abroad didn't stem the retreat of democracy at home, after 1968 no 
> longer moving "forward as a living force, seeking day and night to 
> better the lot" of its own citizens, and now that sixty years have 
> passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn't take much talent 
> for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is fascism, 
> not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's "Greatest 
> Generation," added to its weight and strength on America's shining seas 
> and fruited plains.
>
> A few sorehead liberal intellectuals continue to bemoan the fact, write 
> books about the good old days when everybody was in charge of reading 
> his or her own mail. I hear their message and feel their pain, share 
> their feelings of regret, also wish that Cole Porter was still writing 
> songs, that Jean Harlow and Robert Mitchum hadn't quit making movies. 
> But what's gone is gone, and it serves nobody's purpose to deplore the 
> fact that we're not still riding in a coach to Philadelphia with Thomas 
> Jefferson. The attitude is cowardly and French, symptomatic of effete 
> aesthetes who refuse to change with the times.
>
> As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political endearment 
> are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them 
> already accepted and understood by a gratifyingly large number of our 
> most forward-thinking fellow citizens, multitasking and safe with 
> Jesus. It does no good to ask the weakling's pointless question, "Is 
> America a fascist state?" We must ask instead, in a major rather than a 
> minor key, "Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world 
> has ever seen," an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of 
> the international capital markets, worthy of "a decent respect to the 
> opinions of mankind"? I wish to be the first to say we can. We're 
> Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler 
> failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the 
> early pioneers.
>
> We don't have to burn any books.
>
> The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on 
> the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own 
> good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it 
> as a blessing that we don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry. 
> The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems 
> over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under 
> administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for 
> the sale and distribution of the government's propaganda posters. The 
> publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their 
> profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but 
> to people who don't know how to read or think, they do as little harm 
> as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond.
>
> We don't have to disturb, terrorize, or plunder the bourgeoisie.
>
> In Communist Russia as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the 
> codes of social hygiene occasionally put the regime to the trouble of 
> smashing department-store windows, beating bank managers to death, 
> inviting opinionated merchants on complimentary tours (all expenses 
> paid, breathtaking scenery) of Siberia. The resorts to violence served 
> as study guides for free, thinking businessmen reluctant to give up on 
> the democratic notion that the individual citizen is entitled to an 
> owner's interest in his or her own mind.
>
> The difficulty doesn't arise among people accustomed to regarding 
> themselves as functions of a corporation. Thanks to the diligence of 
> out news media and the structure of our tax laws, our affluent and 
> suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring 
> serial killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard 
> Business School -- think what you're told to think, and not only do you 
> get to keep the house in Florida or command of the Pentagon press 
> office but on some sunny prize day not far over the horizon, the 
> compensation committee will hand you a check for $40 million, or 
> President George W. Bush will bestow on you the favor of a nickname as 
> witty as the ones that on good days elevate Karl Rove to the honorific 
> "Boy Genius," on bad days to the disappointed but no less affectionate 
> "Turd Blossom." Who doesn't now know that the corporation is immortal, 
> that it is the corporation that grants the privilege of an identity, 
> confers meaning on one's life, gives the pension, a decent credit 
> rating, and the priority standing in the community? Of course the 
> corporation reserves the right to open one's email, test one's blood, 
> listen to the phone calls, examine one's urine, hold the patent on the 
> copyright to any idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it 
> not? As surely as the loyal fascist knew that it was his duty to serve 
> the state, the true American knows that it is his duty to protect the 
> brand.
>
> Having met many fine people who come up to the corporate mark -- on 
> golf courses and commuter trains, tending to their gardens in Fairfield 
> County while cutting back the payrolls in Michigan and Mexico -- I'm 
> proud to say (and I think I speak for all of us here this evening with 
> Senator Clinton and her lovely husband) that we're blessed with a 
> bourgeoisie that will welcome fascism as gladly as it welcomes the rain 
> in April and the sun in June. No need to send for the Gestapo or the 
> NKVD; it will not be necessary to set examples.
>
> We don't have to gag the press or seize the radio stations.
>
> People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement have no 
> further use for free speech, which is corrupting, overly emotional, 
> reckless, and ill-informed, not calibrated to the time available for 
> television talk or to the performance standards of a Super Bowl 
> halftime show. It is to our advantage that free speech doesn't meet the 
> criteria of the free market. We don't require the inspirational genius 
> of a Joseph Goebbels; we can rely instead on the dictates of the 
> Nielsen ratings and the camera angles, secure in the knowledge that the 
> major media syndicates run the business on strictly corporatist 
> principles -- afraid of anything disruptive or inappropriate, committed 
> to the promulgation of what is responsible, rational, and approved by 
> experts. Their willingness to stay on message is a credit to their 
> professionalism.
>
> The early twentieth-century fascists had to contend with individuals 
> who regarded their freedom of expression as a necessity -- the bone and 
> marrow of their existence, how they recognized themselves as human 
> beings. Which was why, if sometimes they refused appointments to the 
> state-run radio stations, they sometimes were found dead on the Italian 
> autostrada or drowned in the Kiel Canal. The authorities looked upon 
> their deaths as forms of self-indulgence. The same attitude governs the 
> agreement reached between labor and management at our leading news 
> organizations. No question that the freedom of speech is extended to 
> every American -- it says so in the Constitution -- but the privilege 
> is one that musn't be abused. Understood in a proper and financially 
> rewarding light, freedom of speech is more trouble than it's worth -- a 
> luxury comparable to owning a racehorse and likely to bring with it 
> little else except the risk of being made to look ridiculous. People 
> who learn to conduct themselves in a manner respectful of the telephone 
> tap and the surveillance camera have no reason to fear the fist of 
> censorship. By removing the chore of having to think for oneself, one 
> frees up more leisure time to enjoy the convenience of the Internet 
> services that know exactly what one likes to hear and see and wear and 
> eat. We don't have to murder the intelligentsia.
>
> Here again, we find ourselves in luck. The society is so glutted with 
> easy entertainment that no writer or company of writers is troublesome 
> enough to warrant the compliment of an arrest, or even the courtesy of 
> a sharp blow to the head. What passes for the American school of 
> dissent talks exclusively to itself in the pages of obscure journals, 
> across the coffee cups in Berkeley and Park Slope, in half-deserted 
> lecture halls in small Midwestern colleges. The author on the platform 
> or the beach towel can be relied upon to direct his angriest invective 
> at the other members of the academy who failed to drape around the 
> title of his latest book the garland of a rave review.
>
> The blessings bestowed by Providence place America in the front rank of 
> nations addressing the problems of a twenty-first century, certain to 
> require bold geopolitical initiatives and strong ideological solutions. 
> How can it be otherwise? More pressing demands for always scarcer 
> resources; ever larger numbers of people who cannot be controlled 
> except with an increasingly heavy hand of authoritarian guidance. Who 
> better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set the 
> paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? The existence of mankind hangs 
> in the balance; failure is not an option. Where else but in America can 
> the world find the visionary intelligence to lead it bravely into the 
> future -- Donald Rumsfeld our Dante, Turd Blossom our Michelangelo?
>
> I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made brave 
> strides forward. By matching Eco's list of fascist commandments against 
> our record of achievement, we can see how well we've begun the new 
> project for the next millennium -- the notion of absolute and eternal 
> truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict 
> constructions of the Constitution; our national identity provided by 
> anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of 
> "intelligent design"; a state of perpetual war and a government 
> administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two 
> presidential elections stolen with little or no objection on the part 
> of a complacent populace; the nation's congressional districts 
> gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty years 
> against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news media 
> devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting images of corporate 
> executives like those of the emperor heroes on the coins of ancient 
> Rome.
>
> An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to expect 
> from the innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early 
> twentieth-century fascisms didn't enter their golden age until the 
> proletariat in the countries that gave them birth had been reduced to 
> abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of 
> eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy. On the evidence of 
> the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration with 
> respect to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say nothing of 
> expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we can look 
> forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque 
> bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle 
> police.
> ==============
> ***NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this 
> material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a 
> prior interest in receiving the included information for research and 
> educational purposes.***
> ==============