Deep Politics Forum

Adele Edisen Wrote:I am going to say something bold and rash. You may accept it or not. I think this country is in the midst of a fascist takeover.
There, I said it! Maybe I'm not the only one to say and think the same.

Adele

Ms Edisen,
I have to wonder what percentage of the general public knows what a fascist is. Now, that would be the general public, and not just the readers of this forum. My age group, +/- a few years has been programmed to fear a communist takeover, and now terrorism, but very little discussion about fascism has been forthcoming. Or did I miss it?

LR Trotter Wrote:

Adele Edisen Wrote:I am going to say something bold and rash. You may accept it or not. I think this country is in the midst of a fascist takeover.
There, I said it! Maybe I'm not the only one to say and think the same.

Adele

Ms Edisen,
I have to wonder what percentage of the general public knows what a fascist is. Now, that would be the general public, and not just the readers of this forum. My age group, +/- a few years has been programmed to fear a communist takeover, and now terrorism, but very little discussion about fascism has been forthcoming. Or did I miss it?

Larry,

Thank you for asking about fascism. Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, before and during World War II, defined Fascism as "the Corporate State." This means that the ruling power of the government and its aims are the welfare and maintenance of business corporations. There are other charactristics which are part of the fascist state, but Mussolini's definition gives us the basic concept of what fascism is. Fascism arose in the Twentieth Century in Europe after World War I as highly militarized, totalitarianized states with centralized political power in a very small group enpowered by business interests, including support from international cartels and corporations. The rise of fascist dictatorships in Italy and Germany was economically aided by support from the United States and Great Britain, as well as by domestic corporations.

The post-war economic depression created many unemployed workers, hunger, starvation, and deprivation in the populations, making many prone to the pseudo-socialistic propaganda spouted by the leaders of the fascist movements. The official name, for example, of the German Nazi Party was the National Socialist Workers Party, and it quickly organized and mobilized the poverty-stricken people into militarized units. The German Nazi Party was VOTED into power and quickly controlled the German Reichstag, its parliament. The German Constitution of the Weimar Republic was one of the most democratic constitutions in the world. The weakened chancellor, Hindenburg, gave his powers to Adolph Hitler, and the Third Reich was born in 1933.

By the way, the first piece of legislation passed by the newly formed Reichstag was a law forbidding the use of animals in biological scientific research.

In Italy, originally a monarchy, King Victor Emanual was simply evicted by Benito Mussolini and his private army of blackshirts in 1922. Mussolini initially claimed to be a socialist, but quickly became a tool of the Italian and international corporations who could use him for their profit making gains. Every dictator of any country is a puppet of some guiding economic power, domestic or foreign.

During the 1930s there were other fascist dictatorships in Europe: Spain, Portugal, Hungary, etc., but none as terrrible as Nazi Germany with its extermination camps, killing 14 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews, and its world domination goals extending across Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The fascist philosophy spread to South and Central America, where the Spanish Generalissomo Franco's concept of fascism was prevelent. Franco's fascists were called Falangists, from the word phalanx).

So, the best definition I can find is Mussolini's Corporate State. It is one we may use to define our own form of government now.

By definition, Socialism is defined as public ownership of the means of production and distribution. For example, Amtrak, our railroad passenger system, is publicly owned through the government; it is owned by all of us and is not a private profit-making corporation. In socialist countries this is the case for manufacturing and such productions of all goods; there is no private ownership of production, as is the case in capitalistic nations, USA, etc. There may limited private ownership of economic production units in some quasi-socialist countries. The Soviet Union had a socialist economy (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR). It did not have a communist economy. Webster's dictionary can provide the definitions of these economic terms. There are no truly communist countries, as by Webster's definition of a communist state, all means of economic production are owned by the public, and there is no State, or government, just some administrative offices to run things, presumably.

Some very small societries where everything is shared by the group do exist, and have historically existed throughout human existence. The early Christians, as refugees, lived in such a manner. This allowed them to survive the harsh conditions they faced. A group of primitive peoples in the Phillipines were discovered some years ago living in such a manner, and probably the cave peoples and other early humans did so as well.

There are some good books on Fascism. I'll list a few in my next post.

Adele

THE ANATOMY OF FASCISM by Robert Paxton, and other writings by Paxton on Fascism

and

http://rense.com/general37/char.htm
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Rense.com
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Fourteen Defining
Characteristics Of Fascism
By Dr. Lawrence Britt
Source Free Inquiry.co
5-28-3


Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread
domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

From Liberty Forum

LR Trotter Wrote:

Adele Edisen Wrote:I am going to say something bold and rash. You may accept it or not. I think this country is in the midst of a fascist takeover.
There, I said it! Maybe I'm not the only one to say and think the same.

Adele

Ms Edisen,
I have to wonder what percentage of the general public knows what a fascist is. Now, that would be the general public, and not just the readers of this forum. My age group, +/- a few years has been programmed to fear a communist takeover, and now terrorism, but very little discussion about fascism has been forthcoming. Or did I miss it?

I think what you say Adele is what I think is happening too. And Larry, your observation is very interesting too. For me the whole distraction of the communist bogeyman was part of the fascist bag of tricks. Like the magician's sleight of hand so your attention is diverted elsewhere while the real action is happening some where else. As Chomsky points out the US allows 'freedom of speech' but it takes place with in a very narrow band. Whole areas are off bounds. Invisible. Silent. Yes, you missed it. But you were never meant to see it.

Sadly, the above fits the current US to a tee. Here is a another definition:

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

* * *

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.

In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.

That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.

This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.

Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.

Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.

In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.

In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

* * *

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Umberto Eco 1995

From the book THE AXIS GRAND STRATEGY: Blueprints for the Total War, compiled and edited by Ladislas Farago, 1942, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., New York, NY, and Toronto, Canada.
(Ladislas Farago (1906-1980) was a military historian and journalist, born in Hungary and came to Canada and the US. He is the author of over a dozen books, notably
THE GAME OF THE FOXES - about Nazi spies in US before WWII; PATTON: ORDEAL AND TRIUMPH - basis for movie on General Patton; AFTERMATH: THE SEARCH FOR MARTIN BORMAN - Nazi tracked..


BEAUTY OF WAR

By Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti
1937

War is Beauty because it realizes the mechanical man
Perfect with the gas mask
the terrifying megaphone
the flame thrower
or enclosed in the armoured car
which establishes the domination of man over the machine
War is Beauty
because it commences the metallization of man
of which we used to dream....

The author of this chapter in the book, Psychological Warfare, states, "As a matter of fact, for their total mobilization, the Fascist rulers need men who have ceased to be of flesh and blood."

The poetry and all the arts of Fascism were as devoid of life and truth and beauty as is this poem.

Adele

Adele Edisen Wrote:BEAUTY OF WAR

By Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti
1937

War is Beauty because it realizes the mechanical man
Perfect with the gas mask
the terrifying megaphone
the flame thrower
or enclosed in the armoured car
which establishes the domination of man over the machine
War is Beauty
because it commences the metallization of man
of which we used to dream....

The author of this chapter in the book, Psychological Warfare, states, "As a matter of fact, for their total mobilization, the Fascist rulers need men who have ceased to be of flesh and blood."

Adele - yes, precisely.

Man as commodity, object, mechanical possession devoid of individual human worth, is at the very heart of fascism, and all its offshoots.

The other core philosophy of fascism is Eugenics, with its belief in superior and inferior Blood (Blut) and Breeding.

Now, in 2012, Eugenics could be described as the belief in superior and inferior Genes.

Eugenics has been a core belief of the elites throughout the C20th and beyond, and Hitler placed it right at the centre of Nazi philosophy and ideology.

Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous, was a prominent Eugenicist, and wrote in 1941:

Quote:"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation."

Eugenics is still a core belief of the elites, but they seldom openly proclaim this belief because of the Eugenically-inspired Holocaust of Jews, Roma and Slavs in the 1930-40s.

However, the continuing impact of Eugenics on political policy and decision-making can still be discerned by those with Eyes Wide Open.

Note: I found this article in this morning's NY Times, and thought it appropriate for the Romney topic, comsidering Romney's arguments for self-made business people, and his choice for Vice-President, Paul Ryan, is an Ayn Rand admirer. - AE

The New York Times
August 18, 2012, 2:30 pm

Deluded Individualism
By FIRMIN DEBRABANDER

There is a curious passage early in Freud's "Ego and the Id" where he remarks that the id behaves "as if" it were unconscious. The phrase is puzzling, but the meaning is clear: the id is the secret driver of our desires, the desires that animate our conscious life, but the ego does not recognize it as such. The ego - what we take to be our conscious, autonomous self - is ignorant to the agency of the id, and sees itself in the driver seat instead. Freud offers the following metaphor: the ego is like a man on horseback, struggling to contain the powerful beast beneath; to the extent that the ego succeeds in guiding this beast, it's only by "transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."

By Freud's account, conscious autonomy is a charade. "We are lived," as he puts it, and yet we don't see it as such. Indeed, Freud suggests that to be human is to rebel against that vision - the truth. We tend to see ourselves as self-determining, self-conscious agents in all that we decide and do, and we cling to that image. But why? Why do we resist the truth? Why do we wish - strain, strive, against the grain of reality - to be autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as such?

Perhaps Freud is too cynical regarding conscious autonomy, but he is right to question our presumption to it. He is right to suggest that we typically - wrongly - ignore the extent to which we are determined by unknown forces, and overestimate our self-control. The path to happiness for Freud, or some semblance of it in his stormy account of the psyche, involves accepting our basic condition. But why do we presume individual agency in the first place? Why do we insist on it stubbornly, irrationally, often recklessly?

I was reminded of Freud's paradox by a poignant article in The Times a few months back, which described a Republican leaning district in Minnesota, and its constituents' conflicted desire to be self-reliant ("Even Critics of the Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It," Feb. 11). The article cited a study from Dartmouth political science professor Dean Lacy, which revealed that, though Republicans call for deep cuts to the safety net, their districts rely more on government support than their Democratic counterparts.

In Chisago County, Minn., The Times's reporters spoke with residents who supported the Tea Party and its proposed cuts to federal spending, even while they admitted they could not get by without government support. Tea Party aficionados, and many on the extreme right of the Republican party for that matter, are typically characterized as self-sufficient middle class folk, angry about sustaining the idle poor with their tax dollars. Chisago County revealed a different aspect of this anger: economically struggling Americans professing a robust individualism and self-determination, frustrated with their failures to achieve that ideal.

Why the stubborn insistence on self-determination, in spite of the facts? One might say there is something profoundly American in this. It's our fierce individualism shining through. Residents of Chisago County are clinging to notions of past self-reliance before the recession, before the welfare state. It's admirable in a way. Alternately, it evokes the delusional autonomy of Freud's poor ego.

These people, like many across the nation, rely on government assistance, but pretend they don't. They even resent the government for their reliance. If they looked closely though, they'd see that we are all thoroughly saturated with government assistance in this country: farm subsidies that lower food prices for us all, mortgage interest deductions that disproportionately favor the rich, federal mortgage guarantees that keep interest rates low, a bloated Department of Defense that sustains entire sectors of the economy and puts hundreds of thousands of people to work. We can hardly fathom the depth of our dependence on government, and pretend we are bold individualists instead.

As we are in an election year, the persistence of this delusion has manifested itself politically, particularly as a foundation in the Republican Party ideology - from Ron Paul's insistence during the primaries that the government shouldn't intervene to help the uninsured even when they are deathly ill, to Rick Santorum's maligning of public schools, to Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as a running mate. There is no doubt that radical individualism will remain a central selling point of their campaign. Ryan's signature work, his proposal for the federal budget, calls for drastic cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Pell grants and job training programs, among others. To no surprise, as The New Yorker revealed in a recent profile of Ryan, the home district that supports him is boosted by considerable government largesse.

Of course the professed individualists have an easy time cutting services for the poor. But this is misguided. There are many counties across the nation that, like Chisago County, might feel insulated from the trials of the destitute. Perhaps this is because they are able to ignore the poverty in their midst, or because they are rather homogeneous and geographically removed from concentrations of poverty, like urban ghettos. But the fate of the middle class counties and urban ghettos is entwined. When the poor are left to rot in their misery, the misery does not stay contained. It harms us all. The crime radiates, the misery offends, it debases the whole. Individuals, much less communities, cannot be insulated from it.

Thanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it's easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can't fully imagine or recall what it's like. We can't really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth. But the notion of self-reliance is also a fallacy.

Spinoza greatly influenced Freud, and he adds a compelling insight we would do well to reckon with. Spinoza also questioned the human pretense to autonomy. Men believe themselves free, he said, merely because they are conscious of their volitions and appetites, but they are wholly determined. In fact, Spinoza claimed - to the horror of his contemporaries -that we are all just modes of one substance, "God or Nature" he called it, which is really the same thing. Individual actions are no such thing at all; they are expressions of another entity altogether, which acts through us unwittingly. To be human, according to Spinoza, is to be party to a confounding existential illusion - that human individuals are independent agents - which exacts a heavy emotional and political toll on us. It is the source of anxiety, envy, anger - all the passions that torment our psyche - and the violence that ensues. If we should come to see our nature as it truly is, if we should see that no "individuals" properly speaking exist at all, Spinoza maintained, it would greatly benefit humankind.

There is no such thing as a discrete individual, Spinoza points out. This is a fiction. The boundaries of 'me' are fluid and blurred. We are all profoundly linked in countless ways we can hardly perceive. My decisions, choices, actions are inspired and motivated by others to no small extent. The passions, Spinoza argued, derive from seeing people as autonomous individuals responsible for all the objectionable actions that issue from them. Understanding the interrelated nature of everyone and everything is the key to diminishing the passions and the havoc they wreak.

In this, Spinoza and President Obama seem to concur: we're all in this together. We are not the sole authors of our destiny, each of us; our destinies are entangled - messily, unpredictably. Our cultural demands of individualism are too extreme. They are constitutionally irrational, Spinoza and Freud tell us, and their potential consequences are disastrous. Thanks to our safety net, we live in a society that affirms the dependence and interdependence of all. To that extent, it affirms a basic truth of our nature. We forsake it at our own peril.

Firmin DeBrabander is an associate professor of philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore and the author of "Spinoza and the Stoics."

Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy
NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

Adele

Jan wrote in reply to my post on fascist poem:

Quote:
Adele - yes, precisely.

Man as commodity, object, mechanical possession devoid of individual human worth, is at the very heart of fascism, and all its offshoots.

The other core philosophy of fascism is Eugenics, with its belief in superior and inferior Blood (Blut) and Breeding.

Now, in 2012, Eugenics could be described as the belief in superior and inferior Genes.

Eugenics has been a core belief of the elites throughout the C20th and beyond, and Hitler placed it right at the centre of Nazi philosophy and ideology.

Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous, was a prominent Eugenicist, and wrote in 1941:

Quote:"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation."

Eugenics is still a core belief of the elites, but they seldom openly proclaim this belief because of the Eugenically-inspired Holocaust of Jews, Roma and Slavs in the 1930-40s.

However, the continuing impact of Eugenics on political policy and decision-making can still be discerned by those with Eyes Wide Open.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mon, August 20, 2012 7:16:13 AM
A portrait of the eugenics movement in America
From: Brasscheck TV <news@brasschecktv.com>

(Added by AE: Note the economic causes of the beginnings of the US eugenics movements.)

The horror's of Nazi eugenics programs are well
known at this point, but few people realize that
the idea of a 'master race' originated here in the
United States.

This brief documentary recounts the passage of
U.S. Eugenic legislation in the throughout the
early 20th Century.

Video: 10:00 minutes long

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/11877.html

Goodman Green
- Brasscheck

P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
videos with friends and colleagues.

That's how we grow. Thanks.

================================
Brasscheck TV
2380 California St.
San Francisco, CA 94115

Adele

Adele Edisen Wrote:The horror's of Nazi eugenics programs are well
known at this point, but few people realize that
the idea of a 'master race' originated here in the
United States.

Yes indeed. The Nazis tried to use it as a defence at Nuremberg.

Moving right along.......nothing to see here folks.....