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14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism
BushFlash.com ^ | 2005

Posted on 02/11/2005 11:53:24 AM PST by technochick99

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To: technochick99; Jim Robinson

Can't Jim sue them for using his image without permission?


21 posted on 02/11/2005 12:43:21 PM PST by Pharmboy ("Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God")
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To: All

Mussolini on fascism

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.html


22 posted on 02/11/2005 12:48:05 PM PST by nosofar
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To: Darkwolf377

I too love the style of conceding the talking points and then using the "logic" therein to prove that it still doesn't work, but lots of what was posted there is flat-out wrong.

With regard to corporate power, it is no secret that Fascist governments were notorious for Nationalizing vital industries. The Nazis did this quite a bit.

With regard to Religion and Government, Dr. Britt has a lot of explaining to do. Hitler's personal literature shows a great deal of disdain for Christianity. One of the Nazi goals was to establish a non-religious society, because they felt that organized religion was the creation of Jews, ergo the domain of the inferior. It is no secret that fascist regumes all around the world have executed all kinds of people across all kinds of lines. The Nazi regime executed the mentally ill, Jews, Catholics, Gypsies, and, of course, homosexuals.

The notion that organized labor is somehow a threat to fascism is also ludicrous. Unionization did not exist in America for nearly a century of our history, and not even the most extreme on the left argue that we had a fascist government around the time of the founding. By the way, the Native Americans did not have unions. Were the Native Americans fascist? Organized labor may have done many good things for certain groups of individuals, but they did not inherently lead to the prevention of fascism. Indeed, the fascists were largely fueled by the working classes in Germany and in Italy.

I would again return to the key differences between Nationalism and Patriotism in general. The terms are wrongfully used as equals, when in fact they are different. Nationslism is loyalty to a nation, as in race, while Patriotism is loyalty to a country, as in political organization. The implications of the difference here are obvious. Using Nationalism to describe Patriotism is a dishonest attempt to hoodwink the public into believing that love of country is equivalent to racism.

Curiously, Britt ignores the presence of various powerful government regulations in fascist societites that were aimed at bettering the public health. The Nazis were the first to prohibit smoking at certain social functions, for example.

I hardly know where to begin with the "disdain for intellectuals and the arts" business. One would truly have to be stupid to call this a common characteristic, given the famous stories about Hitler's insatiable appetite for collecting art. In addition, it is noteworthy that quite a number of Nazi officials were considered intellectuals in their day. For a group of peple who hated intellectuals and academia so much, the Nazis sure managed to amass quite a number of intellectuals and researchers to do their bidding. Indeed, more than a few intellectuals in America were sympathizers to the Nazi cause, largely because of its anti-semitic appeal. Anti-semitism persists among the intelligentsia to this day in some circles.

The only media we have in America that it predictably controlled by the state and atriculates a constant viewpoint is the NPR/PBS nexus. Ironically, I note that it consistently tilts to the left. The rest of the media has at least some component of diversity to it.

As a final point, quite a number of fascist societies embraced the pseudo-scientific movement known as Eugenics. Eugenics was concerned with the selective breeding of human beings to create physically and mentally superior offspring by design. At its core, Eugenics carries with it the classical elitist undertone that the government ought to be taking action to control the ability of citizens to reproduce. That is what Planned Parenthood was initially about, and one would therefore not be surprised to learn that Margaret Sanger, its founder, was a Nazi sympathizer. Amazingly, everyone remembers Father Coughlin and perhaps even Charles Lindbergh, but they curiously forget about Margaret Sanger.



The FDR response was very effective. I just figured that it would be fun to rip into the premise of "common threads" through the fascist regimes as well.

By the way, do I even need to mention that the fascists were all big fans of gun control?

I am fairly certain that minds greater than I have ripped into Britt's "thesis" to a greater extent.


23 posted on 02/11/2005 12:51:43 PM PST by AZ_Cowboy ("Be ever vigilant, for you know not when the master is coming")
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To: AZ_Cowboy
Excellent examination of this "Dr." and his little screed. (I also liked the point about art, seeing how one of the most famous facts about Hitler was his desire to paint, not to mention his love of German art and culture, Wagner, architecture, etc.)

When I was sent this thing it included a point by point agreement by some lib, and under the point about art the comment was "Just ask Spongebob Squarepants about Bush's censorship of the arts".

You can't make this stuff up, it just pours out of them...

24 posted on 02/11/2005 12:56:37 PM PST by Darkwolf377 ("What does 'Why not?' mean" -- the mark of a troubled mind)
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To: technochick99

It seems fascism can be a little tricky to define. We know it's supposed to be a bad thing, so this allows people to use the word very recklessly, defining it in such a way to demonize those they disagree with. I've seen liberals argue that the U.S. is headed in the direction of fascism (using their definition of fascism of course). However, any country must necessarily be headed in some direction and so may be headed in the direction of fascism or in the direction of communism or in the direction of democracy, etc. In regards to the U.S., it becomes rather meaningless to speak about direction and wholly dishonest, to put it politely, to speak of the U.S. as any kind of fascist state.

Any country will have something in common with almost any definition of fascism, but one can not therefore conclude that country is fascist, which is exactly what many liberals appear to do.


25 posted on 02/11/2005 1:03:16 PM PST by nosofar
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To: Darkwolf377

I see that several libs have picked up on SpongeBob and have tried to make it a political issue. Christie Whitman, the faux Republican from NJ, was the last I saw reference this tempest in a teapot. The issue of SpongeBob never had anything to do with the feds, of course. This is just another reframe to try and cover the facts.

SpongeBob has been dealt with at length on here. The spat there was between Dr. James Dobson and an affiliate of tolerance.org, which is somehow connected to the SPLC. He offered his opinion that the group was trying to use cartoon characters to do political advocacy in the schools. Dobson for his part has clarified this one about a dozen times by now.

I guess the libs figured they'd reframe it into an attack on SpongeBob, hoping that they could do a replay of the Jerry Falwell thing with the Teletubbies. Even if Dobson were in fact trying to attack SpongeBob, Dobson is not a Bush official, so who cares? Private individuals can do whatever they want, and only the government can be guilty of "censorship". If voicing discontent with an idea is a form of censorship, I must be quite a book-burner. I suspect most of us would be, left or right.


26 posted on 02/11/2005 1:07:05 PM PST by AZ_Cowboy ("Be ever vigilant, for you know not when the master is coming")
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To: AZ_Cowboy
The whole Spongebob thing is an example of free expression by non-government voices. I don't see the problem, those folks have no power to censor.

Interesting how the same people who claim Dobson and crew are somehow censors when they complain about a privat enterprise they have no control over are the ones defending Ward Churchill, who is paid by taxpayer (government) funds.

27 posted on 02/11/2005 1:09:39 PM PST by Darkwolf377 ("What does 'Why not?' mean?" -- the mark of a troubled mind)
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To: Darkwolf377
FDR was a Fascist

Tree-Huggers are Fascists too.

PAINT THEIR SWASTIKA GREEN
by Brien Bartels

     Whenever a group of enviro-lefties get together a lot of clumsy comparisons get thrown around concerning Republicans, free-marketeers, businessmen, and their alleged resemblance to fascists and Nazis.  Which is odd because those groups, however much you like or loathe them, are of various Christian denominations or even Jewish, don’t advocate street violence or eugenics, don’t tend to subjugate individuals to abstractions like racial purity, etc.  In fact the list of dissimilarities goes on and on. 
     But, when you look at the political wing of the environmental/socialist movement, the various Green Parties of the world, you see the following ominous parallels.
     The Green Party is led by a bunch of pagan, vegetarian dropouts.  So were the Nazis. Hitler was a failed artist and vegetarian.  The leader of the SS, Himmler (another soy-sucker), wanted his Black Corps to be the vanguard of a pre-Christian back-to-the-land movement.  The rituals and symbols he devised to replace Christian services looked like really bad art direction of a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle
     The Green Party claims to stand for workers’ rights. "Nazi" is short for National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
     Sometimes the Greens wear animal costumes to political functions. The Nazis went to their rallies in drag as well. 
     The Greens stand up for farmers and peasants, foreign and domestic. The Nazis were wonderfully agrarian, even advocating organizing farming. They just wanted the farms to be in the Ukraine, tended by the untermench
     The Greens advocate "decentralization." The Nazis practiced decentralization by giving their colonial governments life and death power over the organic farmers in their jurisdiction. 
    The Greens wage a defensive war of sabotage and propaganda for the oppressed  peasants of the world.  The Nazis waged a defensive war for the oppressed Aryans of Central Europe. 
     Greens occasionally smash shop windows to get their point across.  One word: Kristalnacht.
     I’m not sure, but I imagine the Greens disapprove of smoking tobacco.  The Nazi regime tried to ban smoking in public places, forcing its soldiers to set an example of abstinence. 
     The Greens hate guns, especially private ownership of guns.  The Nazis inflicted on the world groundbreaking "gun-control" laws, which they tested by confiscating the arms of German Jews. 
     The Greens are big tree planters.  Seven years ago, an aerial survey of the former East Germany revealed a stand of larch in a forest of pine.  These trees, planted by an early and flamboyant supporter of Hitler, formed a huge bright green swastika for a few weeks in spring and a flaming yellow one in the fall. (Ironically, the Germans, those engineers, fooled around for five years before removing the swastika, because they thought cutting down only the larches would just leave a swastika shaped hole in the forest.  I guess they eventually got permission to flatten even de-Nazi-fied trees.)
     The Greens want investment in alternative energy.  The Nazis pioneered not only synthetic oil from coal (to cope with the small problem of a hopeless war) they also invested a ton of Reich marks in an alternative energy system exploiting an until-then useless substance called uranium. 

  And of course, there is the whole fetish for Volkswagen Mini-buses.
_________________
©2002 Brien Bartels
Brien Bartels is a free-lance writer, humorist, entrepreneur and political activist who lives in Washington state.  An edited version of this more-or-less tongue-in-cheek column has been published in the June, 2002 issue of Liberty.  It is republished here by permission of the author, to whom the copyright has reverted.

28 posted on 02/11/2005 1:13:19 PM PST by FreeKeys (Collectivism is collectivism, nomatter what else you call it http://freedomkeys.com/collectivism.htm)
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To: FreeKeys

Fascist is such an elastic term that I'm starting to think to liberals it means "anyone who's not a liberal".


29 posted on 02/11/2005 1:15:10 PM PST by Darkwolf377 ("What does 'Why not?' mean?" -- the mark of a troubled mind)
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To: Darkwolf377
Labor unions did quite well under FDR...

During the war, FDR imposed wage and price controls --- no bargaining for higher wages. He also promised to send in the Army when the UMW threatened a strike in the coal fields. Truman did send in the Army after the war to break a rail road strike.

30 posted on 02/11/2005 1:32:35 PM PST by Ditto ( No trees were killed in sending this message, but billions of electrons were inconvenienced.)
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To: Darkwolf377
I'm starting to think you're right.
31 posted on 02/11/2005 2:11:29 PM PST by FreeKeys (Collectivism is collectivism, nomatter what else you call it http://freedomkeys.com/collectivism.htm)
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To: nosofar

Brilliant commentary! Do you mind if I steal it???


32 posted on 02/12/2005 9:32:51 AM PST by technochick99 (Self defense is a basic human right & Sig Sauer is my equalizer)
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To: technochick99

"What? You mean other people are allowed to have opinions that I disagree with? What is this, Nazi Germany?"


33 posted on 02/12/2005 9:38:52 AM PST by Sofa King (MY rights are not subject to YOUR approval.)
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To: technochick99

Certainly. There's no copyright and I'm sure you can easily improve on it. :)


34 posted on 02/13/2005 4:57:33 PM PST by nosofar
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To: nosofar

Volley Bump, since I am using this elsewhere...


35 posted on 02/17/2005 10:34:15 AM PST by technochick99 (Self defense is a basic human right & Sig Sauer is my equalizer)
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