Happy 4th of July
Collated by Winston Weeks
Edited by Sarah Meyer, Index Research
Boston 04.07.06, photo zayko Fascism
red-rag and pink-flag
blackshirt and brown
strut-mince and stink-brag
have all come to town
some like it shot
and some like it hung
and some like it in the twot
nine months young
ee cummings
*****
"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change."
David Barsamian, journalist and publisher
*****
" Patriotism, like religion, meets people's need for something greater to which their individual lives can be anchored ... America's state religion, [is] patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that "treason" is morally worse than murder or rape "
William Blum, author of Killing Hope
*****
" The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
*****
" The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
John Kenneth Galbraith , economist and author
*****
Martin Luther King, photo hope edu." History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
*****
" The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. "
Noam Chomsky, American linguist, author, US media and foreign policy critic
*****
"The great masses of people. . .will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."
Adolph Hitler
*****
" Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. "
George Orwell, author "1984"
*****
"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. "
Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805 - 1859, French political thinker and author of Democracy in America
*****
Assassination of Martin Luther King" If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
*****
"To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization."
Jeremy Seabrook, Third World Network
*****
" ... the airwaves belong to the people. "
from the 1934 Communications Act
*****
" Many of us regard ourselves as mildly liberal or centrist politically, voice fairly pleasant sentiments about our poor children, contribute money to send poor kids to summer camp, feel benevolent. We're not nazis; we're nice people. We read sophisticated books. We go to church. We go to synagogue. Meanwhile, we put other people's children into an economic and environmental death zone. We make it hard for them to get out. We strip the place bare of amenities. And we sit back and say to ourselves, "Well, I hope that they don't kill each other off. But if they do, it's not my fault."
Jonathan Kozol, educator and author
*****
" The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic."
John Dewey , American philosopher and educator, 1859-1952
*****
A. Pinochet, Chile" [U.S. aid] has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens..."
Lars Schoultz, leading academic specialist on human rights in Latin America
*****
"Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane."
Howard Zinn, historian and author
*****
" In the post-Cold War era, the United States needs to promote the development of democracy and human rights, not militaries that view their own citizens as the enemy."
U.S. Senator Richard Durbin
*****
"The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan."
Lewis Lapham , journalist
*****
" Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
*****
" When I visited Auschwitz I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq, I thought to myself, 'What will we tell our children in fifty years when they ask what we did when the people in Iraq were dying.'"
Mairead McGuire , 1976 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Northern Ireland
*****
" Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or 'disappeared', at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame."
Amnesty International, in its annual report on U.S. military aid and human rights
*****
"How dare Americans allow their government to cause such misery [in the world]."
Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General and human rights activist
*****
"One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous."
Aldous Huxley , English author, 1894-1963
*****
"Does it sound outrageous to you that military spending for fiscal year 2000 will be almost $290 billion and all other domestic discretionary spending, such as education, job training, housing, Amtrak, medical research, environment, Head Start and many other worthwhile programs will total $246 billion, the biggest disparity in modern times ? "
Dale Bumpers , former US Senator and present Director of the Center for Defense Information
*****
" To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. "
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
*****
" If you liked El Salvador, you're going to love Colombia. It's the same death squads, the same military aid, and the same whitewash from Washington. "
Carlos Salinas , Amnesty International's advocacy director for Latin America and the Caribbean
*****
" It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture. "
Jerome Wiesner , president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*****
" The NSS [National Security State] represents and serves the interests of a tiny elite. Its economic policies of "trickling-up", enforced by the machine gun, are rationalized on the ground that growth in the long run will trickle down to the lower orders. This is a self-serving ideology designed mainly to allow the western public to think well of themselves and their own country."
Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic
*****
" As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."
Robert McChesney, journalist and media critic
*****
"The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate."
Jeremy Brecher , historian and author
*****
" Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. "
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English author, literary scholar and social critic
*****
" In the councils of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, 1961
*****
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them."
William Shirer , author
*****
"The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package -- the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity -- must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug."
Edward S. Herman , economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic
*****
" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider , journalist and author
*****
"The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are [being] undone and erased.... No Agent Orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social (rather than physical) destruction has unfolded. The seemingly neutral and scientific tools of macro- economic policy constitute a non-violent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment."
Michel Chossudovsky , economist
*****
"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them."
Harold Pinter, English dramatist, Nobel Prize winner
*****
" America's inability to come to terms with revolutionary change in the The Third World...has created our biggest international problems in the postwar era. But the root of the problem is not, as many Americans persist in believing, the relentless spread of communism. Rather, it is our own difficulty in understanding that Third World revolutions are primarily nationalist, not communist. Nationalism, not capitalism or communism, is the dominant political force in the modern world. You might think that revolutionary nationalism and the desire for self-determination would be relatively easy for Americans - the first successful revolutionaries to win their independence - to understand. But instead we have been dumbfounded when other peoples have tried to pursue the goals of our own revolution two centuries ago.... "
Former U.S. Senator Frank Church, on the shortsightedness of 'rollback' as our foreign policy doctrine
*****
" People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. "
C. Wright Mills - from the book The Power Elite
*****
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."
General David Sharp, former US Marine Commandant,1966
*****
" In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli."
Howard Zinn, historian and author
*****
" Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. "
John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
*****
" Today, the United States and Somalia are the only two countries in the world which haven't ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. And since Somalia is a country with no internationally recognized government, the United States essentially stands alone as the last holdout to legally guarantee children the same full range of human rights ... agreed to by 191 other sovereign states. "
Catherine Langevin-Falcon, executive director of UNICEF (Humanist magazine Nov/Dec 1998)
*****
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..."
General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
*****
" Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
*****
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
Louis Brandeis , Supreme Court justice from 1916-1939
*****
In 1997, the six governments which executed the greatest number of people per capita were China, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Florida and Texas.
From peace.ca
*****
" We live amidst massive inequality. We don't really care that most people have little power to alter the conditions of their lives. We refuse to acknowledge that the earth is dying and that we are killing it. ... Our unthinking celebration of individual achievement and upward mobility works to damage the life-giving ties of kinship and the bonds of community. ...We pretend not to understand the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military presence. "
Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution
*****
" A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
*****
" The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. "
Edward Bernays , "father" of modern public relations (PR), on government propaganda
*****
"I'm not giving him hell. I'm just telling the truth and he thinks it's hell."
Al Gore
*****
I suggest we be clear that our goal is not to reform global corporate and financial rule -- it is to end it. The publicly traded, limited liability corporation is a pathological institutional form and financial speculation is inherently predatory. As a first step both must be regulated. The appropriate longer term goal is to rid our economic affairs of these institutional pathologies -- much as our ancestors eliminated the institution of monarchy.
David C. Korten from ratical.org
*****
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams"
Paulo Coelho
*****
One major issue now which has devastated a good bit of the left and has caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle betwen socialism and capitalism and capitalism won and socialism lost. And the reason it lost is because the Soviet Union turned out to be a failure, and that shows that socialism has lost ... Why don't they say that democracy failed?And the proof that democracy failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. I mean after all, those countries called themselves democratic, in fact they called themselves "people's democracies," real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that democracy failed? Well, I haven't seen any article anywhere saying "look, democracy failed, let's forget
about democracy," and it's obvious why. The fact that they _call_ themselves democratic doesn't say that they _were_ democratic - that's pretty obvious. Well, in what sense did socialism fail? Certainly it's true that they called themselves socialist, but they also called themselves democratic. Were they socialist? You can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are at the core of it, like workers control over production and elimination of wage labor and things like that. Did they have that? There wasn't even a thought. In the pre-Bolshevik period, there were in fact socialist initiatives. They were crushed instantly, within months they were crushed. In fact, just as whatever moves there were towards democracy were instantly destroyed, whatever moves there were towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeoever was sort of a coup, which was sort of a counterrevolution. We certainly understand this easily enough with regard to the claim to democracy, how come we don't understand it with regard to the claim to socialism?
Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky: speech 6/16/94 at Woods Hole, MA
*****
We are meeting in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin . . . .
From the prolific womb of injustice we breed the two great classes -- tramps and millionaires.
-- Populist Party platform, 1892
*****
"Capitalism? No thanks! We will burn your fucking banks!"
From nadir.org
*****
"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even when there is no river."
Nikita Khrushchev
*****
"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
Alex Carey
*****
"Once the great dialectic was capital versus labor. Now it's the conflict between the comfortable and the deprived. And the comfortable see government as the threat because it is the only hope for the deprived."
John Kenneth Galbraith (in Mother Jones Jan/Feb 1994)
*****
"Everybody is exposed to radiation. A little bit more or a little bit less is of no consequence."
Dixy Lee Ray, former chairwoman of the Atomic Energy Commission 1973-1975. Dr. Ray said this on Thursday, December 30, 1993, in response to recent reports detailing radiation experiments on unsuspecting Americans.
Dixy Lee Ray died three days later (1/2/94) from a severe bronchial condition she had for several months. (Bronchial infection: a little bit more or a little bit less is of no consequence, too, I guess).
*****
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so SICK AT HEART, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop."
Mario Savio, spokesperson for the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement
*****
"The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country."
Winston Churchill - 1910
*****
"Democracy means deceive people into doing what the rich want, and markets means make sure the public subsidize the rich."
Noam Chomsky
*****
"We're seeing an enormous increase in inequality in the United States and in the world. There's a massive reallocation of wealth from people who do productive work to people who simply have money. The figure that helps to underline just how extreme this inequality is becoming is the observation that 358 billionaires in the world have combined assets roughly equal to the combined annual income of the world's poorest 2.5 billion people (that's nearly 1/2 of the world's population), and that concentration is continuing....90% of the value of shareholder equity in the United States is owned by the richest 10% of households. 47% is owned by the top 1% of households. The bottom 80% of households own 2%."
David C. Korten
*****
"Nigger control is called 'Law and Order.' Stealing is called 'Capitalism."
Jerry Rubin
*****
APOLITICAL INTELLECTUALS
One Day
the apolitical intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest of our people.
They will be asked what they did
when their nation died out
slowly, like a sweet fire,
small and alone.
No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long lunch breaks,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with "the idea of the nothing"
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.
They won't be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward's death.
They'll be asked nothing
about their absurd justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.
On that day
the simple men will come.
Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
those who mended their clothes,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them, and they'll ask:
"What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life burned out in them?"
Apolitical intellectuals of my sweet country,
you will not be able to answer.
A vulture of silence
will eat your gut.
Your own misery will pick at your soul.
And you will be mute in your shame.
--Castillo
[From: _American Pictures_ multi-media show pamphlet.]
*****
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all"
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
*****
"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."
Thomas Paine
*****
"I never would believe that Providence has sent a few rich men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."
Richard Rumbold: Statement on scaffold before being hung for rebellion, 1685
*****
"In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary".
Kathleen Norris, poet
*****
According to David Paletz and Robert Entman, the "general impact of the mass media is to socialize people into accepting the legitimacy of their country's political system; ... lead them to acquiesce in America's prevailing social values; ... direct their opinions in ways which do not undermine and often support the domestic and foreign objectives of elites; ... and deter them from active, meaningful participation in politics -- rendering them quiescent before the powerful."(Doris Graber, Ed, Media Power in Politics,1981)
*****
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will."
See also: The Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
*****
"No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, 'You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.' He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right. An analogous way of treating human beings is, however,
considered to be contrary to the truths of our holy religion ... The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice."
Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian, pp. 40, 43
*****
"Unreachable Storm"
"To derail concern over whether you should _support_their_policy_,the PR system focuses attention on whether you _support_our_troops_ -- meaningless words, as empty as the question of whether you support the people of Iowa. "That of course, is just the point: to reduce the population to gibbering idiots, mouthing empty phrases and patriotic slogans, waving ribbons, watching gladiatorial contests and the models designed for them by the PR industry, but, crucially, not thinking or acting.
Noam Chomsky, "Post War Teach-In," _Z_, Apr. '91
*****
"We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount . . . . The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living."
General Omar N. Bradley, Chief of Staff, United States Army, Boston, November 10th, 1948
*****
COMMITMENT
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's
favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
*****
We should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems, and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have the right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.
Albert Einstein, Scientist
*****
"The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service."
Albert Einstein
*****
"I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final say"
-Martin Luther King Jr.
*****
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) over the course of his lifetime went from Socialism - he was editor of Avanti, a socialist newspaper - to the leadership of a new political movement called "fascism" [after "fasces", the symbol of bound sticks used a totem of power in ancient Rome].
Mussolini came to power after the "March on Rome" in 1922, and was appointed Prime Minister by King Victor Emmanuel.
In 1932 Mussolini wrote (with the help of Giovanni Gentile) and entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism.
"Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism -- born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into the position where they have to make the great decision -- the alternative of life or death.... "
" ...The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after... Fascism [is] the complete opposite ofMarxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production.... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society.... "
After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....
...Fascism denies, in democracy, the absur[d] conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of "happiness" and indefinite progress....
...given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority...a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State....
The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim.
Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....
...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....
...For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice: this fact explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime, the character of many forces in the State, and the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy in the twentieth century, and would oppose it by recalling the outworn ideology of the nineteenth century - repudiated wheresoever there has been the courage to undertake great experiments of social and political transformation; for never before has the nation stood more in need of authority, of direction and order. If every age has its own characteristic doctrine, there are a thousand signs which point to Fascism as the characteristic doctrine of our time. For if a doctrine must be a living thing, this is proved by the fact that Fascism has created a living faith; and that this faith is very powerful in the minds of men is demonstrated by those who have suffered and died for it.
Modern History Sourcebook: Benito Mussolini:
What is Fascism, 1932
fas·cism (făsh'ĭz'əm) (noun), often Fascism
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
[Italian fascismo, from fascio, group, from Late Latin fascium, from Latin fascis, bundle.]
fascistic fas·cis'tic (fə-shĭs'tĭk) adj.
WORD HISTORY It is fitting that the name of an authoritarian political movement like Fascism, founded in 1919 by Benito Mussolini, should come from the name of a symbol of authority. The Italian name of the movement, fascismo, is derived from fascio, “bundle, (political) group,” but also refers to the movement's emblem, the fasces, a bundle of rods bound around a projecting axe-head that was carried before an ancient Roman magistrate by an attendant as a symbol of authority and power. The name of Mussolini's group of revolutionaries was soon used for similar nationalistic movements in other countries that sought to gain power through violence and ruthlessness, such as National Socialism.
*****
VIDEO. Its' Time To Examine Our Character as a Nation
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Matrix
Winston Weeks lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sarah Meyer is a researcher living in the UK
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The url to Happy 4th of July is: http://indexresearch.blogspot.com/2007/07/happy-4th-of-july.html
The shorter url is: http://tinyurl.com/2ae3nm
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Tags : Index Research, 4th of July, America, Independence Day, fascism, Martin Luther King, Mussolini, Galbraith,
Labels: 4th of July, America, Galbraith, independence day, Martin Luther King, Mussolini
posted by Sarah Meyer @ 7/04/2007 04:04:00 pm
Naomi Klein 
