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... ion this. If "everything changed" on the foreign policy front in the wake of 9 / 11, then the domestic consequences of 9 / 11 II are bound to have a similarly transformative effect. If our response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was to launch a decades-long war to implant democracy throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, what will we do when the battlefield shifts back to the continental U. S. ?
I shudder to think about it. The legal, ideological, and political elements that go into the making of a genuinely fascist regime in America are already in place: all that is required is some catalytic event, one that needn't even be on the scale of 9 / 11, but still dramatic enough to give real impetus to the creation of a police state in this country. The legal foundation is already to be found in the arguments made by the president's lawyers in asserting their "right" to commit torture and other war crimes, under the "constitutional" aegis of the chief executive's wartime powers. In time of war, the president's lawyers argue, our commander-in-chief has the power to immunize himself and his underlings against legal prosecution: they transcend the law, and are put beyond the judgement of the people's representatives by presidential edict. Theoretically, according to the militarist interpretation of the Constitution, there is no power the president may not assume in wartime, because his decisions are "un reviewable. " On account of military necessity, according to this doctrine, we have to admit the possibility that the Constitution might itself be suspended and martial law declared the minute war touches American soil. It wouldn't take much.
There already exists, in the neocon ized Republican party, a mass-based movement that fervently believes in a strong central State and a foreign policy of perpetual war. The brown shirting of the American conservative movement, as Paul Craig Roberts stinging characterized the ugly transformation of the American Right, is so far along that the president can propose the biggest expansion of federal power and spending since the Great Society with nary a peep from the former enthusiasts of "smaller government. " While the Newt Gingrich Republicans of the early 1990 s were never really libertarians in any but a rhetorical sense Newt himself has always been a hopelessly statist neocon the great difference today is that the neocons are coming out with an openly authoritarian program. David Frum and Richard Perle, in their book An End to Evil, advocate establishing an Orwellian government database and comprehensive electronic surveillance system that not only keeps constant track of the whereabouts of everyone in the country, but also stores a dossier, complete with their religious and political affiliations. If anyone had brought such a proposal to the table in the pre- 9 / 11 era, they would have been laughed out of town and mercilessly ridiculed for the rest of their lives.
But today, the neocon tag-team of Frum and Perle not only gets away with it, but these strutting martinets are lauded by the same "conservatives" who used to rail against "Big Government. " The label "neoconservative" has always been unsatisfactory, in part because the neocon ideology of rampant militarism, super-centralism, and unrestrained statism is necessarily at war with the libertarian aspects of authentic conservatism (the sort of conservatism that, say, Frank S. Meyer or Russell Kirk would find recognizable). Let's start calling things by their right names: these aren't neoconservatives. What we are witnessing is the rebirth of fascism in 21 st century America, a movement motivated by the three principles of classical fascist ideology: 1) The idealization of the State as the embodiment of an all-powerful national will or spirit; 2) The leader principle, which personifies the national will in the holder of a political office (whether democratically elected or otherwise is largely a matter of style), and 3) The doctrine of militarism, which bases an entire legal and economic system on war and preparations for war. Of these three, militarism really is the fountainhead, the first principle and necessary precondition that gives rise to the others.
The militarist openly declares that life is conflict, and that the doctrine of economic and political liberalism which holds that there is no necessary conflict of interests among men is wrong. Peace is cowardice, and the values of prosperity, pleasure, and living life for its own sake are evidence of mindless hedonism and even decadence. Life is not to be lived for its own sake: it must be risked to have meaning, and, if necessary, sacrificed in the name of a "higher" (i. e. , abstract) value.
That "higher" value is not only defined by the State, it is the State: in war, the soldier's life is risked on behalf of government interests, by government personnel, on behalf of expanding government power. These beliefs are at the core of the fascist mentality, but there are other aspects of this question too many to go into here. Since fascism is a form of extreme nationalism, every country has its own unique variety, with idiosyncrasies that could only have arisen in a particular locality. In one country, religion will play a prominent role, in others a more secular strategy is pursued: but the question of imminent danger, and the seizure of power as an "emergency" measure to prevent some larger catastrophe, is a common theme of fascist coups everywhere, and in America it is playing out no differently. While Pinochet pointed to the imminent danger of a Communist revolution as did Hitler the neo-fascists of our time and place cite the omnipresent threat of a terrorist attack in the U. S.
This is a permanent rationale for an ever escalating series of draconian measures fated to go far beyond the "PATRIOT Act" or anything yet imagined. Already the intellectual and political ground is being prepared for censorship. The conservative campaign to discredit the "mainstream" media, and challenge its status as a watchdog over government actions, could easily go in an unfortunate direction if Bin Laden succeeds in his vow to take the fight to American shores. Well, since they " re lying, anyway, why not shut them down? After all, this is a "national emergency, " and "they " re not antiwar, they " re on the other side. " The neoconservative movement represents the quintessence of fascism, as expressed by some of its intellectual spokesmen, such as Christopher Hitchens, who infamously hailed the Afghan war as having succeeded in "bombing a country back out of the Stone Age. " This belief in the purifying power of violence its magical, transformative quality is the real emotional axis of evil that motivates the War Party. This is especially true when it comes to those thuggish ex-leftists of Hitchens' ilk who found shelter in the neoconservatives' many mansions when the roof fell in on their old Marxist digs.
Neocon ideologue Stephen Schwartz defends a regime notorious for torturing dissidents, shutting out all political opposition, and arresting thousands on account of their political and religious convictions in Uzbekistan. How far are such people from rationalizing the same sort of regime in the U. S. ? At least one prominent neocon has made the case for censorship, in the name of maintaining "morality" but now, it seems to me, the "national security" rationalization will do just as well, if not better. McConnell is right that we are not yet in the grip of a fully developed fascist system, and the conservative movement is far from thoroughly neocon ized. But we are a single terrorist incident away from all that: a bomb placed in a mall or on the Golden Gate Bridge, or a biological attack of some kind, could sweep away the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and two centuries of legal, political, and cultural traditions all of it wiped out in a single instant, by means of a single act that would tip the balance and push us into the abyss of post-Constitutional history.
The trap is readied, baited, and waiting to be sprung. Whether the American people will fall into it when the time comes: that is the nightmare that haunts the dreams of patriots.
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Research essay sample on Neocon Ized Imminent Danger War
