This kind of shit is really scary... Anyone who has studied the history of white supremacy in the US knows not to take this shit lightly. Also, this shit is how fascism is constructed. Fascism is not some coup or something, it is a slow and painful construction that starts with shit like this. The Republican Party is transforming and we all have REAL cause for concern. Fascism has resonance throughout US history, even before the meteoric rise of Hitler and Franco and Mussolini. Post-Reconstruction South, 1919 with the race riots all throughout the country, the shit that helped to take most of the New Deal's Teeth, Post Reagan Prison growth...It's pretty clear to me that Fascism is a not an abberation of the West, but rather an integral part of it's long and murderous history
http://www.alternet.org/rights/141923/gun-nut_outside_obama_townhall_linked_to_gop_%27stop_obamacare%27_effort/
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3 comments:
(Comment by Andi Cullins)
I don't think most people in US think that Fascism could seriously take hold here. They have no idea how dangerously close we have come in the past, or how rapidly the neo-cons are moving the nation in that direction. While most Americans are basking in the notion of a post-racial era ushered in by Obama, the neo-cons are preparing a campaign of blame and race baiting that will swing the pendulum back 100 years. By the time they are done, Franco and Mussolini will look like leprechauns and the public will think that Obama is the new Hitler. All the time, they are pulling the nation towards absolute intolerance.
(and don't forget we're only 50 years post McCarthy)
or that we've already been a fascist state... americanist ideology teaches us that America is above all that, but for freedpeople after reconstruction, the US was nothing but a fascist state and for those caught in the ever-widening nets of the prison state, there is no denying that we're really already a fascist state... it's a process and people are oblivious to the fact that what happens in prison or Guantanamo or Iraq or the ghetto, will bite us all in the ass. whatever is okay for them sets the limits for what is okay generally. this is just a strengthening of fascist elements of our society.
(comment by Andi Cullins)
the average white american (AWA) can't see any of this. They are unaware of what happens in those places because they can afford to be. That is to say, they can never foresee themselves in that situation. Everything about their experience leads to privilege, which most take for granted and don't realize they have. And, everything about the people in Gitmo, or Iraq or the ghetto connotes an "otherness" that prevents AWAs seeing that end as a potential for themselves. In fact, it does just the opposite. It causes the privileged to see the "others" as so different that they must have been deserving of whatever treatment they are enduring. Otherwise, how can AWAs explain to themselves that it will not, can not happen to them?
That is why the current white backlash to Obama is so dangerous. It is all too easy for neo-cons to manipulate the deep psychological dived that has been ingrained into the american psyche for 400 years. They can use Obama as a metaphor for all that is wrong with American. It translates into why they need show no respect in public settings to any ideas that he might have generated or endorsed. Why is that no one was allowed to heckle anyone who represented the Bush ideals? It would have been intolerable.
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