I've been noticing something over the past couple months. Every intellectual I pay attention to is starting to say that the United States is fucked. They say that the economic meltdown, combined with general apathy and self-delusion, drives us closer to transforming into something like 20th century fascism. We may collapse entirely. One of them even expressed fears of civil war. Almost all of them are convinced that another economic collapse is inevitable. I've actually been developing many of these same fears myself recently, but I didn't know how to research them and I was convinced I was probably wrong, so I don't think I've written a lot about it. BUT I HAVE ARGUMENTUM AD VERECUNDIAM NOW FUCKERS.
Okay so what the fuck is going on? I don't really know how to start this, so I guess I'll just jump right in. Chomsky said last year that he has "never seen anything like this."
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority [which two-thirds of Fox News viewers already believe]. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
Chris Hedges writes in Empire of Illusion:
We have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been dismantled by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has spent, lent, or guaranteed $12.8 trillion toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our part of the grand imperial project on credit. We are supposed to bring back the illusion of wealth created by the bubble economy. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state's preparations to crush potential unrest, and you get a glimpse of the future.
And another:
Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us.
Slavoj Žižek also believes in the coming economic collapse. Although a Marxist, he's still realistic about it. He believes the current crisis, and any potential future crisis branching off of it, will only serve to make capitalism "leaner and meaner in the long term." But even he consents that we're probably going down eventually:
"I'm not cheap apocalyptic guy, I'm not saying, 2012, there will be a catastrophe. Let's be patient, no reason to lose nerves. Let's just be aware that we are dealing with a series of very serious problems, which, if we just leave the existing society to develop following its inherent tendencies, we'll eventually lead to some kind of zero level catastrophic point."
A documentary based on Naomi Wolf's book The End of America makes connections to the current state of America and the rise of fascism. It's up on youtube.
I have this friend, she and I often talk about news events together. And we would talk about the Bush administration, things that were happening, and she kept saying, "They did this in Germany. They did this in Germany." And at first, really, I have to tell you I thought this was crazy talk, you know, so extreme and so out there, right, and I really dismissed it. And she didn't drop it, she kept saying "They did this in Germany." Finally, she sat me down and she put a stack of books in front of me, and she pretty much said, "Read." And I started to read. And as I read, literally, my hair stood on end, because soundbites, and images, and phrases were leaping off the pages, and were current in the discourse around us. Little echoes, from things like "homeland," the Department of Homeland Security used to be called Domestic Security. Homeland, heimat, is a word that became current in National Socialist discourse in about 1931-32. The National Socialists pioneered the practice of unloading the war dead off of trains in the darkness of night, so people wouldn't know the extent of the war dead, the media couldn't take pictures. This administration has also unloaded the war dead from Iraq off the planes in the middle of the night, a departure from practice. . . . And so, what become so clear to me from my reading, Germany in those years wouldn't have looked so different from today. I mean, we tend to think, oh Nazi Germany, you know, it's like a Leni Riefenstahl film. But in fact, Germany in 1931-32 had gay rights organizations, human rights organizations, and feminist organizations. It had celebrities. It had all kinds of newspapers, all kinda of debate, all kinds of dissent. It was a modern state.
[...]
I didn't stop with Germany, I started to read about Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy. East Germany in the 50s. Czechoslovakia in the 60s. Pinochet's coup in Chile in '73. And the Chinese crackdown on the democracy protesters at the end of the 80s. The same things occur again and again and again: little subversions of people's rights, little constitutional changes.
And then there's Matt Taibbi. He read this brilliant article by a former GOP insider who's trying to warn us about how fucking insane the GOP has gotten, and suggests that these new Republican tactics may very well drive the country into another civil war.
In particular, the insane decision to turn the once-routine procedure of raising the debt ceiling (Lofgren notes it was done 87 times since WWII) into a political crisis revealed that the GOP party mainstream had sunk to the level of terrorism – holding our economic system hostage in exchange for political concessions.
This was a form of violence, and a serious escalation even from the days of George W. Bush, when the party was mostly limited in its willingness to use human beings as pawns in homicidal ploys for political power. Bush and Rove were willing to sacrifice Iraqi lives, and the lives of American servicemen, for oil and votes. But this current crew of Republicans shook canisters of kerosene over the entire American population and threatened to light a match if it didn't get what it wanted.
[...]
But for the new GOP, compromise of any kind defeats their central purpose, which is political totale krieg. This party's entire reason for being is conflict and aggression. There is no underlying patriotic instinct to find middle ground with the rest of us, because the party doesn't have a vision for society that includes anyone outside the tent.
I've always been queasy about piling on against the Republicans because it's intellectually too easy; I also worry a lot that the habit pundits have of choosing sides and simply beating on the other party contributes to the extremist tone of the culture war.
But the time is coming when we are all going to be forced to literally take sides in a political conflict far more serious and extreme than we're used to imagining. The situation is such a tinderbox now that all it will take is some prominent politician to openly acknowledge the fact of a cultural/civil war for the real craziness to begin.
[...]
Most people aren't thinking about this because we're so accustomed to thinking of America as a stable, conservative place where politics is not a life-or-death affair but more something that people like to argue about over dinner, as entertainment almost. But it's headed in another, more twisted direction. I'm beginning to wonder if this election season is going to be one none of us ever forget – a 1968 on crack. Anyway, I hope I'm wrong, and I hope everyone reads this Lofgren piece, which is a rare piece of insider insight.
Oh, is that ridiculous? That's too much, you say? How about after reading about the report out this morning that reveals the Obama administration feared a god damn military coup if they tried to prosecute war crimes? THIS. FUCKING. HAPPENED.
This shit isn't right. I feel like something is going to happen. I don't know if this is all going to lead to a collapse or a new birth of fascism or whatever. I hope these people are overreacting. I don't know. But this atmosphere is really scaring me. And I'm seriously considering buying a gun. Sometimes I think about all this and I just want to fucking scream. We know what the solutions are, and yet we do the exact opposite because the fucking bastards who own the country demand it. I'd go so far as to say a socialist economy would probably get rid of most of these problems altogether, but I'm so desperate at this point that I'm willing to give up and settle for good old fashion Keynesian theory. I don't care if that'd have us start the whole process all over again, just as long as we can get fucking stabilized. And what's most frustrating of all is that the world's smartest people are all watching this happen, warning us, and are yet still powerless. I'm reminded of a quote from 19th century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:
"It happened in a theatre that the coulisses caught fire. The Clown was sent to inform the public. It took this as a joke and applauded; he repeated; they jubilated even more. Thus I think that the World will perish under general jubilation from witty heads believing that it is a witticism."
I'm a little scared. But I'm also hopeful. Listen. If this happens -- which in all likelihood, it won't -- we can take advantage of this. If there's ever an opportunity to kick those bourgeoisie fucks out of power so we can run our own god damn country, then we need to take it. Maybe we can use this, and turn it into our own little "arab spring." The rest of the world is already two steps ahead of us, maybe we just need a little jolt. And OccupyWallStreet is next Saturday, eh guys? Maybe that will spiral. But on a final note, let's never, ever, ever forget what Leon Trotsky had to say about what we're fighting against:
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