August 29 by Jon Faulkner Conservatism vs. Nazi Fascism
Germany, under Hitler, defined fascism with its attendant brutality, and brought its ugly face to the world’s attention. Like the right wing everywhere, it sought to present a contrived rationale for its existence, while trying to hide its crimes against humanity. When the truth won out, all it had left was the horror, the scorn, the disgust that humanity reserves for the monstrous. The smoking remnants of a nation lay broken, and its people were hesitantly recognized as human. Americans should take careful note.
Germany celebrated its heyday over the bones of the dead, and few Germans were aware enough to understand the contradiction of their imagined superiority over the weak, the dispossessed. They still bear the burden of that pain over 60 years later. Even the most casual student of history knows that nations bury themselves over the prospect of change. They realize that Germans saw in Hitler salvation, even though nothing threatened them. Hitler made Germans feel entitled to whatever it was they could claim as their own, and to hell with anyone who stood in their way.
The US, under Bush, would seem to bend to the same, aimless ambitions as Germany at war. Americans keep confirming the same themes the republicans insist are vital. Fiscal responsibility! They rave. As they run up the national debt to unprecedented heights. Freedom! They shout. As bombs are dropped on foreign lands and innocent people are murdered while the Constitution is diminished, subverted, disrespected, and why? Personal responsibility! They cry. As US corporations need another taxpayer funded handout to correct their unregulated greed.
Conservatives dread the light of day. They know that if their true motives are revealed, they’ll be lucky to get away with their lives. If they didn’t have an iron grip on media, they’d be banished, like any monster would, and preferably tarred and feathered on the way out.
The right wing’s history is in acting as corporate shill. Corporate has no motive to understand morality so it must have a defense, an explanation for its lack. It is the right wing’s job to provide it. The care that human beings demonstrate for each other is a threat to the corporate bottom line. Compassion is a concept outside the province and interest of corporate law. The motives that drive a man or women to challenge the impossible are unwelcome, and even threatening, in a plutocratic, corporate society. Art is reduced to advertising, for in the corporate world imagination is not welcome. It doesn’t fall within the boundaries of strict definition. It’s not something that can be held, weighed, and measured so what possible use could it have to the corporate mentality?
Art is the medium, the window, through which humanity may catch a fleeting glimpse of itself. It allows, for an instant, that humanity may take an objective view of where it’s been and where it’s going. It’s a huge threat to the corporate function. That’s why advertisement is the public art. For advertisement celebrates the material, and art attempts to examine the intangible depths of the human soul. It asks that humanity look inward to its true nature - to the motives for its existence. The corporate world can’t recognize humanity, nor the moral tenants that guide it. It can’t concern itself with ordinary care outside of profit. It must restrict itself to its only function - bottom line profit, no matter the expense in human terms. Art, and the human imagination, threatens its existence.
Millions of Americans are ready and anxious to vote for Bush ll, the senile version. Why so many voters would do such a thing is entirely outside the province of rational explanation. Bush, one man, has visited fiscal disaster upon the nation. He has also presented the US as an imperialist nation, willing to invade sovereign states for corporate opportunity, thinly disguised as "freedom." If one such man may decide the fate of so many, then some assessment of their character, honor, and intelligence, seems vital.
Americans failed to hold Bush to any qualifier, and their reward is richly deserved. The ones who saw it coming and had to watch it unfold, like an automobile accident in slow motion, will be dragged down right along with the rest of the herd, which, it seems, is poised again to abandon all caution in their support of McCain, a mere codification of the previous eight years. Even a dumb animal learns that after it’s been burned a few times it doesn’t revisit the source of its injury.
Americans remain largely ignorant of the right wing’s historical role in concentrating wealth among a comparative few. The robber barons of the late 19th century, and the grand opulence of the roaring twenties, were republican high points before Americans shook themselves awake and recoiled in horror at conservative excess. Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, helped Americans understand the forces that would undermine democracy. Certain men, driven by unfettered greed, will casually abandon all consideration of moral allowance in their driven pursuit of more, more, more. This is a form of mental illness.
Conservatism’s chief interest is in enriching themselves at other’s expense. This doesn’t tie to the democratic principle of governance by the majority, where the individual does matter, and the desires and needs of the minority are recognized, and if possible, addressed. Conservatives, on the other hand, deliberately disqualify minorities as drags on economy, or even insurrectionists, who would bring harm to the nation. This scare tactic dovetails nicely into the public’s installed fear of minority groups. Divide and conquer.
As much as they try to disguise their hatred of anyone unlike themselves, they reveal their ambition to destroy. If only they would tell the truth, that ignorance is bliss, but only until the bill comes due. War is their forte’, and peace is only a convenient pause while dividing up the loot before their next target is selected, whether it be foreign or domestic. The world is growing more finite daily, and the corporate struggle is in grabbing as much claim to material as possible.
Those who fight wars do so knowing that sacrifice is their burden, and the resultant world should be a new, and better place. Those dead soldiers, who stormed the beaches against the stuttering German machine guns, summoned their impossible bravery from the realization that without their charge at certain death the world would be a darker place. The American soldiers, fighting in Iraq, are given to understand that their war is unending, that it can't be won.
The aftermath of WWII saw the collective efforts of the victors devoting every resource to bring the humiliated losers, the murderous outlaws of the world’s community, back into the human fold. The victors did this in gratitude to their dead, who kept the wolf, the ever creeping, relentless tide of fascism, away from their doors.
Conservatism would protest against helping the vanquished. Let them eat cake, it would say. No matter its disguise, conservatism always concerns itself with the condemnation of human spirit. It insists on mass conformity to realize its ends. It must punish human transcendence to realize its own, narrow boundaries. Its material infatuation is unshakable, and it has no tolerance for any view but its own. It sees the human struggle in terms of possible advantage for itself. It can’t grasp the salient truth that humanity is its causation, and any diminishment of humanity is its own.
Any disposition of human spirit is an affront to its aim. It demands of humanity precisely what humanity can’t give - its collective surrender to sameness. Conservatism asks that equality be universal, without character or form. Conservatism is a colorless world, without the spontaneity of human inspiration. It doesn’t recognize humanities long history of overcoming impossible odds. It doesn’t welcome humanity with its incredible diversity of thought. It can only understand its own narrow aim, that like mules, human beings must be presented a carrot on a stick. Conservatism is constantly threatened by its black and white perception of the world, while humanity is intuitively unwilling to deny its collective dream of individual determination, that is only restricted by imagination.