There has been a potential for Fascism in the US ever since World War I, but it's never been fully realized and there's good reason to think it never will be.

What's more likely is something resembling the kind of "Caesarism" that Raymond Aron suggested back in the 1950s.

What's the difference?

--Fascism--assuming there is such a thing as "generic" Fascism--was/is basically secular in its outlook, while Caesarism relies heavily on traditional religious sanctions to reinforce its dominance.

--Fascism entailed(manipulated)mass political mobilization, while Caesarism entails if anything political demobilization. Caesarism's ideal isn't Nuremburg in 1935 but something like the country music audience in the final scene of Altman's "Nashville"...

You may say I'm not free, but it don't worry me.

I keep wondering if these people know what the words Sunni and Shiite actually mean. Do they understand that these are whole sections of Islam, not just groups of fanatics? It'd be like talking about exterminating all the Protestants because some fundamentalist cults are whacko.

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything?

*falls over giggling* Gods, this guy knows nothing about the Middle East, doesn't he?

A photo of a light flame from a beeswax candle is on the front page so we can warm-up our fingers and toes before 'hitting' the key-board piano. I did not read Darcey Steinke's article, "something to believe in," but I will.

It was snow flurrying here earlier.

I was curious. Is the 'troll' promised a narrow grave? Is the 'grace' or 'grave' for a rt-wing know-it-all, a shallow 3 X 6 foot-plot? Or is the 'toll-grave' for a 'troll' dug more narrow than that?

The wide-spread rumor that floats 'round that a wound-up clock-deity (Easter Bunny?) in the blue-sky is certainly positive we must kill in mass-murder, genocide style? It gut's me lamenting and widely too foreboding. If the thoughts I succumb to here make me shout, just put a cotton bunny tail in your ears?

"I doubt Peter Rabbit wants a swirling vortex dust-bowl hole experience!" That my sole opinion. When I get bitter and need a dankest to blow my nose, I wander, stagger, and have hopped into the Salon. It's a good informing place to "be-all" and not "end-all." A person does NOT need to go to the militarism blog-recruiters. What daily and perpetual disgust gets disputed here in just a instant-input. Thanks anyhow.

None needs to feel "left-out" or obscured or "fall-out." It's mighty good that our day can be brightened-up by a learned mathematical, a legal, a pantheism skeptic, a non-Hollywood paid actors/actresses, and a brick-wall, spray-paint artwork of a former NYC Bowery van-G's masterpieces....resident. And there are many-many exquisite bright witticism-isms hung up in the wall-scroll gallery page.

Or, it's a good light in a dark DC alley. What exquisite and illuminating ISAGOGE'S!

We can't "see-all." We need more than 24-hours and no million dollars profits from sales from sprout seed for calming salad fellow encores...but "we-all" can let seep via our windows the thoughts and take in a renewable and imperishable beauty. To know there are some "non-kook" contemporaries to assist with a 'Rx' fix that mend our individual heart-sickness suffering from listening to the rt-wing "know-all." "Um pains.

A logger I know says I'm crazy. He has a log stuck in his ____!

He extracts trees from "gypsy-moth" damage and drains Miller Light down on rain or sunny days. I'd invite him here to get a good seat so we can get back to what used to be less troublesome day. He just needs a wide door for a log.

Holy Kristos or Ix chis, and let's stay less perturbed and more bright than dark murderous ally-ways in which the rt-wing troll goes. The death toll rings another diminishment each time a human dies for the pro-war death monger's lust for bitter vinegar and 'olive-oil.' The "bell-toll" rings for thee?

I need more reading and leisure time or more than one life to keep informed. The escalator's talk 'hits' the ceiling and this jabber about more fire and incendiaries explosions in the air made me remember a Wall Street Journal article where Kissinger said "The Vietnam-Lesson".....Was What!

NOTE: Kissinger said, "The Government should have dropped more bombs for longer periods of time before 1972 in (I add THIS: populated) Hanoi."

I don't enjoy using words like 'crap.' But the chat about killing is murder!

Desert Son: Yesterday. 2:07Pm. Some of are just not good at long division, and being mathematical. Be easy. Be.

This is a rather disquieting assay on the subject of Fascism, and its obvious relationship with the Current reality.

http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf

I hope posting this web link does not infringe on some "digital intellectual property" rule.

So let me summarize to see if I understand.

When Liberals oppose bombing people of weaker nations, they're racists, but when right wingers promote bombing people of weaker nations, they're not racists. They're liberators. I guess. Ok. Whatever.

Let's see, dying by getting a few limbs blown off and bleeding out or choking on chlorine gas, hmmm let me see I don't know a tough choice. How would reynolds choose to die? It's pretty clear the current definition of WMD is any weapon a non-coalition force uses. Any weapon a coalition force uses is by definition not WMD.

Don't hear compassionate conservatism anymore where'd that go?

So I think Glenn is very aware of what you're saying, and that's the basis of the essay's irony: i.e., Ledeen makes the usual silly right wing suggestion that because liberals and leftists don't rush to advocate blowing some country up, it means they're racists or hierarchalists or something.

Yet the right wingers quoted below Ledeen very explicitly describe those countries' residents as inferior and as targets for genocide.

So, the argument on the right is that because liberals & leftists oppose blowing certain 3rd world peoples up, they're racists, but when right wingers explicitly call for genocide etc. against certain 3rd world peoples, this is somehow not racist & discriminatory.

Thank you, El Cid, for answering that perfectly. I thought the point was clear. Ledeen is claiming that those opposed to Middle East wars (i.e. the "Left") are opposed because they see Arabs and Muslims as sub-human, i.e, not worth fighting to democratize.

As others have pointed out, the idea is that if you don't favor invading and bombing a certain country, destroying its infrastructure, slaughtering hundreds of thousdands of its citizens, and then brutally occupying it, it must mean that you consider them sub-human. The only way to show you think they're equal is by bombing and killing them.

What's odd about that, in addition to the obvious, is that it contradicts so completely the standard right-wing critique of "the Left." Usually, we hear that the Left is incapable of making distinctions between cultures, that the grave error of the Left is its failure to recognize that some cultures are superior to others, that the Left foolishly sees them all as equivalent.

Yet here, the same people make the exact opposite claim - that the problem with the Left is that they DO make such distinctions, that they DO think the West is superior, that they DO see third-world Middle Eastern countries as inferior. It's hard to keep track of their cliches.

It's just bizarre to hear the people who want to kill larger and larger numbers of Population X complain that opponents of such slaughter view Population X as "untermenschen." But then it's not bizarre if you read Paul Rosenberg's summary of Altemeyer's analysis.