[PEN-L:5346] Re: marching in goose step

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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>>> Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 04/09/99 02:28PM >>>
I agree that the armed opposition to Hitler deserves more credit, more
praise. But it's also good to remember that the conservatives and even
moderates who dealt with Hitler didn't know what they were getting in their
fight against bolshevism. They thought/hoped they were getting another
Mussolini, who was really bad but was head and shoulders below Hitler (or
even lower) in the atrocity department. It turned out to be a deal with the
devil.

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Chas: Jim D. and I debated a related issue many months ago on another list.
Bourgeois boosters of Hitler may not have anticipated the holocaust against the Jews but they probably anticipated the holocaust against the Soviet Union ( 20 million dead) because they had the precedent of the WWI. A world war holocaust was foreseeable,and many in the ruling class probably wanted it to get colonies in Eastern Europe.

The holocaust against the Soviets is a world historic crime equal to the holocaust against the Jews. The former was a crime against peace. The latter was a crime against humanity, I believe in the technical Nurmburg terminology.

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Maybe that's just like Clinton thought/hoped that he could "win human
rights" in Yugoslavia on the cheap, using surgically-exact strategic
bombing. But IMHO, he's not in the same league as Hitler -- and we
shouldn't mirror the US/NATO painting of Milosevic as a new Hitler by doing
the same kind of hype against Clinton. As the NYT article that Louis posted
today on Jews in Serbia suggested, using and reusing the Hitler metaphor
makes the real Hitler look normal and almost okay; it's like calling an
unwanted body-groping "rape," which makes real rape seem normal. (I think
that the article is wrong on one detail: M. Albright was raised a Catholic,
but converted to Judaism, didn't she?)

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Chas.: Clinton's war on Yugoslavia is obviously not like WWII (yet :>( ), 50 million dead. In the era of WWII German was a superpower, in today's terminology. The only participant in the current war on Yugo with potential to be fascist imperialist power comparable to German in WWII would be U.S/NATO, the superpower.

On the other hand, the U.S. imperialist history over the last 50 years is a sort of low intensity fascism in its neo-colonies (See list from Korea to Iraq put on these threads several times in the last two weeks). The U.S. imperialist body count is way up there, at or over 6 million. The U.S body count against the indigenous peoples of North America and Africans enslaved is way over 6 million and probably over 50 million. The fact that it was slower does not make it a lesser crime against humanity or holocaust. So in the larger historical picture and in the PRESENT the U.S. is an unsurpassed world historic outlaw.

Anyway, in the Yugoslavian war, the U.S. is the one with the worst history and the greatest current mass murder potential, extermination machine. The U.S. is the only nation ever to drop nuclear bombs on people, and of course, has more nuclear weapons than anybody in the Yugo conflict. Nuclear weapons present the greatest danger of a holocaust today.
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>With liberal/social democracies like those in the UK or Germany, who needs
>fascism anymore?

I think I'd prefer liberalism or social democracy to fascism. It's true
that in terms of external foreign policy there can be lots of similarities
between a liberal/social democratic policy and a fascist one, but at least
they're better than fascism in terms of domestic civil liberties. After
all, Louis wouldn't have been able to find articles supporting his
viewpoint in newspapers printed in Mussolini's Italy.
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Chas.: Lenin pointed out that the bourgeois democratic/republic as a shell for the state is the preferred form of bourgeois rule. I call it the bourgeois finesse. The bourgeoisie have made an advance over previous ruling classes in that they have found that intermittent , rather than continuous , terrorist rule is more efficient. People tend to rule themselves that way. For example, by getting the masses to watch Big Brother (tv as "freedom" of thought) rather than having to have Big Brother watch them all of the time. The bourgeoisie resort to open terrorist rule, fascism,a minority fraction of the time, especially in the imperialist nations. But the system is bourgeois democratic repubic most of the time with fascism at critical points. The fascist phase is a sign of desparate crisis.

On personnel, Mussolini was a leader of the Italian Socialist (Social Democratic) Party before becoming THE ORIGINAL "Fascist" ,( though I'd argue Jim Crow was an earlier form of fascism as fascist as Mussolini's).

Charles Brown