"Craven, Jim" wrote: > "Only one thing could have broken our movement: if the adversary had > understood its principle and from the first day had smashed with extreme > brutality the nucleus of our new movement." > Adolf Hitler (Speech to Nuremberg Congress, September 3, 1933) > > "I am afraid of those who proclaim that it can't happen here. . . . Jim, this displaces the debate, which is not over whether "it" can happen here but over the precise nature of the "it" -- which we need to know if we are going to fight against its appearance. Remember, one of the foundations for the joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron is the propensity of generals to be prepared to fight the last war but not the next war. Focusing too much on a carelessly defined "it" can have two separate disastrous consequences: (1) And you should know this better than anyone, the focus on fascism (and especially on fascism just defined as nastiness) can obscure just how horrible and intense repression up to and including genocide can be in a perfectly sound bourgeois democracy. About half or more of what often goes into definitions of "what can happen here" are simple descriptions of what can't happen here because it has always been here. (2) *If* (as really is possible) the fascism we are trying to define was in fact historically limited to a particular conjunction of circumstances, then a focus on it is preparing for the last war and not looking ahead to the next war. There is always a danger of losing democratic rights, of some sort of directly authoritarian and repressive regime. Just as Hitler was really quite different from Bonaparte, so the next round of threats of the same genus may look terribly and unpredictably different specifically. A focus on fascism can lead to blindness to new dangers. Sinclair Lewis's *It Can't Happen Here* was a lousy novel -- in part because Lewis was a lousy novelist but mostly because he defined the "it" that could or couldn't happen as a mere carbon copy, ignoring the probability that a U.S. fascist movement would of course campaign under an anti-fascist banner. My own best guess as to what an American "Hitler" would look like is Jerry Brown of California. It wouldn't be "fascism," it would probably be something worse. "Soft Fascism" made for a good and useful title, to catch people's attention to certain (dangerous) variations within u.s. democracy -- but in the long run it is mistaken to play games with words in this way. Carrol
