[UC] Moment for historical analysis, Ukraine

[Glenn moyer]

The illegal U.S. backed fascist putsch in Ukraine provides a moment for Americans to understand the empire in a historical context.  Those who get their information from corporate media are so deceived that they certainly believe the absurdity coming from our imperious leaders.  For the few sane folks out there, here is a short essay adapted from a book by Russ Bellant.

The forces of domination obfuscate and rewrite historical movements and ideologies like fascism; cloaking the historical movements with other new terms like American exceptionalism and revitalization.  They try to hide historical connections by equating, for example, a discussion of historical fascism with the taboo subject of Nazism.  They then attempt to silence all inquiry and discussion with the usual fallacious tactics, such as ad hominem.  We've seen this tactic on the list and for decades.

This book and short article was published in 1991, long before 9/11/2001.  I quoted some of the most important features for us to begin to connect the historical movement since WW1 to current reality.

www.publiceye.org/fascist/berlet_fascism.html

"...Fascists particularly loathed the social theories of the French Revolution and its slogan: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."

• Liberty from oppressive government intervention in the daily lives of its citizens, from illicit searches and seizures, from enforced religious values, from intimidation and arrest for dissenters; and liberty to cast a vote in a system in which the ; majority ruled but the minority retained certain inalienable rights.
• Equality in the sense of civic equality, egalitarianism, the notion that while people differ, they all should stand equal in the eyes of the law.
• Fraternity in the sense of the brotherhood of mankind. That all women and men, the old and the young, the infirm and the healthy, the rich and the poor, share a spark of humanity that must be cherished on a level above that of the law, and that binds us all together in a manner that continuously re-affirms and celebrates life.

This is what fascism as an ideology was reacting against--and its support came primarily from desperate people anxious and angry over their perception that their social and economic position was sinking and frustrated with the constant risk of chaos, uncertainty and inefficiency implicit in a modern democracy based on these principles. Fascism is the antithesis of democracy..."

Notice the parallels between post WW1 and today.   Then remember the beginning of our gentrification in the following context.  Remember, how the neighbors in Clark Park were portrayed as "prostitutes, gangs, and drug dealers" who frightened "the good people with children."

"... That anger frequently found its outlet in an ideology that asserted not just the importance of the nation, but its unquestionable primacy and central predestined role in history.

In identifying "goodness" and "superiority" with "us," there was a tendency to identify "evil" with "them." This process involves scapegoating and dehumanization. It was then an easy step to blame all societal problems on "them," and presuppose a conspiracy of these evildoers which had emasculated and humiliated the idealized core group of the nation. To solve society's problems one need only unmask the conspirators and eliminate them..."

"Fascism and Nazism as ideologies involve, to varying degrees, some of the following hallmarks:

• Nationalism and super-patriotism with a sense of historic mission.
• Aggressive militarism even to the extent of glorifying war as good for the national or individual spirit.
• Use of violence or threats of violence to impose views on others (fascism and Nazism both employed street violence and state violence at different moments in their development).
• Authoritarian reliance on a leader or elite not constitutionally responsible to an electorate.
• Cult of personality around a charismatic leader.
• Reaction against the values of Modernism, usually with emotional attacks against both liberalism and communism.
• Exhortations for the homogeneous masses of common folk (Volkish in German, Populist in the U.S.) to join voluntarily in a heroic mission--often metaphysical and romanticized in character.
• Dehumanization and scapegoating of the enemy--seeing the enemy as an inferior or subhuman force, perhaps involved in a conspiracy that justifies eradicating them.
• The self image of being a superior form of social organization beyond socialism, capitalism and democracy.
• Elements of national socialist ideological roots, for example, ostensible support for the industrial working class or farmers; but ultimately, the forging of an alliance with an elite sector of society.
• Abandonment of any consistent ideology in a drive for state power."

Rewriting history; propaganda; and our current reality in Venezuela, Ukraine, Columbia, etc., etc.,etc., etc.

"...But if so much is already known of this period, why does journalist and historian George Seldes call the history of Europe between roughly 1920 and 1950 a "press forgery"? Because most people are completely unfamiliar with this material, and because so much of the popular historical record either ignores or contradicts the facts of European nationalism, Nazi collaborationism, and our government's reliance on these enemies of democracy to further our Cold War foreign policy objectives.

This widely-accepted, albeit misleading, historical record has been shaped by filtered media reports and self-serving academic revisionism rooted in an ideological preference for those European nationalist forces which opposed socialism and communism. Since sectors of those nationalist anti-communist forces allied themselves with political fascism, but later became our allies against communism, apologiafor collaborationists became the rule, not the exception.

Soon, as war memories dimmed and newspaper accounts of collaboration faded, the fascists and their allies re-emerged cloaked in a new mantle of respectability. Portrayed as anti-communist freedom fighters, their backgrounds blurred by time and artful circumlocution, they stepped forward to continue their political organizing with goals unchanged and slogans slightly repackaged to suit domestic sensibilities..."

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