By Sara Robinson
August 6, 2009

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history’s worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who’d made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. “Wellll…we’re on a bad road, and if we don’t change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there’s also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don’t worry. As bad as this looks: no — we are not there yet.”

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it.

Full story

Unable to inspire voters, the isolated, illiberal oligarchs of the EU are using the threat of fantasy fascism to try to force us to be pro-EU.

Frank Furedi - 4 June 2009

The political class seems to have given up on formulating any positive reasons for voting in today’s elections to the European Parliament. Instead, it has reconciled itself to the fact that the institutions of the European Union (EU) lack popular legitimacy, and now acknowledges, more or less, that its ‘European project’ lacks content and meaning.

Surveys throughout Europe confirm that the public looks upon the EU with suspicion. Significant numbers of people also perceive it as a threat to their way of life. That is why the EU oligarchs, the Brussels bureaucrats who oversee this ‘European project’, have embraced the politics of fear. Unable to come up with positive arguments for voting, they have kickstarted a campaign of fear designed to scare people into casting their ballots.

‘If people don’t vote, the danger is that there will be more extremist parties or parties from outside the mainstream [in the European Parliament]’, warned Hans-Gert Poettering, president of the parliament. That is the main message of the EU oligarchy in this week’s elections: they are seeking, not a positive endorsement of mainstream EU parties, but votes cast to keep out the extremists.

Full story

John Hoefle - June 5, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review

May 29—With every passing day, the Obama Administration more closely resembles the fascist regimes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Underneath all of Obama’s promissory rhetoric lies a policy of unlimited support for the parasitic financier class, while savagely gouging the middle and lower economic strata.

That this is the policy advocated by the financier elite should be no surprise: Wall Street helped the Brutish Empire create both Hitler and Mussolini, and funded a fascist movement in the U.S.—the American Liberty League and its satellites—in the 1930s, as elements of an attempt to create a world fascist movement. This fascist cabal even tried to organize a coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. That coup fortunately failed, and FDR defeated the fascists, both foreign and domestic. But the victory was only temporary.

We have repeatedly identified this grouping as the American wing of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier oligarchy, centered in the City of London and operated through a worldwide system of central banks, private financial institutions, and corporate cartels. It is more commonly known as the British Empire.

Today, these imperial fascists are attempting another coup. After decades of financial deregulation and corporate cartelization, they have amassed great wealth and power, to the point that they dominate both the financial system and the Federal government. They are now using their power to run the greatest criminal swindle in history—the Wall Street bailouts—while using the financial crisis to gut what remains of the productive economy.

Full story

by Mrs Jane Birkby

I see echoes of Germany in the 1920/30s in our country today. The powerful multi-national corporations and banks hold sway, the public are dissatisfied with their Parliament, which has been run badly by the ineffective three in one main parties, who handed over most of it’s legislative power to the EU.

The situation is ripe for someone to gain complete power and control, using the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, in conjunction with the terrorist legislation, to sweep away our democratic bodies, take power away from the people, and tyrannise the country using the surveillance apparatus already in operation.

We have brutal police units not afraid to harm to public, and another foreign military police unit (Ugendfor) waiting in Vincenza, Italy to ‘help’ our police in cases of civil unrest.

Full story

Adam Lebor - 09th May 2009

The paper is aged and fragile, the typewritten letters slowly fading. But US Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128 is as chilling now as the day it was written in November 1944.

The document, also known as the Red House Report, is a detailed account of a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944. There, Nazi officials ordered an elite group of German industrialists to plan for Germany’s post-war recovery, prepare for the Nazis’ return to power and work for a ’strong German empire’. In other words: the Fourth Reich.

The three-page, closely typed report, marked ‘Secret’, copied to British officials and sent by air pouch to Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, detailed how the industrialists were to work with the Nazi Party to rebuild Germany’s economy by sending money through Switzerland.

They would set up a network of secret front companies abroad. They would wait until conditions were right. And then they would take over Germany again.

The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire - but not just German.

Full story

by Gary North

I have lived through three monumental historical events. I remember only two of them.

I do not remember the dropping of the two atomic bombs in August of 1945. As symbols of scientific world transformation, this constituted the most momentous event of the 20th century. This breakthrough, so far, has not led to nuclear war, even though on several occasions, it looked as though nuclear war was a distinct possibility. Nevertheless, the arrival of the nuclear age heralded a transformation of the modern world. We have not yet seen the end of that transformation.

Martin van Creveld, the great military historian in the State of Israel, has argued that the nuclear age ruined the plans of empire for large nations. They could no longer risk a war with each other. Yet spending on empire increased. Today, large states face resistance from non-State groups. The Soviet Union went down when the Afghans beat them by using Stinger missiles. The USSR was an empire, and an empire that loses to insurgents has lost its reason for existence.

We are about to experience a similar defeat in the same country.

Full story

Matthew D. Jarvie - November 6, 2008

The circus has ended once again for another four years, and the international power brokers now have their selected frontman to take over from the current stooge in January, to further lead the United States (and the world as a whole) into the grips of global governance. An article I just recently read on one of the news websites referred to Obama as “the first truly global President.” This is not a mere coincidence, and neither is the media’s incessant gloating over Obama, who is now being referred to as “The One,” as if he is the messiah himself.

Tuesday night’s media coverage of Obama’s win showed tens of thousands of star-struck zombies looking upward at the stage as Obama delivered his first address to the world as President-elect, almost as if Jesus was descending from the clouds. Of course what we heard and saw was the usual overdramaticized, Hollywood-type drivel that the people have been conditioned to love so much, because politics is little more than an art of manipulating the emotions of the many for the benefit of the few in control. It’s about using emotion to override rational thought, because once this is achieved the people can be lead in whatever direction the controllers want. These are the exact same techniques that have used under fascist governments throughout history, and Tuesday night’s post-victory rally in Chicago, at least in my mind, drew connotations to a 1920s Mussolini rally. These same techniques that were used decades ago are still being used today, and have since been perfected by the social engineers to move the people in a pre-determined direction without their knowing.

Full story

Becky Akers - October 21, 2008
After the orgy of nationalizing the economy, freedom’s foes ought to be snoring it off somewhere, glutted and stupefied. But there’s no rest for the wicked, so they’re corporatizing airports instead. They don’t call it that, of course, lest we imagine little grey bureaucrats filling der Führer’s orders for more poison gas and barbed wire. No, they’re “privatizing” airports. Chicago Midway is their first conquest. Others will follow.

Far from selling property government has no business owning to entrepreneurs who then do with it as they judge best, privatizing is just another gimmick to boost the State’s power. It tries to harness the trust, friendliness and efficiency of the free market for Leviathan’s benefit by leasing, not selling, airports and other assets. The beast retains its stranglehold, decreeing that the property must remain what it was (an airport cannot become a housing development or amusement park, for example), regulating its operations, and subsidizing it with bonds, taxes, and other thieveries. Tragically, businessmen who owe their fortunes to the market cooperate with this fraud, while snakes in the grass – excuse me, think-tanks ballyhoo it as “free market.”

Full story

Philip Jones - 10-20-8

Corporatists of left, right and centre show a marked hostility to allegations that the European Union is fundamentally fascist. This is perhaps not surprising since they combine in their belief in supranational government, collective solutions, corporatist economics, State intervention and what Tony Blair often termed the “Third Way” most of the characteristics of fascism.

They must therefore seek to distance themselves from that discredited ideology. This is made easier if they can find an enemy to whom they can ascribe the values of “fascism” ­ they choose nationalists and those they term “the extreme right”.

A fine example is the article by Professor Richard Overy in the London Evening Standard of 15th May 2002 who described “fascism” as an exclusively “right wing” movement. This false analysis was supported by pictures of the Frenchman Le Pen and the late Austrian politician Jorg Haider who are in principal nationalists, not fascists. The defining aspect of fascism is that it is neither right nor left nor centrist it is left and right and centrist as the support for fascism in the 1930s from Liberals like Lloyd George, Conservatives like Samuel Hoare and Socialists like Ramsay Macdonald, Lord Allen of Hurtwood and Arnold Toynbee clearly demonstrate.

Full story

William N. Grigg - September 21, 2008

A foolish consistency, we are told, is the hobgoblin of little minds, and — this side of Sean Hannity, at least — it’s difficult to find anyone more consistently foolish, or more obviously small-minded, than George W. Bush.

During the nearly eight years his presidency has blighted our country, the Bushling has been a roving epicenter of disaster. And he has greeted each crisis with an indecent, if thoroughly predictable, eagerness to expand his own power, and that of the embedded oligarchy that produced him.

With the embarrassing enthusiasm of a dim-witted schoolchild, he strikes resolute poses and utters the same handful of banalities that translate into one perfectly consistent demand: Shut up and submit.

Undisguised Fascism

The one defining idea of George W. Bush’s career — and trust me, one idea is the storage capacity of his tiny yet uncluttered mind — is this: As creatures of privilege, he and his cronies are permitted to do whatever they please. This is what made him so useful to the Power Elite that stands poised this week to impose a system of undisguised fascism on our country.

Full story

Marty Peretz - 13.09.2008

Among the trite bromides delivered by Sarah Palin to the Republican National Convention was this: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honest and sincerity and dignity.” Wow, these sure are powerful words, certainly not the verbiage of ordinary people or even ordinary speech writers. Palin certainly didn’t write her speech, and even her distinctly dismal assembly of words in her ABC interview with Charles Gibson were probably not hers. Apropos the wisdom about small towns, her staff also did not trust themselves to do a sentence approximating the thought. So they went to… well, not a treasury of great quotations. It is, after all, a rather banal thought, banally expressed. They went to Westbrook Pegler.

You have to be pretty old to know that Pegler would be a treasure house of right-wing populist jargon. The fact is–and I’ve been checking this all day–no one under 65 with whom I spoke had the slightest idea who he was. So who, then, would know to breeze through the writing of Westbrook Pegler, of all people, in search of what is, after all, just a cliche? Surely only someone knowledgeable (and sympathetic to?) native American fascism.

Ful story