Some things in life, my friends, are unpredictable. The weather. True love. The stock market. But some things are entirely, utterly, and almost boringly predictable, too. And strangely, those aren’t small things. Sometimes, they’re big things. One of the most predictable things of all is fascism, the classical sequence of a proto-fascist collapse.
Don’t believe me? Let’s think about. It goes something like this: economic stagnation, a falling middle class, a rising demagogue, who scapegoats and demonizes minorities, blaming the troubles of the many on the few and the different. Soon enough, something like this follows: paramilitaries are formed, parallel judiciaries, law enforcement, and citizenship are created, camps rise, apartheid laws begin, minorities are expropriated of savings, homes, and assets (which are redistributed to the pure of blood, because, remember, the economy is stagnant), forced exile, ghettoization, enslavement, and finally, extermination. The lying press! Enemies of the people! Vermin! Animals! We know how this goes, don’t we?
Where would you saw we are in that sequence of […]
There’s an old familiar saw, attributed to Russia, but, it could be any country, really. Out in a boat and trouble strikes? “Pray to God but row for shore.” The trouble today is that people are doing neither. No prayin’ and no rowin’. Sad as we see that homo stupidio is part of the 6th mass extinction. Apparently we are just here to experience and indeed we shall, as Gaia exacts her revenge against all other life.
The separation of one person from another and the choice to favor self-serving behaviors over those that maximize utility for the culture as a whole, must always lead to fear, domination, violence and all manner of destructive -isms. Given that the basis of the action of most people is self-interest and that is integral to our system of law and mores, our society seems perfectly understandable. How else could it be conscionable that three Americans can own as much as 160,000,000 Americans combined? In the case of climate change it doesn’t become an issue until the individual is affected. That our media has actually been an enemy of the people in service to a tiny owner class for generations is hardly of interest to our news pundits self-serving ambitions. Nor was it to Hearst or Pulitzer.
The mid-range estimate is that 847,000 Americans die each year, one every 36 seconds, as a result of social factors related to poverty. That is not a new phenomena…looks to me like we have effectively been fascists for a very long time.