== Ecos of fascism past ==
It is well to look back a few years to the brilliant Umberto Eco’s list of 14 Traits of Fascism, of which the Nazis were just one sub type. It truly is a fascinating (and chilling) list, as Eco avoids the temptation of prescriptive jargon, distilling fascism to common traits we see so very often in authoritarian movements.
The overwhelming prevalence of nasty-stupid feudalism may have galactic implications! A trait that common among humans might also be obligatory in other races, across the stars, helping to explain the “Fermi Paradox” or quandary over the apparent absence of interstellar civilizations. It's a trap that all-too few escape.
==Karl's ghost rises ==
But getting back to Umberto Eco's list, is another question. How do Marxist authoritarian states differ from fascist ones? It seems to me that Marxists - or Leninists, actually - break from the list in traits #1 & 2, while modifying #6 & 10 & 12 in order to mask them with egalitarian/proletarian gloss.
A key point I keep hammering. It seemed for a while as if the works of Karl Marx had been devastatingly refuted by the society that Franklin, Lincoln and the FDR generation built, which broke almost every "ordained" pattern that old Karl thought inevitable -- making a flattened "capitalism" that followed Adam Smith's egalitarian prescription instead, seeking to include ever more groups in flat-fair-creative competitive productivity.
A few residual red-believers grumbled: "Just you wait. The aristocrats and cheaters will be back to re-establish the worst version of capitalism. A version of feudalism that finally drives oppressed serfs to revolution!" Like many, I shrugged off those cultists...
...only now Marxist works are flying off the shelves, all over the world, and Karl's raving followers rant on every campus and in sweatshops and unemployment lines. Moreover, this resurrection of an undead cult wasn't caused by moderate liberal reformers, or those FDR-loving members of the Greatest Generation, or even Bernie-style Scandinavia socialists.
The blame is fully at the feet of those would-be lords backing Fox. You did this. You raised the dead. And those zombies will get you.
== Ayn Rand may offer a torpedo to sink GOP fascism ==
Now and then I propose something most of you reflexively reject - reaching out to libertarians. Offering them Adam Smith and liberally-accentuated flat-fair-creative Competition instead of cultish worship of Property. ("C" word, not "P"!) The Koch/Forbes cabal spent billions to suborn this movement, an achilles hell, should libertarians ever wake from the trance.
So far - yes - it's glacially slow, pointing out that liberals want bedroom freedom, body sovereignty, church separation, are fiscally far more prudent and it's blue states who spur entrepreneurship and are ending the damned War on Drugs. But this new item could actually do it!
MAGA War on Architectural Diversity to bring back Classical Architecture.
So far - yes - it's glacially slow, pointing out that liberals want bedroom freedom, body sovereignty, church separation, are fiscally far more prudent and it's blue states who spur entrepreneurship and are ending the damned War on Drugs. But this new item could actually do it!
MAGA War on Architectural Diversity to bring back Classical Architecture.
Seriously, nothing you do will cause a randian to rock back and take notice more than rubbing that in their face! In Ayn Rand's best (or least-bad) book, art critic Ellsworth Monkton Toohey oppresses architectural genius Howard Roark with demands for classical columns and conformity to ornate, conservative style. So use this! Nothing could make more clear to that branch of libertarians that yes, it is the Republicans who are the cheaters, looters and repressers of modernity (and science and every other fact-using profession) in favor of a return to feudal-inherited oligarchic traditionalism.
Know one? Hammer this!
== An important dilemma to consider… but beware the sub-text! ==
Robert Zubrin, best known for his advocacy of Mars colonization, is unabashedly forward on many cutting edge issues, often combining incisive insight about the future with a somewhat-mad, rightwing moralizing that seems quaintly decent and naive, in the age of Putin, Fox, MBS and Trump. Take his most recent article in The National Review - The Real Robot Threat - a call for an international treaty against autonomous lethal weaponry - machinery that can be unleashed to target living people without the supervision and control of a human operator.
And yes, human operators do make a big difference. The drone strikes that saw an upsurge during the Obama years were all closely monitored and even from thousands of miles away, Air Force and CIA operators in Nevada frequently called off hits at the very last moment, when they suspected likely civilian casualties (sometimes violating direct orders.) Their rates of cancelation and refusal were far higher than by pilots of fighter-bombers on the scene! Suggesting that the video game generation has not been ‘dehumanized.’ (See the fascinating Mexican sci fi flick “Sleep Dealer.”)
You’ll get none of that conscientious oversight in basic, unleashed auto-targeted systems. So yes, I approve of Rob raising the issue! Though there are many points to quibble in this piece.
First, there’s the Cryptic Elite Effect. Such laws and treaties will be violated by the very ones who are most dangerous with the technology, such as criminal or despotic elites who will only respond to such a treaty by pursuing them in secret. Such controls can only be useful if we first get what I have for 30 years called the PRE-REQUISITE for all goody-goody legislation — widespread and worldwide transparency. And in such a world, the need for such laws would vanish organically, anyway.
Second, alas, Rob’s fetishistic tunnel vision glares throughout the article, for example: “Bureaucracy is necessary for tyranny because it suppresses conscience. The bureaucrat is required not to think or feel. He or she is to be part of a machine. The purpose of bureaucracy is to turn people into automatons.”
Oh what stunning drivel! Oh, sure, bureaucracy can be the tool of whatever society wields it. And yes, as Orwell, Kafka, Vonnegut and Arendt pointed out, bureaucrats can be great enablers of hierarchical oppression. (I was Distinguished Scholar at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center and my father knew her at the Eichmann Trial.) But Zubrin’s obsession is a way of blaming the tool and letting the hierarchs off the hook.
For 6000 years, those oppressive hierarchs weren’t “bureaucrats” or socialists, but kings, feudal lords and theocrats, fiercely enforcing wealth inheritance for their sons, maintaining 60 centuries of grueling darkness and error and misrule and suppression. The very kind of oligarchic rule that the world’s entire mad right is trying to re-impose upon us, as we speak. Even Leninist and fascist regimes fit that pattern - pyramids of top-down power - perfectly, with only cosmetic changes in symbolism and state cult-religion.
And such oligarchies have hated one enemy above all -- Periclean Enlightenments, brief eras of flat-open, egalitarian, transparent and fact-driven opportunity, with policies that encourage fair-competition and social mobility and opportunity for all. And yes, as Adam Smith pointed out, these vastly-creative renaissances require bureaucrats to counter-balance the power of lords and the wealthy and other elites.
And yes, that is why the mad right has declared war against today’s largely loyal, intelligent and conscientious civil servants… slandering them as some purported "deep state"... and against all other fact-using professions.
So yes, go read Rob’s missive. It’s thought provoking, so let thoughts be provoked! Only then think beyond, to why it is that a few of our brightest get lured into ancient incantations and magic spells that wind up thwarting the very kind of society they want to defend.
== Who are the crazies at the top? ==
We've all watched the bizarro theater of acting Navy Secretary Modley firing Captain Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt for trying desperately to save the lives of his sailors. Ironically, Theodore Roosevelt himself did something very similar, in order to get his own men away from Yellow Fever infested swamps where the McKinley Administration cynically kept them, for political reasons. Above all, look up the story of Ernest King, who refused stupid orders to endanger his men, aboard USS Lexington in the 1930s. His career seemed doomed. And 8 years later he led the US Navy wearing five stars during WWII.
Consider this: “Billions of dollars allocated for the critical acquisition of additional ships and aircraft vital for Navy and Marne Corps warfighting capability diverted by SecDef Esper for border wall construction. This action undermines our national security and military readiness for political purposes.”
Look at all actions by these idiocrats. Find me one that goes against the itnerests of Vladimir Putin.
Look at all actions by these idiocrats. Find me one that goes against the itnerests of Vladimir Putin.
== Political miscellany… some of it even funny! ==
Biggest lie? "Drain the Swamp" is near the top. Robert Reich's video lays it out so vividly - make your MAGAs watch!
“Trump's new lawyer reportedly steered more than $60 million from his nonprofit to family members.”
