The fascist threat
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Gary MacLennan
Lou wrote: “There is no fascist threat in the U.S. today because there is no Communist threat”.
That for me is the key. The fascists come from outside the ranks of the ruling class. The latter turn to them in desperation and fear. And they hold their noses while doing so.
I have a copy of G. Ward Price's book on Hitler I know these dictators 1937. Price worked for Lord Rothmere owner of the Daily Mail. Price was a close associate of Oswald Mosley the British Fascist. Price describes how on the 27th January 1932 Fritz Thyssen organised for Hitler to speak to the leading manufacturers of the Rhineland.
Previous funding from Bavarian industrialists had been driven by the necessity to counter Russian funding to "German Reds". But the floodgates of funding only opened after the Hitler speech at the Park Hotel Dusseldorf.
The text of the speech is online. Price reports that it lasted for 2 hours & 35 minutes and at the end Thyssen leaped to his feet hailing Hitler as the saviour of Germany and announced that he Thyssen was joining the Nazi Party
The thrust of the speech was that the problem lay with democracy. Hitler was calling explicitly for a dictatorship. He said "To sum up the argument: I see two diametrically opposed principles: the principle of democracy which, wherever it is allowed practical effect is the principle of destruction: and the principle of the authority of personality which I would call the principle of achievement, because whatever man in the past has achieved – all human civilizations – is conceivable only if the supremacy of this principle is admitted " (Hitler, 1932) .
Earlier he had made the point that "in
the economic sphere communism is analogous to democracy in the political
sphere." Ernest Mandel once wrote about how the German ruling class had gambled when they supported the Nazis and because they nearly lost everything on that gamble that he did not think they would willingly take such a gamble again. I think the point here is that to support the Nazis coming to government the ruling class would have to be frightened and desperate. Looking at the American ruling class from this distance I see only a super confident and arrogant class which is very far from afraid. Unfortunately comradely Gary
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It's become cliched to say this,but fascism in the USA,in the 21st Century,is not going to look like fascism in Europe in the 20th Century.
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workerpoet
Agreed -- though the brutality aimed and minorities, the poor and the left are certainly familiar. A difference I've noted over the years is the influence of "libertarianism" which, unlike the rigid, militaristic hierarchy of German fascism is more like anarcho-fascism, at least in its goal. The reduction of government to what is needed to protect the wealthy and their property from the increasingly disenfranchised majority -- laws, police and prisons. The rest is pure corporate dictatorship resembling a mad-max serfdom. The road there is still rife with fear-driven partisan hierarchy as the trump administration and GOP illustrate daily.
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