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On Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:10:34 -0500 David Thorstad <bin...@gvtel.com> wrote: > Israel is a bourgeois democracy, as well > as a colonial settler-state, and its state is founded on racism > (rights for Jews that Arabs are denied). But to call it Nazi, i.e., > fascist, is hardly a defensible Marxist position. It's a little difficult to know what would or wouldn't be a "Marxist" position on this topic. Old Dr Karl died well before Fascism was invented. And of course "Fascism" is a slippery term. But whatever it is, it's not a quantitative assessment of evilness. Doesn't it have more to do with how the evildoers think about what they're doing, and how they justify it? Isn't Fascism, in great part, a state of mind? Fascism as a state of mind makes a sharp distinction between real people and sub-humans. The latter are often compared to animals of various kinds, especially insects and other invertebrates. Fascism enjoys the rhetoric of cleanliness and dirtiness. Fascism loves the idea of race, and the idea that some "races" are better, smarter, cleaner, nobler, more moral, and generally more deserving than others. Fascism likes to deploy the rhetoric of victimhood on behalf of the strong, and depict its victims as brutal oppressors. Fascism worships the strongman, adores violence, and becomes aroused when it hears the phrase, "Im Anfang war die Tat!" (The neo-Hebrew translation of this slogan can be further rendered into English as "facts on the ground.") These are the kind of attitudes and the kind of thinking that I associate with Fascism, and so it's hard to resist the conclusion that Israel has one of the most thoroughly Fascist cultures in the contemporary world. -- Michael Smith m...@smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com "Everyone has his favorite passage from the Theodosian Code." -- M I Finley ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
