F(ascism) YOU!

“I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.” ― Jim Garrison

The old aphorism that makes the aw-shucks-golly-gee-willikers observation, “Laws are like sausages; it is best not to see them being made,” has been referenced by docile nitwits since the late 1800s as a cloying and unforgivable defense as to why it might be acceptable to remain a passive nonparticipation in the democratic process, its urbane quotability crafted no doubt for those least likely to be victimized by legislation rendered in contempt of a person’s ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious conviction, or political affiliation. Put another way, it is a saying invented for the same entitled laggards who, if they ever saw the legislation proven to actually make sausages of their neighbors and fellow human beings, might be less laudatory of the maxim’s lyrical wit and pointless application once perceived accurately as a sort of Novocaine for one’s empathy center, as if the discomfort rumored to be an essential part of any participatory democracy was best dulled and forgotten.

Indeed, most of the sausage-making legislation that a growing number of people don’t want to look at is the kind of legislation that makes sausages of those actively resisting the patriotic call to be cannibalized by America’s insatiable desire to eliminate any person, place, or thing attempting to exist outside of its absolute control. For some, this is not legislation that one can easily point to; mostly, that is, because it isn’t the sort of legislation that enjoys public debate or, in recent times, even private conversation. It is the sort of legislation that deliberately skews or flat out suppresses all information, no matter how accurate and incontrovertible, that might ultimately speak critically of the intentions and actions of the United States. Indeed, throughout history, it has been proven time and time again that the most efficient method that a government has of maintaining a particular attitude about what is right and wrong with the world is to limit public access to alternative points of view.

Take for instance—and excluding any of the obvious examples offered by the Trump administration on a daily basis—as one of the more tragic examples of how brutally a government can behave towards a segment of its own population that simply wishes to move beyond complaining into a more proactive role of civic participation, the Labor Movement in this country, which, although it had previous manifestations, however short-lived, as a class struggle imported from England in the earliest days of U.S. history, first appeared as an organized political movement in 1839 in the Hudson River Valley on a 720,000 acre expanse of land known as the Rensselaer Estate, a feudal manor for tenant farmers originally established in 1629. As part of a feudal system, the farmers living and working on the estate, of which there were around 80,000, did not own the land that they occupied, nor did they have any rights to the timber, minerals, or water power on the land, and only limited rights to their own crops and livestock, yet they were responsible for all the property taxes and subject to eviction at the landlord’s discretion.

Hoping to assert their own sovereignty and to gain greater significance in the eyes of the national government, a privilege extended only to property owners, the farmers, no longer recognizing the legitimacy of the land titles held by the Rensselaer family (titles which had been established by the British in pre-Revolutionary War America), organized and refused to pay their rent, thus beginning what was known as the Anti-Renter’s Movement. Initially begun as a private insurgency, and nearly dying there, the movement eventually found voice in local politics and finally reached the federal level where it forced legislation to be drafted preventing the creation of any new feudal leases, although it provided no relief for those farmers suffering under existing leases. Still, what this ultimately demonstrated to the common citizen was how dissent and rebellion, when acclimated into nonviolent modes of expression and used to reflect and then exercise rights guaranteed by the Constitution— rights, some might argue, originally included cosmetically by the Founding Fathers as ideals to aspire to and never meant to seep into everyday use since everyday use could only weaken the absolute supremacy of the social and political elite—could actually strike down abusive laws and traditions originally adopted to exploit and/or marginalize and/or vilify the weaker and less affluent segments of society. It demonstrated that the system did in fact contain some provisions designed to help protect the rights of theoretical people and that actual people need only to concentrate their efforts and to make a sufficient political noise to manifest what would constitute a majority vote in the appropriate venue to change things for the better. (In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1962: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”)

However, what it also ultimately demonstrated to those in power, who were those with the most to lose by allowing full participation of the lower classes in the political process, was how important propaganda and control of the public mind would be for the prevention of future grabs at sovereignty by the masses, particularly by the labor force which not only did all the work that turned a profit for the ruling class and kept its salacious appetites for money and power well entrenched, but which already was a threat to the bourgeoisie because it had the added benefit of being pre-organized into groups where one worker could talk to another worker and both could have their respective suspicions confirmed that life without direct influence over one’s own destiny was demonstratively unfair and that a massive restructuring of society was needed, beginning with the immediate eradication of the capitalist leadership. Thus began a program of state sponsored violence and the maligning of any group attempting to organize resistance against the tyranny of repression institutionalized by the capitalistic model, as if there was something radical and profoundly subversive and terribly rude about victims of oppression realizing the injustice inherent in their situation and scheming to change it.

After all, wage slaves who are forced to subjugate themselves to a hierarchical social structure where the overwhelming majority of working men and women are prevented from accessing their own passions and ideas about what constitutes a life worth living, and who are made to suppress their own natural tendencies towards self-preservation and self-determination in deference to the greed, narcissism, and innumerable prejudices of the privileged class, should know better; they should know, quite simply, that since being rich is better than being poor (ask anybody) then it logically follows that rich people must be better people than poor people and that civilization, in the interest of being the best that it can be, must always choose as its architects—and reward as its beneficiaries as it dies a little more everyday—the better men.

So while it should certainly be considered a real tragedy in the deepest sense of the word that the period connecting the mid-19^th Century with the mid-20^th Century was indeed a period largely defined, at least domestically, by governmental assaults on the civil liberties of working people through strikebreaking, blacklisting, murder, and intimidation —people who were doing little more than hoping to create and guarantee a freer society for themselves and future generations based on mutual cooperation and equal access to the law—the greater tragedy in my mind is the contempt with which the average American is encouraged to remember those who struggled and died for the Bill of Rights and what turned out to be the pipedream of a stronger democracy; that is, of course, if they’re encouraged to remember anything at all. Certainly, the greatest disgrace that the leaders of a so-called free society can offer the ancestors of its malcontents, which are all of us, is denial of the malcontents’ existence, forget about their sacrifice. The fact that Eugene Debs, for instance, is either completely unknown or considered a kook by many who have merely overheard his name in bogus conversations about kooks and somebody like Theodore Roosevelt is immediately recognized and considered a hero for giving birth to both modern-day Imperialism and the Teddy Bear is truly indicative of a system deliberately structured to guarantee subordination of any group or class preferring social justice and pluralism over the politics of the Big Stick, state propaganda, and the sort of rugged individualism that discourages the formation of any organized form of self-government capable of nurturing a meaning of life unrelated to the stock market or the status quo.

Such manipulative, dare I say fascistic with a capital F, behavior as the writing of American history to exclude the barbarism of the power elite must, of course—just for the sake of adhering to the physics of how recollections are first formed before they’re flung into the past—begin with the falsification of current events as they happen so that the spin that cements them into the collective memory of the public is sufficiently selective to protect the reputation of the ruling class. That’s why, for example, particularly in recent years, whenever the United States decides to bomb another country, whether it’s Bosnia or Panama or Libya or Sudan or Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or Venezuela (note to publisher: it might be wise to allow some extra space here as this list is guaranteed to grow substantially in the weeks and months and years ahead), or whenever the United States decides to directly supply the training and the financial backing and the weaponry to other countries containing potential struggles for self-determination and sovereignty unrelated to American big business, whether it’s in Palestine or Turkey or the Philippines or Saudi Arabia or Brazil or Chile or Guatemala or Nicaragua or Argentina or Haiti, etcetera, the atrocities are always reported to be committed either in self-defense or in the interest of the health and wellbeing of the civilians on the ground in or around the area that’s being bombed, with debate, at least in the mainstream media or statements released by government officials, never involving a historical perspective that might label either claim as complete and utter bullshit.

To understand the greed and cowardice that determines American foreign policy one need only look at the greed and cowardice that has and continues to drive the U.S. governmental attacks on science and education, the American Labor Movement, the never-ending Peace and anti-genocide movements, the Women’s Rights Movement, the LGBTQIA+ Movement, the pro-immigrant’s rights movement, and the Environmental Movement; attacks that have nothing to do with a need for humanitarian intervention—in fact, perpetrating the opposite—although the excuse of committing the attacks in self-defense might be applicable if the term was understood to really mean profit-defense.

Furthermore, when one recognizes the weaponry and the method of warfare that the United States typically uses to attack other countries with—namely from drones or the dropping of bombs from 15,000 feet up to avoid the possibility of any retaliation whatsoever and the targeting of civilians and their infrastructure so that after all the immediate killing and after the proper sanctions are put into place to starve all the survivors to near and actual death for some time, American corporations can invade the country with blueprints under one arm and investors under the other without facing any resistance whatsoever, all around them homeless people and neighborhoods needing immediate gentrification just like home!—one should have no problem labeling America the Beautiful as a world class scumbag and anyone not actively trying to chop her huge swinging balls off, either through force or through more peaceful methods such as conscientious objecting and civil disobedience and the court system, scumbag accessories to a crime that, the longer it goes without being named and punished, sadly accumulates the need for a harsher and harsher sentence.

So why should we expect to see acts of domestic and international terrorism grow exponentially in conjunction with the increased violence from nation states in the months and years ahead, along with an increase in prayers from law-abiding citizens from other countries begging the universe to expedite the unintentional self-immolation of America? And why should any one of us ever again be surprised by airplanes that are crashed into buildings or human bombs that are exploded in busy cafes or fertilizer trucks that are blown up outside government offices or having the names and faces of lone assassins burned into our brains like the newest media influencer? And why should it be okay for every human being on the planet to feel as if he or she has a target painted on his or her forehead and that he or she has equal chance of dying from somebody else’s political or religious or economic fanaticism as he or she does of having a forehead? Answer: Because it’s unfair for the richest countries on the planet, under the revolting leadership of the United States, to want to privatize even that and expect everyone just to accept it.

After all, we the people will take freedom and democracy in whatever form the power structure makes available to us.