American Fascism is Coming
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The deranged rantings of Glenn Beck and Michael Savage are bearing fruit.
On September 12th, a census worker was found hanged, with the word "Fed" scratched into his chest, in rural Kentucky. Law enforcement has labeled the death an "apparent homicide." Bill Sparkman, the man who was killed, was a 51 year old teacher, Boy Scout leader, and cancer survivor.
Hardly a threat to democracy.
There were, most likely, multiple motives. Local rumor has it that Sparks stumbled on a meth lab during his census work. But at least part of the killer's goal was intimidation or incitement. If the only purpose for the killing had been to hide a meth lab, there are multiple ways, and many reasons, to make a body disappear. Hanging the body from a noose and scratching "Fed" into his chest is a provocation.
This is what happens when loons like Beck and Savage spew their rantings on national radio and TV. Beck has called Obama a marxist, a racist, and a fascist, and compared him to Mussolini. He says the US is headed towards socialism one day, and fascism the next and gives airtime to wild, paranoid conspiracy theories.
This is the same sort of empty headed rhetoric that White Supremacists spout off and use to justify their terrorism.
These American terrorists, like all terrorists, are cowards. They use violence to achieve political ends.
They are egged on, not just by the ratings driven ravings of Beck and Co, but by politicians like Texas Governor Rick Perry and even celebrities like Chuck Norris, who talk about seceding from the Union.
Republicans: Get a clue! You are aiding terrorists!
Fascism came to Germany and Italy through violent mobs, organized by demagogues.
Let's not go down the same path.
Have conversations, not screaming matches, with your political opponents.
Study history with an open mind. Don't trust the media, right or left.
Think for yourself! Study logic. Take time to evaluate the assertions you see that are passed off as facts.
Choose reason over fear and hate.
The future of our democracy may depend on you.
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Right Jiberish, the "facts"... just like I brought facts to light on your post and was completely ignored.
As I said - investigate the claims, don't just repost something you saw on an internet forum.
The Nazi party was made up of regular Germans who thought they knew the facts and the truth about what had happened to their country. What they had, instead, were lies fed to them by the Nazi propaganda machine.
You have every right to disagree with me, but if you ignore facts you will hurt yourself as well as others.
This was once again, right on! You are right in identifying the Becks of the world as inciting hatred and violence and ginning up the base for blood - keep writing!
Thank you kartika!
Great post. Keep writing, as Kartika said. The time for quiet toleration of the lunatic fringe is past. I'm not saying they're all lunatics, but when hatred and misunderstandings start to influence too many peoples' beliefs, it's time to take sane action to bring our country back to a reasonable path. Now isn't the time to be politely quiet in the face of ignorance. Keep talking, cause our country needs the voice of sanity right now.
Reminds me. The census taker, may he rest in peace, reminds me of something.
Back in very late July, a woman was arrested for basically casing an airforce base in New Jersey while toting a couple of assault weapons in her car. It didn't get a lot of news, but I spent some time researching the issue and writing a hub on it. She had a myspace page which was moved to private the morning after her arrest, but somehow I got lucky and stumbled upon a link that let me view her blog through a back door entry. She was a beck fan, which news on her was mentioning, but they didn't mention just how far out this woman really was. Through her twitter page, youtube account, myspace blog, and even stumbling upon comments she made on webmd, i realized that she was one highly confused person. I further realized that she wasn't alone, but the extent she was driven to worried me about the current state of affairs.
She related an incident when a census worker visited her home, which is why this incident you relate reminds me of her, and why I've been paying close attention to the news on it. For the woman I'm talking about, having a census worker show up at her house was just a huge violation of her rights, as she saw it. She was highly suspect of his handheld computer device. She said something along the lines of "I don't even want to think about what kind of information that machine is giving the government". That was from memory, not an exact quote, but startling in its paranoia, which is why it stuck with me. She end up releasing her dog on the poor guy. In another blog post she described a run-in with police wherein she was clearly being unreasonably incooperative, and yet felt she was being persecuted. Yet another post described how she believed that the FBI was secretly using her home to spy on her neighbors during the eighties.
Her social networking sites had alot of links to right wing extremists and militant groups. She -and they- feared the Fema camps conspiracy that Glenn Beck and Co. helped fuel last spring. That's why she repeatedly visited the airforce base, lurking around its perimeters and illegaly taking pictures. She also believed that American military was working with foreign military to effect a coup on the american people.
But when you read the material on the websites she linked to, and considered the way Beck and Co. legitimized these claims and fueled these peoples' fears, you could almost understand how an uneducated person could fall prey to these sort of far-out beliefs. In the end I couldn't help feeling sorry for the woman. I didn't leave the hub up for long. Well in truth, I changed to an anonymous ID to protect my job search in my conservative area of the country, and just chose not to republish that hub under my new ID. The picture it painted of this woman was too disturbing, and I really ended up feeling sorry for her. I don't know if she had any serious mental issues or not, she was clearly functional. She also clearly suffered from delusions of persecution. During her court hearing she apparently went sort of balistic, and they ended up holding her over for psychiatric evaluation. I was never able to find out what happened to her after that.
Her arrest after casing the airforce base with weapons in tow is what prompted beck's sudden calls for nonviolence in early august.
But my point is, assuming I have one, that this is what we're up against. This is the fringe element that's running the conservative roadshow these days. Working people don't have alot of time for researching facts. They hear some things which seem scary enough, and without realizing what they're doing, they buy into the whole crazy movement.
Keep talking.
Thank you for that info, Things. It's a scary world we live in, and dire economic times. For some, it's easier to believe in conspiracy theories than to look for truth.
Hopefully most Americans will not be exploited.
Things, your comment reminds me of something that happened near where I live, last summer. A gunman entered the Unitarian Church, in Knoxville, and killed 2 people before he was stopped. He stated that he did it to kill liberals, and he had copies of books by Michael Savage and many other conservative pundits.
Ugly rhetoric leads to ugly results.
Yeah I remember that incident. I don't understand why people hate liberals so much. Well, yeah. I guess I do. No, I don't understand the hate. But there are alot of things about this world I don't understand.
I understand the ignorance though. We're all so busy trying to earn a living and take care of our own, it's next to impossible to even try and begin to try and understand what the heck is going on in the world.
Most conspiracy theories are pretty much wacko, but at the same time, somethin' just ain't right. It's too bad that all that energy and passion expended on fighting the various imaginary enemies can't be focused into fighting the real problems.
We're all being exploited, and most of us are accomplices in it.
What kind of evidence do you have that would stand up in a court of law that would indict guys like Beck & Savage as reponsible for the murder of a federal worker? Forget about court evidence, you've offered no evidence at all. Let's see the facts that link the two.
Apparently I listen to these guys less than you do, since you seem to be able to make this indicting link between murder and the pundits. But I have listened to them enough to know that these guys are not inciting murder and mayhem in America.
As for the rise of fascism in America, I agree with you--I't coming, but not from where you think it is....
Bibowen - thanks for the comment. I can't link the killings directly to Beck and Savage, but I do assert that their speech promotes an atmosphere of fear and/or violence. Beck is more of a fearmonger, while Savage is much more hateful.
I may try to make more direct links - in the meantime, you might check out my post on the language Beck uses.
But, unfortunately, we can't make direct links between speech and action. Or can we?
When a radical Islamic mullah calls for the destruction of the United States, can we tie him directly to the deaths of Americans? What about when Savage calls for liberals to be rounded up and put into concentration camps?
Excellent critical analysis of the current state of affairs within our country...as well as the murder. I'm a fan.
Dude, we've been a fascist state for, well, decades now. Ever since the Supreme Court decided not to stand up to FDR's threat to pack the Supreme Court with justices he wanted. Since that time every election, every judicial nomination, every law passed has been a farce.
The only difference is not people are feeling the consequences of centralized power. That poor man was killed because the idiots in Washington are busy screwing up the US and people are getting tired of it. Oh sure, right now the only people taking action are the lunatic fringe, but how long will it be before others start taking action?
"Ever since the Supreme Court decided not to stand up to FDR's threat to pack the Supreme Court with justices he wanted"
???
But they did. His court packing scheme failed.
Good Hub William, The "Sea is Sawing" at the moment as there was much the same coming from the left over the last eight years. Requires a healthy skepticism of every thing you read or hear on Radio, TV, or in the Newspapers. Everyone has an agenda the things that suffer are the regular guy and the truth. God Bless I'm a new fan..
LeDefensetech: thanks for the comment.
Part of the trouble with flinging around words like 'fascism' (yes, this applies to me too) is that everyone seems to have a different definition. Many right wing thinkers would point to a much earlier time, Woodrow Wilson's presidency, as the rise of American fascism. Left wing thinkers might say that World War 2 was the beginning, as it established the military industrial complex.
A case could be made that Lincoln was a fascist, even though the term hadn't been used yet, because he suspended many constitutional rights, etc.
In fact, if you look at the entire history of the US, you see that it has been based on racism and some degree of nationalism.
I don't know if I agree with the idea that America is, or has ever been, fascist. Perhaps the closest we ever came was during World War 2, when pacifists were rounded up alongside Japanese Americans and put into work camps, and the government had total control over pretty much everything that went on in America.
I think I may write a hub soon about the difference between socialism, fascism, democracy, communism, marxism, and all that, because the terms seem to be blurring at the edges. Obama is somehow both a fascist and Socialist? That would have been an absurd claim in Italy in the 1920s when fascism was coming to power.
Thanks for the kind words, Lita and Hmrjmr1!
Look up "As We Go Marching" by John T. Flynn. He does a great job at defining fascism in an economic sense and traces the evolution of the fascist movement in Italy that transformed it from a nation not unlike our own to the totalitarian nightmare of the blackshirts. Especially germane to us today is his discussion of deficit spending by Mussolini and it's effects on the country and how that spending made war inevitable.
http://mises.org/books/aswegomarching.pdf
It's also interesting to note that among politicians of that age, fascism was very popular. Look up the Blue Eagle of the New Deal. In any case I think we can define fascism as state control over the economy for the purposes of national well being, unlike socialism or communism which advocates state control for the well being of the "workers". Either way, both economic systems suffer from similar problems. That's one of the reasons we find ourselves in the straits we're in today.
I don't think the U.S. is fascist, but I think it's moving in that direction. I notice the publisher is rushing Sarah Palin's autobiography to print this week to capitalize on all this hot, free-floating hate and fear. Yikes. I can't look at that woman without thinking of Faye Dunaway in "The Handmaid's Tale."
What we have now is a sort of reverse fascism whereby corporations own the government and the government forks over whatever the corporations want. I find the argument between "It's the government!" and "It's the corporations!" really useless though. The endless chicken or egg economic debate is a dead end. Roosevelt was a scoundrel! Roosevelit was hero! Geez, it's the 21st century, can we have a few NEW ideas please? Is that too much to hope for?
It's just another version of the same old right/left, Coke/Pepsi, WFW fake political discussion that the people with all the money want us to waste our time having. That's my view anyway.
The end result, however you want to frame it, is bad for 95% of us though. I don't know if this mess can be fixed or the hateful converted but I've decided to respect my own capacity to think. If fear and ignorance is the disease, then courage and education is the cure. Great hub, thank you.
Hmmm.... Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are glorified by the left, but Beck and Savage are vilified.
Hypocrisy, anyone?
Oh gosh, Nicomp, I totally forgot how oppressed white males have been throughout the history of Western Civilization. You're totally right!
William, how can you have a society which is color blind when you constantly argue about who is oppressed and when they were oppressed. We either don't care about the color of a person's skin or we don't. Didn't Dr. King dream of a day in which the character of a man was what defined him, not the color of his skin?
LTD if I recall correctly, your answer to the slavery question was that slaves could have 'just run away,' and that would have eventually solved the whole problem without a civil war. Why don't you quit advocating for the Devil and write your own hubs once in awhile? It's safer and more fun to snipe from the peanut gallery isn't it? Make everybody else argue from a defensive position, like making the first move in tic-tac-toe.
The legacy of the reign of fear comes to fruition it seems. That which you sow, that also shall you reap. Sow fear among the ignorant, and sit within your fortified walls in fear that the masses will storm your castle. Think of eighteenth century France. Speak to your neighbors. Become involved. Speak for peace. Write for reason and hope. Good luck to us.
Pam, yes it would have. You cannot keep people in bondage forever. Sooner or later they revolt. The longer it takes for an enslaved people to revolt the more bloody such a revolution will be. That's what happens when you set up a society which ignores natural law.
And don't be bitter just because you are increasingly unable to defend your positions. The fault there does not lie with the people who disagree with you, but your own inability to question your assumptions.
I'm able to WRITE my positions instead of using fake history to be argumentative with others to no good purpose. My WRITING is my defense of my position. You might want to consider WRITING something. Or not. Like I said, it is easier to snipe.
LDT: first I'd like to point out that I didn't bring race into this discussion, but Nicomp did.
Second: African Americans, and African American leaders, occupy a considerably different position in our society than do Glenn Beck or Michael Savage.
The difference between prejudice and racism is that racism is backed by power. Black people can be prejudiced, but they cannot be racist in the same way that white people can because black people have less power than white people in our society. The evidence of that is all around you if you'd care to look.
So the question is not, "how can you have a society which is color blind when you constantly argue about who is oppressed and when they were oppressed." The question is, why are some people in our society still oppressed and what do we do to stop that oppression?
Interesting hub. Hmtjmr1 hit the nail on the head when he said we need "healthy skepticism". I think people sense that this country is in dire straits, so they need little encouragement to find a new scapegoat. And that is not a liberal, conservative, democrat, or republican thing. It is a human thing. We need to be VERY careful with the media.
Thanks for dropping by bucky! I agree that the problem, and the solution, is not a liberal or conservative thing.
"Things" tend to get a lot worse before they get better (in general). The more suppressed people are the higher the chance of revolt is; so maybe a fascist America is necessary for the evolution of our specie.
Interesting idea Mr. Happy. I hope not! Thanks for dropping by.
I agree with some of the things you said and certainly agree with you about the hate mongerers but I've followed politics for over forty years and each time I thought America was on the abyss the democratic process prevails.We've overcome a lot of crises situations that would have toppled many a country and for the most part without bloodshed.I'm very concerned about the political climate out here but I have confidence in the American conscience,and our political system.It's not perfect but it's flexible,it will always be a work in progress.Once again you've produced an excellant, thought provoking hub and by doing so you've validated my confidence in our system.Keep up the good work!
Thank you for the kind words Oldenuf! I hope you are right.
William, What a truly informative article on a very important subject. I like everyone esle value the right to free speech, but when that speech incites violence or other terroristic activities it should be criminal. And as for govenor Rick Perry, don't even get me started. His wild west approach to using the death sentence has made Texans look like barbarians.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS,
Chris
Thank you Christal! I've enjoyed your hubs too.
It has been proven that this census worker committed suicide your hub has it wrong but nice try promulgating your leftist propaganda
Arthur - you are correct,the state police ruled the death a suicide.
This hub was written shortly after his death, when the actual cause of death was unknown and a murder seemed likely.
I'm leaving it here because I think the message is an important one.
That message is this: Fascism in America won't come from the government, as long as we stay engaged in the democratic process. It will come from mobs and demagogues spewing hate speech.
"Beck has called Obama a marxist, a racist, and a fascist, and compared him to Mussolini. He says the US is headed towards socialism one day, and fascism the next and gives airtime to wild, paranoid conspiracy theories. "
Apparently Glenn Beck has no clue what he is talking about.
Mussolini defined fascism as being a collectivist ideology in opposition to socialism, classical liberalism, democracy and individualism.
Very spirited indeed. I wish more politicians could have that passion to voice our state of affairs.
jiberish 2 years ago
Yup it sure does, and as long as there are those who try to brings facts into light, they will be called loonatics. I quess it's easier for some to swallow the truth.