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Tuesday, November 9, 2004 |
Monbiot: "'If Bush wins', the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, 'fascism is possible in the United States'. (1) Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She's wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security state as 'soft fascism' in the Guardian last month. (2) So is the endless traffic on the internet. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as '... a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity'. (3) It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don't understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.
Puritanism is perhaps the least-understood of any political movement in European history.
So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush's government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it's up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s."
The ideology behind Bush and his cronies may have Puritan roots, but it is much more than that. It includes capitalism in its most virulent form, it includes militarism to an insane degree. When I hear a soldier before the attack on Falluja declare that this is a war against satan, I only hear hysterical popular excitement, which is exactly what Bush is provoking, not for religious purposes, but for the enrichment of a limited group of neo-cons. Bush, like all tyrants, is a master in deceit and propaganda. He is no Puritan. It is his smokescreen. What counts is greed and power. We can read that in all the official documents, from the "PNAC" to the Patriot Act.
It would be a great mistake to see what is now happening as a form of Puritanism. Bushism has all the characteristics of fascism.
"I got my kills, I'm coming down. I just love my job." Those are not the words of a Puritan, but of a mentally disturbed militarist. It is the hysterical excitement of a professional hooligan.
Monbiot said it himself, Bush needs a justifying ideology, and that is Puritanism. It is no more than an attempt at justification from his side, another lie to hide the bloody reality, his real purposes. Add greed and militarism and you have a new form of fascism in which a rich minority have all rights and the rest none. The essence of fascism is the existence of two kinds of people: the Uebermensch and the Untermensch, the privileged and the cannonfodder needed to fight for the privileges of the former. If no bounds are set for the Bush clique, that will be our future.
I agree with Monbiot in that it is essential to expose Puritanism as an empty ideology. Millions of people are deluded by it, therefore it must be tackled and exposed as the propaganda tool of the militarists and the neo-cons. The ideology of the Bush regime is essentially fascist, the ideology of the deluded people is not (yet); so there is hope. It is high time to reveal the emperor's clothes.
4:39:03 PM 
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LA Times: "The first military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was halted Monday after a federal judge here ruled the proceedings invalid under U.S. and international law - dealing a blow to the legal process set up by the Bush administration to handle accused terrorists.
'Today's decision sends a clear message that the fight against terrorism does not give the government license to disregard domestic and international law,' said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union."
11:33:04 AM
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Observer: "America has begun preparing its next military objective - space. Documents reveal that the US Air Force has for the first time adopted a doctrine to establish 'space superiority'.
The new doctrine means that pre-emptive strikes against enemy satellites would become 'crucial steps in any military operation'. This week defence experts will attend a conference in London amid warnings that President Bush's re-election will pave the way to the arming of space."
We now have a man in office who wants to rule the world but cannot even properly pronounce the word 'nuclear'.
Documentation and link for public comments.
11:29:25 AM
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Analysis: "With significant U.S. federal funds now available to replace outdated punch-card and mechanical voting systems, municipalities and states throughout the U.S. are adopting paperless electronic voting systems from a number of different vendors. We present a security analysis of the source code to one such machine used in a significant share of the market. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered and executed without access to the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable, showing that not only can an insider, such as a poll worker, modify the votes, but that insiders can also violate voter privacy and match votes with the voters who cast them. We conclude that this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general election. Any paperless electronic voting system might suffer similar flaws, despite any 'certification' it could have otherwise received. We suggest that the best solutions are voting systems having a 'voter-verifiable audit trail', where a computerized voting system might print a paper ballot that can be read and verified by the vote."
11:13:15 AM
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