Are Neocons Fascists?

There's much use of the fascist term in political dialog these days. The term comes up most naturally in connection with neoconservatism. Some would maintain that the dissimilarities between the two political ideologies allow no comparisons. On the other hand, the rhetoric being used on the neocon airwaves does sound somehow familiar, ca. 1930s. ...

The neoconservatives have had nothing more nor less on their agenda than a takeover of the government. The sooner we recognize this the better. Comparing them to fascism or authoritarians of any branch means little to most people since the horrors of those phenomena can't be brought home on a human level. For most people, talk of a government takeover in the US--where these things just don't happen--is like talking about fairies in Beulah land.

Much of the discussion about whether neocons are fascists or not still works at the level of abstractions and fog. The reality of what a takeover might look like or how it might be felt and experienced slowly seeps into consciousness and is soon forgotten. Remember the days after 911 when people walked around in a despondent funk--when people were fired for voicing minimal opposition to the so-called "war" on terrorism?

I suggest that that reality is what covers most of the dealings we have with the world now. The neocons have indeed changed the way we think about the world--and it is a much more brutish, nasty, and short-sighted vision of American ideals than has ever existed in America.

Hitler to Himmler:

The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.

It's well-known that Hitler believed Jews to be a bacillus.

Radio talk-show host Michael Savage on July 6:

Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet.

As Stephen T. Katz has argued in his monumnetal study of the Holocaust, the unique brand of anti-semitism that Hitler espoused was uniquely determined by the scientistic context of his time/place. Just as his anti-semitism was conditioned by this historical context, I also think the very terms of the fascistic terminology was influenced as well. The use of the virus/bacillus terminology is unique to a modern, scientistic mind-set.

The neoconservatives have had nothing more not less on their agenda than a takeover of the government. The sooner we recognize this the better. Comparing them to fascism or authoritarians of any branch means little to most people since the horrors of those phenomena can't be brought home on a human level. For most people, talk of a government takeover in the US--where these things just don't happen--is like talking about fairies in Beulah land.

Much of the discussion about neoconservatives still works at the level of abstractions and fog. The reality of what a takeover might look like or how it might be felt and experienced slowly seeps into consciousness and is soon forgotten. Remember the days after 911 when people walked around in a despondent funk--when people were fired for voicing minimal opposition to the so-called "war" on terrorism?

I am still persuaded by Richard Sennett's distinction between two forms of fascism, what he calls soft and hard fascism:

We could think of fascism itself as either hard or soft. Hard fascism rams home to the citizen that he or she is held in that iron grip, as in Mussolini's theatre of force or George Orwell's nightmare Nineteen Eighty-four. Soft fascism is not so much a velvet glove as an invisible hand, the operations of control hidden from scrutiny as Patriot Act II, and more, internal repression presented to the public as merely preventive action against threats that have yet to materialise. The Bush administration acted in this preventive way, for instance, by shutting three of the larger Muslim charities in America, not for anything they had done, but for what might happen, some time, somewhere. In hard fascism the state exploits concrete fear, in soft fascism the state exploits diffuse anxiety.

I suggest that that reality is what covers most of the dealings we have with the world now. The neocons have indeed changed the way we think about the world--and it is a much more brutish, nasty, and short-sighted vision of American ideals than has ever existed in America.

The neocons practise the "double-truth" theory, which was first espoused by Plato in Republic and then taken up by Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes) and other Islamic philosophers. This theory teaches that there are truths for the unlettered and ignorant and truths for the intellectual and "scientist." In most cases, these philosophers limited the theory to divine scripture.

Neoncon theoretician Leo Strauss took over the theory from the Islamic philosophers and Plato and noted that philosophy is destructive to the state and therefore should only be practised by the initiated. He therefore backed the notion that democracy (in true Platonic and Aristotelian fashion) is a retrograde political system. The truth of political power is to be exercised by the initiated few who understand the true workings of how power and force are to be used.

There's something that Americans have never been able to face, even though they have committed atrocity after atrocity. That is the dark secret that lies behind the neocon takeover--they know that Americans will never ever allow to come to consciousness exactly how evil America’s precious innocence and ignorance are.