Darvish Khan Writes

American fascism is its very own brand. It is distinct from the European fascism of the 1930’s and ’40’s. The reluctance to call it for what it is lies in the reluctance to clearly understand American history and to account for what has happened, especially since the end of the last great war- and most especially in the last twenty plus years.

In classic fascism the jingoistic state, in the person of a charismatic demagogue, assumes control of the military and economy. The state through the agency of a talented demagogue corrupts the political process by enlisting the military, police, industry and church to resurrect past greatness.

The appeal in fascism lies in a demoralized populace due to economic despair; incompetent and ineffectual politics; the collapse of authentic religiosity; and exceptional collective tension and anxiety which contrives a scapegoat. Fascism draws upon the irrational.

The unusual thing about American fascism is that the corporate sector on the basis of lobbying has corrupted electoral politics and assumed control of government. This represents an inversion of European fascism.  This is fascism by stealth. It did not require a demagogue to effect; it did not require, initially, a demoralized public to succeed and it did not require initially the explicit compliance of the church, police or military. This is the most important point to understand.

American fascism has been a long time in the making. All fascism requires nationalism, a call to patriotism in the service of some past ideal, and against some enemy of that ideal. This has always been in fact the American genius: to always have an enemy that opposes its expansion and success as a (thinly disguised) racist enterprise drawing upon exalted humanist democratic rhetoric as the basis for its existence.

America’s very founding depended on the calculated violence of settler colonialism. (Israel shares this distinction.) Genocide and slavery are at the very root of American culture. Jamestown, the first permanent British colony in the Americas, was in fact a corporation chartered to return a profit on the basis of exploitation; this requirement quickly adopted slavery as the most expedient way to provide the labor that the English were not themselves willing to provide. (The Native American proved comparatively useless in this regard. They had nothing but contempt for capitalism).

But history is always written by the victors, and the real history of genocide and slavery has been whitewashed to create the fantasy of an idealized past that serves as the basis, in our time,  for the development of fascism. The American obligatory homage to its past as a humanist, democratic and egalitarian striving for political freedom is total bullshit but which Americans generally look back upon as the gospel truth.  This is who we want to think we are.

Americans have accepted the legacy of Jamestown as an entirely appropriate guide to an exalted future of democratic capitalism: Wall Street is the apotheosis of Jamestown. The slavery of Blacks has been replaced by the slavery of the working class.

What this means is that the basic elements of European fascism have been so well socialized here in America that they are not commonly identified as such. The telltale qualities of fascism such as hyper-masculinity, the propensity for violence, the fervent belief in an exalted mythic past that that must be restored, the hatred of corrupting foreigners, an ardent espousal of martial virtue in both police and military, the cult of patriotism as the defining American virtue, and the enshrining of materialistic values as the sign of a beneficent God are permanently entrenched in the American psyche.

The end of the 2nd WW, the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 all served to confirm the most exalted and exceptional destiny of America to rule the world by projecting the myth of democracy and egalitarianism. The potent legacy of America’s racism and exploitation was unleashed upon the world with the rationalization that it is our destiny to ennoble man with a supreme militarized and implicitly religious (pure) corporate based nationalism.

Or, in other words, fascism, American style.

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The problem with our present Age is that it has lost all bearings. Our Machine Age, aka the fag end of the Kali Yuga, is so infatuated with the idea of Progress that it has obliterated all reference to what we can call primordial integrity.

The four Ages in both Greek and Indian cosmological thought reference a progressive degradation of spiritual possibility. The Golden Age degrades into the Silver, then the Bronze and finally the Iron Age. We are now in the late Iron Age, and have no cogent  memory of the previous Ages. It’s as if they never existed. In fact, according to the perverted logic of the Iron Age, things have never been better. The late Iron Age or the Machine Age has defined itself as the Age of Progress, which is the absolute inversion of  spiritual fact.

People commonly think that the present age represents the climax of development over many thousands of years. This has everything to do with the exaltation of technology, which represents power. People commonly think that power represents development. People commonly think that the telephone, for example, represents an advancement over previous means of communication.  Early man, it is stated, could only grunt his thoughts- let alone articulate them. But modern man can not only articulate his thoughts, but he can transmit them over vast distances via the power of technology. Modern man is thus an obviously superior being.

This framing of the evolution of man as a progressive development over time has been completely seductive. Practically everyone believes it. Only crazy people believe that the past represents anything other than an anticipation of our present development: man has never been so smart and never so capable as he is today.

Science has become the religion of the Machine Age. Science is defined as the continuously advanced investigation of the universe; we know more and more over time about who and what we are. But in fact, we know less and less. Human understanding develops a more and more abstracted knowledge of the universe  which is illustrated by the advancing power of technology. The power of technology comes to define an increasingly impoverished knowledge of man as spirit.

We live in a time in which the advancement of analytical thought as illustrated in science and technology defines the supreme development of man. This very development of science and technology which defines Progress is of course destroying the planet. Our exalted God, the idol of Progress, is strangulating us. But none can believe that this is really happening. Most people believe we will invent a solution to outwit impending catastrophe. Most people believe we are way too smart to commit global ecocide and suicide. Most people believe that Progress will not fail us.

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There comes a point of no return in the development of zeitgeist. The US has long since devolved into corporate state fascism. Eisenhower in 1961 warned the nation of this eventuality; Dr. MLK Jr. in 1967 prophesized that the nation would lose its soul if it did not abdicate greed, racism and militarism as represented in the War Against Vietnam. Many others have vigorously protested the same, but none so dramatically and eloquently as the greatest American, Dr. King.

Dr. King was a real Christian, a genuine activist, and a stellar prophet of the American tragedy. He accurately grokked the diabolical forces animating America. His vision of what was to come had nothing to do with identity politics or some ridiculous and pathetic bid for diversity. He did not speak merely as a Black seeking improved opportunity to cash in on corporatism and militarism: he rejected the entire American project for economic and political supremacy as racism. He saw it exactly for what it was.

The last twenty years represent a free fall into the Pit of virulent racism, greed and carnage. The ME and Islam have been configured as the devil to justify the uncontrollable greed and anger that animates corporate America and the deep state it has engendered. The corporation has no soul. E. F. Schumacher defined Wall Street as the “socialization of greed”; this was entirely prescient as he passed away many decades before the advent of the corporate sponsored  “Terror Wars”. What we now witness is many, many times more catastrophic in its implications than even the War Against Vietnam.

We have plunged off the cliff of polite viciousness into raging unapologetic carnage. We don’t need to explain anything. We don’t need to apologize  for anything. We are absolved of all crimes before they are committed. We are the most exceptional mother fuckers of all time who don’t answer to anyone; except, that is, the Zionist lobbies.

Israel is the tail that wags the rabid American dog. There is no nation that exerts anything like the influence of Israel on US politics. The pro Israel lobbies have an unparalleled influence in Washington. They are like Moses delivering the Tablets from on high. Their word is sacrosanct. Now, this would be a racist trope were it not true; but it is true, and every single member of Congress knows it is true.

The American free fall into fascism is effected, more than any other reason, by the endorsement of Zionism. It is the supreme triumph of identity politics over American democracy. It is the supreme triumph of Orwellian kitsch to have America believe and support, as an eternal pledge, the triumph of religious and racial absolutism.

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