This week, David Horowitz and his band of degenerate murderers, religious extremists, and fear-mongering terrorists are polluting the country with their special brand of racism and hatred that we have come to expect from right-wing Bush sycophants. These religious persecutors, war-criminals, and lackeys continue on their project to destroy America from within, while murdering as many brown-skinned people as possible along the way. All who dare not bend automatically to their sick will to power and their destiny to destroy are fair game. Not only the religion of Islam, but the international community, its rule of law, and its respect for human rights are also in the cross-hairs of these sick, demented brown-shirted bastards.
In honor of the Great Professor Horowitz, and to counter-balance his campaign to infect the world with his ignorance, I proclaim this Bushismo-Fascism Awareness Week and will present a series of diaries that describe Bushism and its basis in fascistic ideology.
I. Introduction
While Professor Horowitz has the intellectual honesty of a rabid hyena, and continues the farce that a stateless entity which he has named Islamo-Fascism is a danger to the World, the truth is quite different. He is wrong both in definition, scope, and meaning. He is intellectually dishonest because he fails to see that he is the one enabling fascism, a fascism that is state-based and even more wide-spread than its predecessors who preached its ideology in Italy and Germany. The real legitimate threat to the world is Bushism and its fascistic ideology.
II. An honest approach towards definition
As mentioned in the diary which unofficially began this week's festivities, Bush Authoritarianism as 'fascism in motion', I argued that the definition of 'Fascism', 'fascism', and 'fascist ideology' was somewhat problematic and prone to bias and error. However, the method suggested in that diary was to look toward the literature of those who have attempted to define the terms, and deconstruct the definitions into a set of variables. Then these variables can be assigned a weight by the one attempting to define a group as based upon a 'fascist ideology'.
As explained in that diary, only a lazy fool would make conclusory remarks about the application of the term 'fascist', absent any evidence of a careful review of the subject. Horowitz is such a lazy fool, and his set of conferences are based on the lies of the lazy fool.
III. Today's featured article
Robert O. Paxton, "The Five Stages of Fascism", 70 The Journal of Modern History 1 (1998), available via the JSTOR database.
For convenience sake, I present a list from Professor Paxton writing at the time from Columbia University. These seven characteristics are analyzed by Paxton throughout what he describes as a five-stage process towards fascism:
1. The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual.
2. The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action against the group's enemies, internal as well as external.
3. Dread of the group's decadence under the corrosive effect of individualistic and cosmopolitan liberalism.
4. Closer integration of the community within a brotherhood (fascio) whose unity and purity are forged by common conviction, if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary.
5. An enhanced sense of identity and belonging, in which the grandeur of the group reinforces individual self-esteem.
6. Authority of natural leaders (always male) throughout society, culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny.
7. The beauty of violence and of will, when they are devoted to the group's success in a Darwinian struggle.
IV. Application of Paxton's seven characteristics
If it were not redundant to discussions that happen on this web-site each day, I would list examples for you showing that each of these seven principles are evident in Bushism, to varying degrees.
That isn't necessary, but, individual examples of each of the seven can be easily discerned if one has been paying attention for the past six years.
Does this end the analysis? No. As with any conference, the speaker presents his or her work to the attendees, and a discussion ensues. Some might find one or more of the variables inapplicable, and I hope that in our cyber-conference, comments will be presented below expressing their desire to exclude this or that variable.
V. Conclusion
Does this mean that Bushism is fascism? By itself, no; but, upon conclusion of the conference, I remain hopeful that the attendees will realize that if we are not currently in the grasp of Bushismo-Fascism, we are without any doubt tending towards it at a frightening pace.