Dear rn,
Unless the problem is with my own rn subscription, Jan seems to have
temporarily abandoned us. Could her classic PC finally have failed? Is
she off on another NGO mission? I trust we'll hear the story in good time,
and I'm sure she's up to something beneficial to humanity.
In the meantime, I'll share with you an essay I wrote for the cj list,
slightly updated. Someone wrote to me that the important question about
fascism is "How could anyone fall for it?". I suggest rather the question
for our time is: "How can you recognize facism when it pretends to be
something else?".
yours,
rkm
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The Crisis in Yugoslavia and its Relationship to Global Fascism
27 April 1999
Richard K. Moore
http://cyberjournal.org
Among the lies and hypocrisies which characterize media reportage on NATO's
aggression against Serbia is the absurd notion that NATO is somehow
"fighting fascism". Ironically, the exact opposite turns out to be the
case.
Fascism was an invention of capitalism. Hitler was originally recruited by
German military intelligence to infiltrate a socialist labor party, which
Hitler eventually tranformed into the Nazi party. Hitler and Mussolini
were financed, encouraged, and supported (mostly covertly) by Western
industrialists, and Western governments, for the express purpose of
suppressing grass-roots democratic forces (labor, socialist, communist, and
anarchist movements) which were seeking to overcome capitalist
exploitation. I looked up some Readers Digest articles from the thirties.
I found an "interview" with two young Germans, one male one female, in
which they explained all about the shiny new Germany, the virtues of
eugenics, and about how Jews were like a cancer that had to be rooted out,
even if unfortunate human suffering might be necessary. The article was a
sympathetic one, not a crtique.
Hitler's Mein Kampf agenda was on the public record, and the extensive US
investments and technology transfers to Nazi Germany enabled Hitler to
invade Russia, the avowed enemy of the capitalist system. General Motors
and Ford (along with other US firms) operated manufacturing plants in
Germany both before and throughout the war - the bombers which blitzed
England were built in a General Motors plant. After the war, Allen Dulles
made it his mission to see that no US firm was punished for collaboration
with the Nazis. In fact, far from denying their collaboration, General
Motors and Ford demanded and received something like $30 million in
compensation from the US government for damage to their plants from Allied
bombing. More recently, when these facts reached public light, they were
again not disputed - instead Ford and GM offered the flimsy excuse that
their "subsidiaries were outside their control". This is all thoroughly
documented history, and references are supplied at the end of this
article.(1,2,3,4)
The US and Britain withheld their invasion of Europe until Russia began to
turn the tide against the Nazis. Only then did Allied troops land in
Italy and Normandy. This timing, along with other evidence, indicates a
strategy aimed at limiting the western advance of Russian forces, rather
than a strategy of defeating Nazism as quickly as possible.(5,15) In fact
Truman said outright:
If we see that Germany is winning we should help Russia and if Russia
is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many
as possible . . .
Harry S. Truman, 1941
(I believe the original source was a
local newspaper in Independence, Mo.)
---
The use of fascist governments by the West to suppress local democracy was
not abandoned after WW II, despite propaganda rhetoric about "free-world"
democratization. Throughout the Third World, by means primarily of covert
and military US interventions, fascist military dictatorships were
installed in order to suppress local populations and facilitate exploitive
capitalist operations.(11,12,13,15)
Racism and nationalism were both characteristic of German Nazism, but
neither is characteristic of fascism in general. Spain's fascism didn't
share the Nazis' preoccupation with aggressive nationalism, and Italy's
fascism didn't share the Nazis' extreme version of racism. Furthermore,
the presence of racism or nationalism is not evidence for fascism. Racism
has existed for millenia; nationalism has existed for centuries; fascism is
a twentieth-century invention.
What characterizes fascism in all cases is police-state suppression of the
population, and the delegation of economic operations to capitalist
interests. Mussolini was explicit about the relationship between fascism
and capitalism, and took pride in the fact that he "got the trains running
on time"; Hitler was less explicit about the association, given the
pseudo-socialist component of Goebbel's propaganda line, but it was Herr
Krupp who was made Oberfuhrer of Industry for all Third Reich territories,
and the majority of concentration camps were run as corporate slave-labor
operations rather than as death camps per se. Krupp had to argue this
point with Hitler, finally convincing him that it made more sense to work
Jews to death rather than "wasting" them by killing them outright.(3)
---
Fascism is thus not a phenomenon which can be usefully studied in terms of
the isolated national context, and certainly not in terms of the psychology
of individual leaders. Power-mad leaders, charismatic or merely ruthless,
can always be recruited - you only need one per country. And any nation,
if subjected to sufficient externally-driven destablization, can fall prey
to fascism. How and why fascism arises can only be understood from the
larger perspective - in the context of capitalist strategies to maintain
global dominance.
Fascism is only one of many such strategies. Liberal pseudo-democracy is
the strategy employed in the West, and in some third world countries (eg,
Phillipines) when the oppressiveness of the fascist strategy threatens to
bring about an autonomous, locally initiated, change of regime.
Theocracies (eg Iran) are another of the strategies. The Shah had
faithfully played the fascist role, and when a popular rebellion threatened
to bring in an autonomous local regime - most likely socialist and
non-aligned - the Ayatolla was dusted off in his Paris sanctuary,
transformed by the global corporate media into a manufactured "peoples'
choice", and installed by the US, France, and Britain just-in-time to
prevent local autonomy of an unapproved variety. Western rhetoric
pretended to be disappointed when the Ayatolla turned out to be a tyrant,
but in fact he serves Western interests perfectly, both as "someone to
hate" (justifying military expenditures and all sorts of anti-Bill Of
Rights, so called "anti-terrorist" legislation), and as a general
destabilizing force in the Arab world. Fear of Arab solidarity has been a
central driving force in Western Mideast policy since at least the end of
WW I.
Destabilization and regional devololution is another general strategy for
global capitalist dominance. In this case, the goal is to break a region
down into smaller, more manageable chunks.
US/NATO policy in Yugoslavia, or in Iraq, it seems to me, must be examined
primarily in terms of the strategies revealed. The "threat" posed by Iraq
was to become a model of Arab modernization - a model based on the
reinvestment of oil profits to build a modern national infrastructure.
Such a modernization model is contrary to the Western model for managing
the Mideast, which seeks to keep the oil-producing states in a permanent
state of medievalism. This is why Kuwait was encouraged to engage in
provocative price cutting, and why the US tricked Saddam into invading
Kuwait. That sequence of orchestrated events provided the pretext for the
US military to go in and destroy the national infrastructure which had been
developed contrary to the interests of global capitalism. The fact that
Saddam is a dictator was of no strategic significance, except for its
propaganda value. All the oil-producing states are dictatorships, mostly
installed by the West, and any pretense that Saddam's style of government
was a reason for Desert Storm is transparent hypocrisy.
In Yugloslavia, the strategy obviously being deployed is that of
destablization and devolution. Local fascism has little strategic
relevance to the situation, nor does the level-of-democracy in any of the
local governments - and most certainly US/NATO policy has never been
organized around any intent to promote human rights in the region. By
encouraging the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, by secretly providing arms to
militant factions, and by preventing any useful attempts at negotiation or
mediation, Western policies have led inevitably and predictably to what is
being called, at the level of individual episodes, "ethnic cleansing".
In fact ehnic cleansing, at the macro level, is precisely what Western
policy is all about: the creation of several small countries, each of which
has its own ethnic identity, and each of which is in conflict with its
neighbors. This is a textbook example of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of
Civilizations" model for global capitalist domination.(16)
If one or the other local governments in the Balkans are fascist, that has
little relevance to Western policy. If any government there deserves to be
painted with the fascist brush, Croatia would certainly be high on the
list, and Croatia is being treated as a friendly ally by the West. It was
Croatia which took the fascist side in WW II, and I recall reading a couple
years back about a soccer match which was delayed so the Croatian fans
could finish their enthusiastic round of Nazi songs. I'm not trying to
shift any finger of blame from Serbia to Croatia - they're both victims in
this scenario - I'm rather making the point that local fascism isn't
strategically relevant to the situation. The more relevant strategic
factors, I submit, are -
(1) regional destabilization
(2) framentation along Huntington's "civilization boundaries"
(3) most of all - the establishment by de facto precedent of an
end to territorial national sovereignty and its replacement by a
pseudo-legitimized, capitalist-controlled, corporate-media
celebrated, global military regime.
Thus, as we look deeper, fascism is indeed of primary relevance to what's
going on in the Balkans - but at the global level, not the national.
At the national level, the hallmarks of fascism are police-suppression of
populations and the delegation of economic affairs to capitalist interests.
At the global level, the US/NATO hi-tech military machine serves to
suppress whole national populations at a time, in order that economic
affairs can be conveniently managed according to capitalism's globalization
/ TNC-world-governement agenda.
Far from promoting human rights and fighting fascism, the US/NATO actions
amount to the consolidation of a global fascist regime - the military arm
of globalization - the muscle that makes real the global sovereignty of
those institutions which manage the global economy on behalf of their TNC
constituency - the WTO, IMF, World Bank, OECD, WIPO, ad nauseum acronymium.
Human rights and human welfare, as we can see evidenced throughout the
Third World, are of no concern to global capitalism. In the calculus of
transnational "market forces", as interpreted by the almighty IMF,
maximizing TNC profits is the only goal. Human welfare and human rights
are not to interfere, even if that means mass starvation, which is
precisely what it does mean.(17,18,19)
There's one more of capitalism's oft-used strategies which deserves mention
in this regard, and that is genocide. In North America, Australia, and
South Africa, to name three examples from the nineteenth century, wholesale
genocide against indigenous peoples was the method used to clear the land
for expansion of the capitalist system. It seems that some cultures don't
domesticate well, from a capitalist perspective, and outright genocide is
necessary to free up the land and resources being "wasted" by people who
live "outside the cash economy". Local self-sufficiency is anathema to
capitalism, as is economic sustainability. Both are fundamentally
incompatible with what capitalism calls economic growth and "development".
Sub-Sahara Africa is today's version of "Injun Territory" - a vast land
occupied by semi-indigenous economies and peoples which aren't particularly
productive from the perspective of global capitalism. Against the
American "Injuns" the weapons were the US Cavalry, the destruction of the
Bison herds, and media demonization of "savage heathens"; against the
people of Sub-Sahara Africa the weapons are covertly-sponsored civil wars,
the destruction of economies via IMF diktats, and media attribution of the
civil wars to "primitive tribalism". The predictable consequence, now as
in the US Old West, is publicly tolerated genocide on a continental
scale.(17)
Of all the human rights - as enumerated by documents such as the US
Constitution or the UN Delcaration of Human Rights - the one least
respected of all by global capitalism is that of democratic self
determination. Local autonomy, democratic or otherwise, is the ultimate
deadly sin in the eyes of global capitalism. The mechanisms for preventing
local autonomy, and for selling the prevention process to Western
populations, have been steadily refined over at least the past three
centuries, and are recently enjoing an unfortunate renaissance of demonic
inventiveness - from free-trade treaties, to NATO blitzkrieg, to
state-of-the-art wag-the-dog journalism.
Respectfully Yours,
Richard K. Moore
Wexford, Ireland
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recommended References
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(Please accept my apologies for not having at hand names of current
publishers and other details for some of these references)
(1) George Seldes, "Facts and Fascism".
(2) James Pool, "Who Financed Hitler", 1978, Pocket Books, Simon &
Schuster, New York.
(3) William Manchester, "The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968".
(4) Charles Higham, "Trading with the Enemy".
(5) Holly Sklar, ed, "Trilateralism", 1980, South End Press, Boston.
(6) Zinn, Howard, "A Peoples History of the United States", 1980, Harper &
Row, New York.
(7) William Greider, "Who Will Tell the People, the Betrayal of American
Democracy", 1992, Touchstone Press, Simon & Schuster, New York.
(8) Lederer, William J, "A Nation of Sheep", 1962, Fawcett
World Library, Crest Books, New York.
(9) Michael Parenti, "Inventing Reality", 1993, St. Martin's Press, New York.
(10) Parenti, "Make-Believe Media - The Politics of Entertainment", 1992,
St. Martin's Press, New York.
(11) Parenti, "The Sword and the Dollar - Imperialism, Revolution, and the
Arms Race", 1989, St. Martin's Press, New York.
(12) William Blum, "Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since
World War II", 1995, Common Courage Press, Monroe Maine.
(13) John Stockwell, "In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story".
(14) David Horowitz, editor, "Containment and Revolution", Beacon Press,
Boston, 1967,
(15) John Bagguley, "The World War and the Cold War".
(16) Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order", 1997, Simon and Schuster.
(17) Michel Chossudovsky, "The Globalization of Poverty", 1997, Third World
Network, Penang, Malaysia.
(18) Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, ed, "The Case Against the Global
Economy, and For a Turn Toward the Local", 1996, Sierra Club Books, San
Francisco.
(19) Frances More Lappé, "World Hunger, Twelve Myths", 1986, Grove Press,
New York.
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