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Originally Posted by guyy
Hmmm... I guess that's why liberals and socialists all supported Hitler and Franco and Mussolini. The pinko Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought for Franco. Correct? And the biggest supporters of Pinochet must have been socialists like Allende himself and everybody's favourite bogeyman, Fidel. Thatcher and Kissinger et al. hated his guts. Right?
And this explains why right-wingers like Nixon and Bush were dead set opposed to the FBI & CIA spying on Americans and chopped the gummint down to the proper, night-watchman size. Yep.
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guyy, you are correct, of course. Up is not down, but what once was considered "center" has moved visibly to the right, in the political spectrum, over the last 60 years.
A couple of things...I tried to change the title moments after first posting the thread, to "neo-fascists" because I don't want to distract from the core issue I've put up for discussion.
I also tried to make it clear that, for the purposes of the one issue of FISA "reform", I find myself far to the right of where I would have been on the issue in 1978, and where I should be, based on my core beliefs now.
Compared to the folks desrcribed below, two aged and recently deceased veteran's of the 1930's Lincoln Brigade, and Corliss Lamont, my political leanings put me clearly much to the right of theirs.
In a recent historical context, I am, compared to the three of them, of a center-left political persuasion, and they are "leftists".
Almost all of you who claim to be "moderates", are probably of a political bent that puts you to the right of 50s center-right republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.
From the standpoint of their avowed "militarism" and "corporatism", Clinton and Obama are positioned to the right of Eisdenhower, as well. The tax policy Eisenhower accepted and presided over for 8 years was dramatically to the left of anything Clinton or Obama would advocate. Eisenhower's foreign policy was less "hawkish" than Clinton's or Obama's.
On the issue of what should be done now about FISA, and on the idea that America is moving "towards socialism", and on a host of issues involving tax, social, foreign, military, and domestic security policy, some of you who consider yourselves center-right or right, are so far to the right of Eisenhower ans the historical idea of "center", that you embrace, wittingly or not....neo fascist postures,
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http://www.corliss-lamont.org/#life
The Life of Corliss Lamont
Corliss Lamont (1902-1995) is a 20th century American hero whose independent thinking challenged prevailing ideas in philosophy, economics, religion, patriotism, world peace and the exercise of our cherished civil liberties.
Corliss Lamont was born to Wall Street wealth, yet he championed the cause of the working class, and was derided as a "Socialist" and a "traitor to his class".
Corliss Lamont's Humanist belief that earthlings have evolved without supernatural intervention and are responsible for their own survival on this planet caused traditionalists to label him a "godless atheist".
Corliss Lamont's patriotic insistence that the United States maintain a productive relationship with the Soviet Union in the face of prevailing rabid anti-communist hysteria earned him the accusation by Senator Joseph McCarthy of being "un-American". [See Philip Wittenberg (ed.), The Lamont Case: History of a Congressional Investigation, Corliss Lamont and the McCarthy Hearings (New York: Horizon Press, 1957) for details.]
Corliss Lamont was a philosopher, author and poet who carried several landmark cases to the courts successfully, including a suit [381 U.S. 301 (1965)] against the United States Postmaster General which was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court's decision was in Dr. Lamont's favor.....
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/ob...s/17wolff.html
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 17, 2008
Milton Wolff, the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the longtime commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died Monday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 92....
....At first a young Communist rabble-rouser on soapboxes in New York City, Mr. Wolff was wielding a machine gun in Spain by the time he was 21. By 22, he was the ninth commander of what is commonly called the Lincoln Brigade; four of his predecessors had been killed, four wounded; none now survive, the archives confirm.
Mr. Wolff found himself holding together the remnants of North American volunteers on a counteroffensive that moved across the Ebro River to the violent Hill 666 in the Sierra Pandols. It was a last gasp by foreign troops supporting the elected leftist government of Spain against the revolt led by Gen. Francisco Franco. The Americans soon left Spain; Madrid fell in March 1939, and the war was over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/ny...=1&oref=slogin
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 12, 2007
Correction Appended
Moe Fishman, who as a 21-year-old from Astoria, Queens, fought Fascists in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was severely wounded, then led veterans of that unit in fighting efforts to brand them as Communist subversives, died on Aug. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.....
....In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1962, he said: “I’m the organization. If there’s something to decide, I talk it over with the guys and then decide what I’m going to do. Cockeyed, but that’s the way it is.”
The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after Gen. Francisco Franco set out to overthrow the newly elected leftist government. Americans soon volunteered to fight Franco in what came to be called the Lincoln Brigade.
It was actually a battalion. Officially, Americans joined it or the Washington Battalion. The two American battalions, which informally have come to be known as the Lincoln Brigade, joined with four other battalions of volunteers from other countries to form the XV International Brigade.
In 1937, Mr. Fishman was a college dropout working in a laundry and driving a truck. He was also a member of the Young Communist League, having joined partly to meet like-minded young women at dances the organization sponsored, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004.
He also liked how the Communists responded when a family behind on the rent was evicted and thrown on the streets with its furniture. He told The Times that party members would use an ax or hammer to break the lock on the door and put the family back in.....
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...033002075.html
EXECUTIVE EXCESS
Where's Congress In This Power Play?
By Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Huq
Sunday, April 1, 2007; Page B01
Thirty years ago, a Senate committee headed by the late Sen. Frank Church exposed widespread abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies dating to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. In the name of "national security," the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency spied on politicians, protest groups and civil rights activists; illegally opened mail; and sponsored scores of covert operations abroad, many of which imperiled democracy in foreign countries.
The sheer magnitude of the abuses unearthed by the committee shocked the nation, led to broad reforms and embarrassed Congress, whose feckless oversight over decades was plain for all to see. As a result, Congress required presidents to report covert operations to permanent new intelligence committees and created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which squarely repudiated the idea of inherent executive power to spy on Americans without obtaining warrants. New guidelines were issued for FBI investigations....
....But Congress now faces an even bigger problem than heightened partisanship. Past presidents have never claimed that the Constitution gave them power to set aside statutes permanently. (Richard M. Nixon was no longer in office when he declared: "When the president does it, it means that it is not illegal.") The Bush administration, however, appears committed to eliminating judicial and congressional oversight of executive action at all costs. This pernicious idea, at odds with the Founders' vision of checks and balances, lies at the heart of many of today's abuses.
In some ways, the "Magna Carta" of this combative ideology was the minority report issued by eight of the Republicans on the Iran-contra committee that investigated the Reagan administration's handling of covert arms sales to Iran and the secret -- and illegal -- effort to finance the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua.
Among the report's signers was then-Rep. Dick Cheney, who led the group. They rejected the idea that separation of powers would "preclude the exercise of arbitrary power" and argued that the president needed to act expeditiously and secretly to achieve American aims in a dangerous world. Their solution to executive abuse was to water down congressional and judicial oversight. The minority report referred approvingly to "monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit [presidents] to exceed the law" if Congress tried to exercise oversight on national security matters. Cheney later insisted in an interview that "you have to preserve the prerogative of the president in extraordinary circumstances," by not notifying Congress of intelligence operations.
Cheney's views have not shifted since then. In December 2005, he referred reporters to the minority report for his view of "the president's prerogatives." And for the first time in U.S. history, executive branch lawyers have argued that the president has power to "suspend" laws permanently in the name of national security. In signing statements for new laws, the chief executive has repeatedly asserted this broad power. In internal legal opinions on torture, Justice Department lawyers have proposed that the president can set aside laws that conflict with his ideas of national security. Under this logic, laws against torture, warrantless surveillance and transfers of detainees to governments that torture all buckle.
We do not know precisely which laws were turned aside, because the administration still refuses to reveal Justice Department opinions that define what laws the executive will and will not follow. Such secrecy, which has nothing to do with the legitimate protection of sources and methods of intelligence agencies, cannot be justified.
This crisis of constitutional faith did not begin with the current Republican administration. After a burst of reforms in the 1970s, Congress quickly fell back into Cold War apathy, finding it easier to let standards lapse than to hold the executive branch to account. The Iran-contra scandal was the first warning that the Church Committee's lessons had been sidelined by the executive branch. Attorney generals issued looser guidelines on FBI investigations. The White House became a keen user of unilateral executive orders that bypassed Congress.....
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Again, the point is that there is no longer a "left" in America, if Lamont and the two Lincoln brigade vets were the essence of what to be "on the left" was.
Those who think they are "centrist" are predominately significantly to the right of the republican president in office 50 years ago, and the majority of the congress are positioned to the right of this "centrist" group.
But "the right", and the "center-right" is far to the right of "left-lite", perceived by them to be folks like me, and I am someone who, in the 50s would be regarded as center-left establishment.
Neo-fascist is where it was on the spectrum, in the early 30s....the peculiarities of it are "same old", "same old", the difference now is that lots of folks on the right have drifted over to it, are happy with the neighborhood, but just haven't yet glanced up at the street sign. They all perceive a "liberal bias" in the press, though!