The United States and Fascism
By Leslie Reynolds-Benns, PhD
             
The area of human rights is one that is rife with strongly held opinions and powerful emotions – the seeds of psychic clutter which is most often collected unconsciously and left unexamined.  In Africa and some Middle Eastern and Asian communities, female babies, girls and adolescents, undergo a ritual genital mutilation which will guarantee them limited or no sexual pleasure for the rest of their lives.   In some Islamic cultures, woman can still be executed by their family members for shaming the family with sexual indiscretion.  In Thailand, pre-pubescent girls, often street children or those coming from destitute families, are favored as prostitutes.  In Rumania it is both boys and girls that are widely favored and even exported to other European countries.  In India many brides are burned by their husbands or husbands’ families for dowry insufficiencies. 

In New York, men and women are brought into the United States to gain their freedom, only to find themselves working for their saviors in sweat shops to pay for their keep – an amount that could never be repaid with the wages they earn.  Young runaways in the Midwest are picked up, hooked on drugs, and used as prostitutes until they die of exposure, AIDS, or a drug overdose.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on Human Rights, ratified by all members, including the United States, that defines a set of rights that go well beyond those described in our own Bill of Rights. In it’s preamble, it states that:

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

   And in Article Two it declares that:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Recently Islamic countries were accused of Fascism – a despotic and brutal dictatorship that was evidenced not only by Hitler in Germany, but also by Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, and more recently by Suharto in Indonesia and Pinochet in Chile. The United States has always vehemently expressed opposition to the heinous actions perpetrated by Fascist regimes, if not always to the regimes themselves.  Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, claims to have found fourteen defining characteristics among those regimes listed above, as well as by other Fascist regimes.

These commonalities are:

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism 
2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
4. Supremacy of the military
5. Rampant sexism
6. Controlled mass media
7. Obsession with national security
8. Religion and government intertwined
9. Corporate power is protected
10. Labor power is suppressed
11. Disdain for the intellectual and the arts
12. Obsession with crime and punishment
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
14.  Fraudulent elections

Most of us believe that these Fascist tactics would never be allowed in the United States, today.  Others, however, would disagree.  Abu Graib for a start.  Detaining prisoners in countries that have not agreed to the Geneva Convention.  The proposal, made by the current government, to change the rules of interrogation.  Other items on the above list, with a very few exceptions, can be easily agreed with. 

And a highly upsetting one is that the media in the United States are rapidly combining into international conglomerates, about which Nicholas Johnson, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said, “The only Americans with the First Amendment rights today are those who own the media.  Media concentration is a dagger in America’s heart.” 

So look at the list again.  Can you see the possibility that our country could be moving in a Fascist direction, in spite of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights?   This is just a question not an indictment.  You could give long lists of reasons that all of the above are necessary in these uncertain times.  As the journalist Elinor Holcomb wrote in an essay on the FCC, “Our free press, which we’ve taken for granted, has been stolen from us while we were sleeping.”   A clutter induced sleep. 

When we know that something exists but believe that it shouldn’t, we collect psychic clutter.

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