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you know, this just keeps getting more and more ridiculous.
now, in the midst of some dilletante potted summary of arbitrary information about the post 1945 history of the united states, we get the limbaugh argument: whaddya worried about? rights are abstract-----they come and go-----and since everything always works out for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds (iraq anyone?)-----dont worry be happy. if the nice people in the bush administration decide that you should be placed under surveillance, dont worry, be happy. because we support this administration politically, we never need to even consider that they have, are or could be doing anything wrong. on the other hand, if you are far enough to the right, you can count on not being put under surveillance, and can then imagine that those who would be are all people that you would consider to be enemies of the "nation"----so dont worry be happy----in the end, the law is only draw to the guilty.
that fascism is a possibility within radical nationalist politics is given. usually it is evident enough that the first sign of drift from the latter toward the former is enough to instantly delegitimate the politics, be that individual or organizational. perhaps this explains why the antecedents to the ideologies now at the center of the american populist conservative movement spent so much of the preceding 50 years hiding under rocks----opposition to the united nations borrowed from the john birch society, extreme right christian ideology with all its explicitly antidemocratic aspects, etc. now the situation is different, the old political lines blur--and even with all this, the drift from hardline radical nationalism toward fascism would not in itself be a problem. it is the willing submission to the logic along which this drift would take place that is a problem: a suspicion of legal protections from state power, a disregard for legality in general, ranging from due process to treatment of prisoners. the assumption that the law is only drawn to the guilty.
last times out, fascism drew its primary inspiration and support from what you might call petit bourgeois common sense. it is convenient to imagine such regimes as state-driven, that the ideology was imposed on unwitting folk from the top down. but that is not how it went: people internalized this politics, recapitulated its logic, supported it because they imagined that it made them safe---from the Big Scary Other, from Change economic, social, cultural---from percieved contaminants that endangered some illusory pure culture--a notion (pure culture) that is wholly absurd, wholly indefensable, that cannot be discussed explicitly and expect to survive the conversation--perhaps all these are the more powerful because they are types of secret beliefs, held away from critique by all kinds of psychological defense mechanisms..
most of the above rests upon and draws support from a profound ignorance of history.
the most dangerous kind of ignorance of history is that which pretends it is otherwise.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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