BayouVixen's Blog

In 1934, Smedley D. Butler – a two-time Medal of Honor winner who was arguably the most popular military figure of his time – stunned the nation by announcing that he had been approached by a group of businessmen to lead a fascist overthrow of the Roosevelt administration – an administration he opposed vociferously.

Butler, a Marine who earned his legendary status during the “Banana Wars” in Nicaragua and throughout the Caribbean, claimed he was asked to led a march on Washington by 500,000 veterans demanding payment of pensions promised them for their service during the first World War. The real purpose of the march, Butler told Congress, was to install a “secretary of general welfare” and take the burden of government off the shoulders of Roosevelt – to make the President a figurehead.

Congress briefly examined the charges during hearings which lasted several months, then petered out, and none of those named by Butler was ever charged. World War II came and the matter was quickly forgotten.

Guess who’s in charge of the United States now?

While certainly nowhere near as merciless, organized or efficient as the totalitarians of World War II, today’s American fascists control every sector of the economy, education and politics. They have taken control subtly and legally by winning elections and by winning over both key figures and by playing on the prejudices of everyday Americans.

“Fascism in America won’t come with jackboots, book burnings, mass rallies, and fevered harangues, nor will it come with black helicopters or tanks on the street,”political journalist Chris Floyd observed in 2001. “It won’t come like a storm—but as a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: Everything is the same, but everything has changed.”

“Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality will have taken its place. All the old forms will still be there: legislatures, elections, campaigns—plenty of bread and circuses. But ‘consent of the governed’ will no longer apply; actual control of the state will have passed to a small and privileged group who rule for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons.”

Indeed, the way today’s U.S. government operates is chillingly reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s concern, addressed in a letter to a friend in 1864. Lincoln warned of the growing power of corporations and expressed his fear that if that power were not curbed, eventually the moneyed class would use its influence to take charge of the government, and “….our Republic is no more.”

America’s liberals have been howling about our descent into corporate control for years -- and have been roundly scoffed at for their wild rhetoric and radical solutions, especially since their answer was to vote Democrat. Now, however, they’re beginning to be joined by constitutionalists and libertarians fleeing the Republican Party.

“These days, it's hard to read anything without thinking, ‘this can't be true.’ We're living in an age of secret bunker governments and stealth legislation, however, and unlikely scenarios are tempered with the realization our old reality is gone,” liberal commentator Maureen Farrell wrote on Buzzflash. “Yet here we are, scratching our heads, while guardians of the public trust shill for the state.”
Indeed, while the term “fascist” has often been hurled at the Republican Party, especially under its current leader, George Bush, both parties have their adherents. The previous occupant of the Oval Office, Bill Clinton, was also an adherent of Bush’s Third Way politics, and his wife, Hillary, is one of the key architects of the movement’s crowning glory – control over American public education.

This author put the pieces of the puzzle together back in 1996 and termed the movement the “New Utopians” in the Katy (Texas) Times newspaper by exposing the connection between the National Center on Education and the Economy, the Clintons, and Bush’s support of the rewrite of education standards in Texas.

In a letter to Hillary Clinton written in 1992, NCEE director Marc Tucker wrote that Bill Clinton’s election gave the movement an opportunity to finish making the changes to American public education which would cement the system into place: transforming the education system into one which would train “human resources for the state.” Bush’s Texas education commissioner, Mike Moses, used the NCEE blueprint to implement the same standards which had failed miserably under the Clintons in Arkansas – and when Bush was elected President, the system went national via the No Child Left Behind Act.

Many liberals are keen to point out that all the warning signs of fascism are evident in today’s America: powerful nationalism, a “common enemy” to focus the public’s attention on (terrorism), secret prisons and justice system, secrecy demanded, the military glorified, the news media complicit or controlled, corporations shielded from government intervention, corruption unchecked, militarized police, rampant sexism, bullying of intellectuals and stolen elections.

Some of those warning signs can, of course, be argued – while others are easy to identify. Certainly only the most radical elements of the political Left could believe there has been any increase in sexism (or racism) in today’s Politically Correct America. And non-religious members of the conservative movement have for years been howling that Democrats have been rigging elections themselves with tricks like having “volunteers” help the aged vote or helping illegal aliens to cast ballots – the latter having been found to have occurred on a massive scale during this year’s Texas primary elections.

At the same time, several of the warning signs point out the clear and present danger.

Across the country, for example, the right of Americans to defend themselves is constantly under attack – from the very same political leftists, who may unwittingly be playing into the hands of the fascists through their support of universal firearm confiscation. The legal system penalizes those who defend themselves – remember the $8 million award to the burglar who was shot by the Florida homeowner while trying to sneak into the window of a child’s bedroom?

The War on Terror has spawned a secret system of military tribunals and prisons to handle captured terrorists and, some believe, domestic opponents of the fascist programs deemed to be “supporters” of terrorism. The clear evidence of rampant corruption by powerful multinational corporations within the Bush Administration (and its predecessor) is unrivaled in modern American history.

Yet today’s brand of fascism has been successful in gaining at least partial control over the United States because unlike the Nazis it appeals to both ends of the political spectrum. Author Chris Chantrill offers that what we’re dealing with in the U.S. is liberal fascism, or “what I like to call ‘Mommy fascism.’”

“The fascism of the 1930s was a daddy fascism featuring a militarized command economy and smart CCC uniforms with everyone marching in step,” Chantrill writes. Quoting conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, he says: “Mommy fascism is different and Jonah takes the reader through Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village …’In chapter after chapter she argues for interventions on behalf of children from literally the moment they are born...Then there are the home inspectors, the advisers, the teachers, the social workers.  Clinton relies on her loyal army of experts to dispense advice about every jot of child rearing.”

The difference between the fascists of the 1930s and their snappy uniforms and marching in lockstep and today’s fascists is that today’s fascists have integrated with the true socialist element in politics. 

Chantrill notes: “Liberals would say that ‘liberal fascism’ is an oxymoron, and a hateful one at that.  How could liberals have anything to do with right-wing fascism?  But sixty years ago Hayek in The Road to Serfdom had already made the connection.  He quoted Peter Drucker:  ‘Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.’  Communists and fascists, Hayek continues, ‘compete for the same type of mind and reserve for each other the hatred of the heretic.’”

While the Republican Party is fracturing with the desertion of religious conservatives, constitutionalists and libertarians during this election cycle, some liberal commentators believe that Democrats are also just starting to realize their party has been co-opted as well.

“America is almost a de facto one party state where the Democrats pay Bush the highest compliment by trying to imitate him,” notes Yippie writer Stew Albert in “Are We There Yet? Fascism in America.”  “American fascism is flowering in a post socialist era in which global capitalists feels fully free to bury the welfare state. Because of this historical circumstance, American fascism has within itself the potential for an unearthly collective barbarism.”

Lincoln realized in 1864 that Big Money has power, and rightfully saw the European banking interests which sought to provide financing for the Northern war effort as a threat to national sovereignty. And it is the same interests which have taken control today via control of international corporations – business entities which owe allegiance to no state or flag, but to themselves only.

“I suspect that everything I have just recounted is entirely by design … of Big Money interests,” writes Gary Scott in The Rise of American Fascism. “The role of money ensures that only the wealthy and well-connected have any chance of influencing the political process or holding elected office at a significant level. 

“Thus, it was not by sheer coincidence that, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters were given a choice between a Yale graduate, whose father had been President and whose grandfather was a Senator, and a Harvard graduate, whose father was a Senator. And in the 2004 presidential contest, the choice was even more narrow, between a multi-millionaire Yale “Skull and Bones” man and a billionaire Yale “Skull and Bones” man. Nepotism, like corruption, discourages most good Americans from participating in elections, to say nothing of running for office!”

With each election, no matter who wins it, we seem to take another step forward the ultimate goal of the fascist movement: world control.

“The fascism of today will not simply be a repression of political life in the imperialist countries to the level of the politically repressive states of many 'developing' nations,” notes an article in the Communist journal, Rally! Comrades. “It will mean the transformation of political rule everywhere, although the process of its implementation and its form will undoubtedly vary around the world. The common denominator cannot help but be a state, global in nature, which guarantees the unrestrained rule of private property on a global scale and the protection of the interests of a supranational ruling class.”

Constitutionalists and libertarians are connecting with the Radical Left on this score: “Since 1990, when George Bush brought the phrase ‘New World Order’ out of the closet (it was Adolf Hitler's pet phrase first) we have entered a new phase,” notes alternative press author Mark Evans. “The push for world government of, for, and by the transnational cartels is on in earnest. The globalists, being thoroughly multi-partisan, … continued to implement the agenda of their New World Order under Clinton, even while utilizing the right-wing in America to attack Clinton as a ‘socialist.’ This scenario has had the net effect of moving the whole dialectic further in the direction of universal fascism.”

Indeed, one of the Nazis’ favorite tactics – publicly denying that something was going on even as it happened in secret – is being employed today. Even while scoffing at the very notion, President Bush and his counterparts in Mexico and Canada moved forward with plans for the formation of the North American Union in New Orleans April 21-22… a treaty never debated by Congress nor even advertised to the American people.