I WANT YOU
The Overthrow of Democratic Chile Part 1 (Salvador Allende)
The 1973 Chilean coup d'état was a watershed event in the history of Chile and the Cold War. On 11 September 1973, the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d'état organised by the Chilean military. A military junta took control of the government, composed of the heads of the Air Force, Navy, Carabineros (police force) and the Army led by General Augusto Pinochet.[1] Pinochet later assumed power and ended Allende’s democratically elected Popular Unity government.[2][3]
During the air raids and ground attacks that preceded the coup, Allende gave his last speech where he vowed to stay in the presidential palace.[4] Direct witness accounts of his death agree that he committed suicide in the presidential palace.[5][6] After the coup Pinochet established a military dictatorship that ruled Chile until 1990 and that was marked by severe human rights violations. A weak insurgence movement against the Pinochet government was maintained inside Chile by elements sympathetic to the former Allende government.
The U.S. is backing Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.
Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, “The notion of an honest puppet is a contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world since 1945.” What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that failure.
If fascism could be defeated in debate, I assure you that it would never have happened, neither in Germany, nor in Italy, nor anywhere else. Those who recognised its threat at the time and tried to stop it were, I assume, also called “a mob”. Regrettably too many “fair-minded” people didn’t either try, or want to stop it, and, as I witnessed myself during the war, accommodated themselves when it took over … People who witnessed fascism at its height are dying out, but the ideology is still here, and its apologists are working hard at a comeback. Past experience should teach us that fascism must be stopped before it takes hold again of too many minds, and becomes useful once again to some powerful interests.
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| — | Frank Frison, holocaust survivor |
The New Hip Fascist State | Bobby London Wordpress
[…] As the state continues to build it’s arsenal against the resistance and create more authoritarian agencies to stalk us. I wonder how long it is going to take for us to move away from a position of defense towards a more proactive stance against an increasingly more powerful fascistic state.
I find my self debating with people often on whether or not what we’re living under is even really Fascism, “we still have a free press” they say, “you’re not locked up in jail or murdered for your political ideas” they say, “how can this be fascism?” they ask. Now insert some WWI or WWII historical fact here and if one cannot prove that America is doing that exact thing, in this exact way, then we are not of course living under a fascist regime. Despite however the fact that in this country we are more surveilled than the populace in Nazi Germany, that America, after the war, recruited and adopted many of the Nazi’s all-star players, many of them top scientists and researchers.
And sure, I haven’t been imprisoned for the things I write or say – yet, but the state is carefully collecting and storing everything from phone calls to emails for later use. We’ve already seen cases of people being arrested for their Facebook or Twitter statuses – free speech ain’t so free after all. Let’s be clear though, the media is owned by a rich minority that is used as a complete propaganda tool for the state. The function of the state at this point is to serve corporate white supremacist interests both here and abroad. To do this they need Fascism and the force of the police state.
This however does not constitute as Fascism according to them. I guess we’ll have to wait for a more obvious form of ethnic cleansing, (enter statistic that is consistently increasing here) of black people being killed every day by police officers, but I guess this isn’t systematic enough.
Does it matter what we call it anyways? In this time of highly propagated media you could probably market Fascism as something fashionable and chic. The public would eat it up. Have it run a candidate that’s a TV show host they love to hate just to draw them in, or wrap it up in Feminism, ‘cause it’s time to smash some glass ceilings (for some of us), or better yet throw some Socialism on it for others ‘cause you know you can’t be a socialist and a fascist.
At this point is Fascism more dangerous than White Supremacy? Can you really have institutional White Supremacy without Fascism? and if so, then doesn’t that mean that America has always been a fascist state? Sure Mussolini may have coined the phrase but America has been utilizing the very same tactics before the idea was even given its fancy name, so give credit where credit is due.
America has always been fascist depending on what America you are talking to. If you’re a black and in America from the time of slavery this country has been fascist to you. From genocide, to a vast prison industry, the introduction of crack cocaine by the CIA , AIDS, segregation, and let’s not forget slavery. The Edward Snowden era anti-surveillance advocates only come at a time where now the tentacles of Fascism are effecting white America.
I’m sure depending on who you’re talking to and what part of the world they are living in Fascism will look and sound different too. Fascism for someone who survived the Holocaust may have looked much different than for someone who survived the reign of Pinochet. I think the major difference between now and the 1930’s are that governments are no longer openly fascist in name. Which is a great PR trick, but it does not change the fact that they behave as fascists. Take for instance Occupied Palestine also known as Israel by other fellow fascists. Israel resembles and inflicts a lot of the same persecution and terrible techniques used by Nazi Germany on the Palestinian people. They are also currently one of the major weapons and surveillance capitals of the world. They have imposed heavily militarized checkpoints and test chemical weapons on the Palestinian people, used forced sterilization on Ethiopian Jews, and what is Gaza other than a large scale concentration camp at this point?
So back to a question I asked earlier, does it matter whether or not we call it Fascism? The answer is yes. From the time we attend grade school we are taught that Fascism is wrong, that Democracy is key, and that WWII was a victory of good against evil and freedom against fascistic enslavement. The Nazis were good, but the Americans were even better when it came down to propaganda. Propaganda was repurposed and rebranded as Public Relations (PR), and Americans along with the existing international community, including the wealthy elite, knew they needed rebranding as much as they needed Fascism. So instead of calling it Fascism, they would call it Neo-Liberalism, or Democracy (their interpretation of it anyway), or however they decide to spin it, in the end Fascism is Fascism.
Define fascism
Anonymousno-corners-deactivated20160918:
Fascism is right-wing, fiercely nationalist, subjectivist in philosophy, and totalitarian in practice. It is an extreme reactionary form of capitalist government. Fascism began in Italy (1922-43), Germany (1933-45), Spain (1939-75), and various other nations, starting generally in the time between the first and second world war. The origin of the term comes from the Italian word fascismo, derived from the Latin fasces (a bundle of elm or birch rods containing an ax: once a symbol of authority in ancient Rome). Benito Mussolini adopted the symbol as the emblem of the Italian Fascist movement in 1919.
The social composition of Fascist movements have historically been small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats of all stripes (see petty bourgeoeis), with great success in rural areas, especially among farmers, peasants, and in the city, slum workers. Meanwhile, fascist leadership invariably comes to power through the sponsorship and funding of massive capitalists, without needing a revolution. These capitalists along with the top-tier leaders they create become fascism’s ruling aristocracy.
Fascism has many different forms: the Italian fascism of Mussolini was often against Hitler’s Fascism, calling it “one hundred percent racism: Against everything and everyone: Yesterday against Christian civilization, today against Latin civilization, tomorrow, who knows, against the civilization of the whole world.” When Hitler began achieving impressive military conquests, which Mussolini had started in Ethiopia in 1935, the two formed an axis of power in June of 1940. The birth of fascism in Germany was aided by Western governments, who for two decades viewed it as the ideology that would successfully crush the Soviet Union. Not until Germany’s tanks were on the borders of England and France did those governments ‘switch’ sides: now it was their imperialist domination being threatened.
While Mussolini had once been a member of the Socialist party (banished from the party for his rampant support of World War I), Hitler fought leftists from the first. Thus it is not without irony, that in the name for his party Hitler used “socialist,” (Nazi = National Socialist) conceding to the engrained consciousness the German masses had for leftist ideals. It should be noted that fascism supported the community ideal, but not the grass-roots power of direct community democracy as Socialism demands, but the obideance and unity of the community to vanguard of the Nation. Further, orthodox fascism constantly parrots the Communist lexicon of working class struggle, etc, for reasons of populism. Neo-fascism, on the other hand, disdains any trace of Socialist/Communist terminology in thier labels, and instead appeals to new populist roots: the modern aspirations of many workers to be wealthly, to be stronger than others, etc.
Fascism championed corporate economics, which operated on an anarcho-syndicalist model in reverse: associations of bosses in particular industries determine working conditions, prices, etc. In this form of corporatism, bosses dictate everything from working hours to minimum wages, without goverment interference. The fascist corporate model differs from the more moderate corporatist model by eradicating all forms of regulatory control that protect workers (so-called “consumers”), the environment, price fixing, insider trading, and destroying all independent workers’ organisations. In fascism, the corporate parliament either replaces the representative bodies of government or reduces them to a sham and the state freely intervenes in the activity of companies, either by bestowing favouritism, or handing them over to the control of rivals.
“to believe, to obey, to combat”
There are several fundamental characteristics of fascism, among them are:
1. Right Wing: Fascists are fervently against: Marxism, Socialism, Anarchism, Communism, Environmentalism; etc – in essence, they are against the progressive left in total, including moderate lefts (social democrats, etc). Fascism is an extreme right wing ideology, though it can be opportunistic.
2. Nationalism: Fascism places a very strong emphasis on patriotism and nationalism. Criticism of the nation’s main ideals, especially war, is lambasted as unpatriotic at best, and treason at worst. State propaganda consistently broadcasts threats of attack, while justifying pre-emptive war. Fascism invariably seeks to instill in its people the warrior mentality: to always be vigilant, wary of strangers and suspicous of foreigners.
3. Hierarchy: Fascist society is ruled by an righteous leader, who is supported by an elite secret vanguard of capitalists. Hierarchy is prevalent throughout all aspects of society – every street, every workplace, every school, will have its local Hitler, part police-informer, part bureaucrat – and society is prepared for war at all times. The absolute power of the social hierarchy prevails over everything, and thus a totalitarian society is formed. Representative government is acceptable only if it can be controlled and regulated, direct democracy (e.g. Communism) is the greatest of all crimes. Any who oppose the social hierarchy of fascism will be imprisoned or executed.
4. Anti-equality: Fascism loathes the principles of economic equality and disdains equality between immigrant and citizen. Some forms of fascism extend the fight against equality into other areas: gender, sexual, minority or religious rights, for example.
5. Religious: Fascism contains a strong amount of reactionary religious beliefs, harking back to times when religion was strict, potent, and pure. Nearly all Fascist societies are Christian, and are supported by Catholic and Protestant churches.
6. Capitalist: Fascism does not require revolution to exist in captialist society: fascists can be elected into office (though their disdain for elections usually means manipulation of the electoral system). They view parliamentary and congressional systems of government to be inefficent and weak, and will do their best to minimize its power over their policy agenda. Fascism exhibits the worst kind of capitalism where corporate power is absolute, and all vestiges of workers’ rights are destroyed.
7. War: Fascism is capitalism at the stage of impotent imperialism. War can create markets that would not otherwise exist by wrecking massive devastation on a society, which then requires reconstruction! Fascism can thus “liberate” the survivors, provide huge loans to that society so fascist corporations can begin the process of rebuilding.
8. Voluntarist Ideology: Fascism adopts a certain kind of “voluntarism;” they believe that an act of will, if sufficiently powerful, can make something true. Thus all sorts of ideas about racial inferiority, historical destiny, even physical science, are supported by means of violence, in the belief that they can be made true. It is this sense that Fascism is subjectivist.
9. Anti-Modern: Fascism loathes all kinds of modernism, especially creativity in the arts, whether acting as a mirror for life (where it does not conform to the Fascist ideal), or expressing deviant or innovative points of view. Fascism invariably burns books and victimises artists, and artists which do not promote the fascists ideals are seen as “decadent.” Fascism is hostile to broad learning and interest in other cultures, since such pursuits threaten the dominance of fascist myths. The peddling of conspiracy theories is usually substituted for the objective study of history.
