Julio:
Without being too post-modern, would you be willing to entertain the (remote) possibility that some people are using the term "fascism" in a different sense than yours?
Sure, I use the term in a different way from classical Marxism myself from time to time. Like the fascist NY Yankees or the fascist dog in the apartment upstairs that barks late at night.
Moreover, under the hypothesis that the proletariat is a global class, would you be willing to accept (temporarily, as a mere exercise in human communication) that some recent events in the globe qualify as *somewhat* revolutionary in the proletarian -- or at least in the anti-imperialist -- sense (e.g. Venezuela), and that Bush's approach to asserting the U.S. imperial interests in the world may be *somewhat* analogous to the methods used by Nazis and fascists in the 1930s?
Not really. Great Britain was certainly not fascist when it was involved in things like this. It was just acting in the way that colonial powers do. Justice for A Genocide, in Book Form By John Dolan, The eXile Posted on September 30, 2006, Printed on October 25, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/42219/ Reviewed: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkin, (Henry Holt and Co, 2006) One of the great mysteries of the 20th century was the way Britain got away with pillaging nearly every country on the planet without suffering any retribution. I've spent a long, bitter time brooding over this experimental proof that there's no such thing as karma. Among the reasons I've found for this failure to prosecute are the reluctance of the raped to report their sufferings, the stupidity and credulity of American scholars vis-a-vis their Oxbridge colleagues, and the charmed life that seems to reward those individuals and nations lucky enough to lack any vestige of conscience. But there are simpler reasons, bravely revealed in Caroline Elkins's account of the slaughter of some 300,000 ethnic Kikuyu of Kenya, the torture of hundreds of thousands more, and the internment of the entire Kikuyu population, in mid-20th-century Kenya. As Elkins reveals, the Brits simply destroyed every record of the massacres they could find, and -- unlike the French, Germans or other conscience-harried colonials -- kept the settlers' oath of Omerta, never revealing what they did to the "Kukes" to anyone except other vets whose anecdotes were as bloody and full of blame as theirs. The difference between the British Empire and other fascist empires is not that these guys were nicer. Nobody who reads this book could continue to believe that, if they were fool enough to believe it beforehand. The difference is that the Brits were good at it, and had no conscience to trouble them. Thanks to that careful incineration of records and highly adaptive national sociopathic disorder, "...there would be no soul-searching or public accounting [in Britain] for the crimes perpetrated against the hundreds of thousands of men and women in Kenya." (clip)
