Michael Ledeen discusses how Fascism is all around us:
It's hard to see fascism plain, because many of its essential features are obscured by its most infamous variation: German National Socialism. Hardly anybody knows that fascism had already been in power in Italy for more than a decade when Hitler seized Germany, and fewer still are aware that, in the late Twenties and early Thirties, there were so many fascist movements — from Latin America to Western, Central and Eastern Europe, from Great Britain to the Middle East — that Mussolini could realistically dream of organizing a fascist "international." Most of the fascist leaders who looked to Rome for inspiration were not racists, and did not share the Nazis' vision of a great empire ruled by a single führer. They were intensely nationalistic, and believed that each national unit would develop its own unique form of fascism, which they saw as a "third way" between capitalism and bolshevism, both of which they despised.He goes on to explain the fascist nature of fundamentalist Islam. Indeed, their facsism is similar to Nazism in that it sets up a strawman as villain, and uses the same strawman. The Jews. Fascists don't see political opponents as the loyal opposition, but as evil that must be stamped out. Thus, no relevant opposition in the middle east to the fascists practices of their leaders.
And keep your ears open, you'll see similar vilification of political opponents in the United States. Wild claims of conspiracy to kill the weak, the old and the poor. "I think [Republicans'] principal motivation [in purposefully running up the deficit] is to undo the pillars of the New Deal, particularly Medicare and Social Security, by making the budget deficit so big that those programs can't be sustained," said Howard Dean. He also "proposed a two-year, $100 billion "Fund to Restore America" that he said would add more than 1 million jobs." I'm not saying he's a fascist (although the left says Bush is), but his government jobs program has precedent.
