FASCISM – IS IT HERE ALREADY? THE TOWN HALL MEETINGS SUGGEST – “YES”!

The following “excerpts” are from www.truthout.org.  They’re contained within an article by Sara Robinson who elaborates on the thinking of Robert Paxton – quite possibly the world’s leading expert on how countries turn fascist.

Paxton’s definition of fascism is:  “Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.”

Paxton further goes on to enlarge upon the above definition:  “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Now, to apply the above definitions to what is actually occurring in America today at all of these town hall meetings is the following excerpt from the same article in www.truthout.org.

“Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they’re going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country’s most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

We’ve arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we’re slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.”

Any questions?