Chris Hedges is Useless

Seriously.  I read American Fascists a couple years ago and appreciated it.  But over the last year or so everything I've read of his has made me want to pound my head against the wall.  Or, maybe, his.

Especially this brilliantly insightful think piece.

It's called "Is America 'Yearning for Fascism?'"  Basically, what he's arguing is that we're at the early stages of Germany's handing over of power to Hitler.  We have a massive class of increasingly hopeless unemployed who feel powerless and are ready to take to the streets en masse.  On this I cannot help but agree.

But who is to blame for this, according to Hedges?  The Democrats.  Because they're not liberal enough and, therefore, um...profit?

The argument basically boils down to this: Democrats aren't doing enough to help people.  They're backed by a limp-wristed and useless liberal intellectual elite that just doesn't understand the problems facing real Americans.  The bailout wasn't enough.  Health care reform as we (kind of) got it isn't enough.  We need to get Americans back to work and back on the path to prosperity.  Meanwhile, the left has been focusing on all the wrong things, like racism and idiotic rhetoric.

Now, the fantastic thing about this is that Hedges isn't wrong.  I agree with him that the Democrats have been focused on the wrong things and that sending taxpayer money to banks that fucked the system over while forcing people who couldn't afford buy in to the health system without actually doing anything to fix the larger ills of that system is not the way to do things.  And, when it gets right down to it, the Democrats are about as liberal these days as President Roosevelt.  Not Franklin, mind you.  Teddy.

In this the Tea Partiers and the actual Progressives have common cause.  Neither side is particularly happy with the Democrats.  But the left doesn't like that the Democrats are far too rightward leaning and too willing to cave to the demands of the right.

But that's why you can't treat the Democrats as if they have been operating in a vacuum.  A large number of those same people who could probably stand a little government assistance to step back from the abyss of imminent poverty are the same ones who hold up signs claiming Barack Obama is simultaneously worse than Stalin and Hitler.  The ones who showed up at the Town Hall Meetings to scream about IslamoSocialistFascists destroying their democracy fail to see that the first effective step the Nazis took was to stop the proper functioning of their elected government.

The folks running off to the wilderness to stock up on ammo and plan for the revolution aren't doing it because they're worried the Democrats and the pointy-headed liberal intellectual elites aren't doing enough to help them.  They're doing it because they believe that the tiny steps that have been taken to help are an imminent sign of the destruction of America as they know it.  But they're not going to start the revolution shouting, "Health care for all!"  They're going to take to the streets looking for "socialists" to put up against the wall.

So we're left with the all-important question: who profits from this?  Certainly not Democrats or the liberal elite.  It's the right wing power brokers.  It's the pundits, talking heads, and would-be Presidents who keep their names and voices in the media every day on our new, wearisome four-year Presidential campaign trail.

The terrifying thing about nascent American fascism, though, is this: there is no American Hitler.  Now, I suppose it's strange to call the lack of a Hitler a good thing, but consider the implications.

Hitler tapped in to an underlying vein of discontent in the Wiemar Republic.  He laid down the principles for the National Socialists and built his movement from a centralized plan.  Nazism had principles, such as they were, before it had power.

America's so-called "yearning for fascism" wasn't built by one, but by many.  It has no central figure, no central theme, no unifying concept.  Arguing against the proto-fascist movement in America is fighting a mist.  It's principles were laid down by the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys in a quest for ratings or the Sarah Palins in an attempt to secure future votes.  But in any politic built on fear the one thing that keeps the followers following must be constantly ratcheted up or the crowds will depart.  In doing so the only thing that can be created is a monster.  Without an American Hitler there is no one to control the monster.

We're already seeing the results of this de-centralization of fascism.  There were the Hutaree raids yesterday, but that's just one militia among hundreds with one single plan to kick off a war no one else knew they were fighting that was frightfully simple in its scope and relative ease of execution.

We lack an American Hitler.  But in his place we have a hundreds of potential Hutarees, we have thousands of potential Timothy McVeighs.  Not one of those groups can possibly take over America in its name.  But what they can all do together is worse: they can force it in to anarchy.

If that happens it won't be Barack Obama's fault.  But I'm pretty sure that will be left to tomorrow's historians to determine.

Who Watches the Doom Bunker?

A friend of mine let me in on an interesting little tidbit today. Seems it's really hard to buy 9MM, .40, .45, and .223 centerfire these days. Apparently there are people out there who are buying it wholesale. This goes right along with a clip I saw the other day of one of the top douchebags in the NRA crowing about how the economy is in the tank but gun sales have never been better. "Yeah," I wanted to yell at him, "Because you've got everybody scared shitless that the government's going to come take their rights." It's irresponsible and more than a little disturbing. Now, before I go any deeper in to this, let me put this out front: I really don't care either way about guns. I don't own any guns and don't feel the need to own them. But I'm not about to take away anybody else's guns. And, in general, I'll go along with the argument that making more guns illegal doesn't actually take most of the problem guns off the street. Moreover, as long as there are dangerous people who own guns, they shouldn't be allowed to monopolize the concept. So with that disclaimer out of the way, the I'd love to know what the hell is going on in the heads of the people stockpiling guns and ammo for the Obamageddon. Actually, sadly, I'm pretty sure I know. See, there are certain people out there who are utterly convinced the world as we know it will soon be over and the only force standing between them and the encroaching forces of evil These folks are basically the Watchmen. They can't understand exactly why it is that the rest of the world is afraid of them. I don't mean afraid in the sense of crossing to the other side of the street. I mean afraid in the wild, unpredictable beast sort of way. They're waiting expectantly for the revolution. And the fun thing about the revolution is that if it doesn't come, some grow impatient. Some take it upon themselves to create the right moment. The hope of revolution is Millennial. This is why it's a dangerous hope and something to be feared. I'll borrow a thought from Gershom Gorenberg once more. It's a thought from another, far more famous Millennial hope.

And the dissonance between hope and reality is what creates the greatest risks in Jerusalem. The day after the last is most dangerous.

When is the last day? Do we really know? One of the things we know about Millennial hope is that it's easy to manipulate. Jack Van Impe hasn't been on TV since before TV was invented for no reason, after all. We're less than two months in to the Obama Administration and the Obamageddon is imminent in some peoples' minds. And, yes, the Obamageddon is hope for the self-appointed watchmen of our freedom. Much like the Premillennial Dispensationalists rely on a tin-eared, eisegetical* interpretation of the Bible, the preachers of the Obamaspiracy rely on a history illiterate interpretation of the past. It's the only way to make Obama in to everyone's favorite bogeyman. See, we're all afraid of Hitler, but we don't understand why. And it's precisely that lack of understanding that the demagogues take advantage. "Obama will take away your guns!" the cried. And this time the gun owners believed like they've never believed before. This isn't something that happened in isolation, either. There's a strong overlap between the wing of the Republican Party the Sarah Palin pick pandered to, gun people, social conservatives, fundamentalists, and Intelligent Design proponents. One of the things all these groups have in common is that they've been "losing" for the last few decades. People have sex. A lot. Gay people have sex and it's completely legal. We're teaching evolution in the schools as if it's actually the way the world works. "Socialist" concepts like nationalized health care are being discussed seriously and with urgency. Back in the middle of his campaign, Obama was speaking to a group in California and he said something to the general effect that there were a lot of people in the heartland who had lost jobs and hope and clung to guns and superstition out of desperation. Sarah Palin tried to hit Obama for this several months later when the Republican rallies were getting scarier and scarier. Most of the country shrugged and said, "Yeah, so?" The thing is, I suspect that somewhere between half and two-thirds of the country heard Obama's words, shrugged, and said, "Yeah, sounds about right." By the time Palin joined the race I strongly suspect the Republicans had seen the writing on the wall. They may have figured there was a slim chance she could help them pull victory from the jaws of defeat, but I think they were already playing a longer game by then. I like to believe they were simply trying to get the base riled up and hope to hold it in that state through 2010 and in to 2012. I like to believe they didn't see the Millennial hope of the Revolution. But to be perfectly honest, I just don't know. It's almost impossible for me to believe that anyone can honestly compare Obama to Hitler. And it's almost impossible for me to believe that anybody sees the stockpiling of arms and ammo as an innocent activity. It doesn't matter that the Hitler comparison completely and totally doesn't work, either. See, the entire argument is predicated on the fact that one of the first things the Nazis did was take guns out of the hands of the people. The argument follows that Obama and Biden are strongly anti-gun, so they'll take everyone's guns away. Then, with the Second Amendment relegated to the dust bin of history, they'll send the stormtroopers in and there won't be any well-armed patriots to stop them. It doesn't matter that anyone who genuinely believes this scenario lives in an absurd dream world, either. First, let's say for the sake of the argument that Obama lies awake at night trying to figure out how to take everyone's guns away. He has so far behaved in a way that indicates he respects the law at least as much as his predecessor did (honestly, he's done some stuff that doesn't get reported too much that's uncomfortably in line with Bush the Younger. But even Bush the Younger wasn't actually anywhere close to Hitler. He was more of an inept Nixon, really. But that's a story for another day). More importantly, his journey to the White House was completely and totally legal. We cannot say this about Hitler. See, Adolph had plans. When the Nazis first got seats in the Reichstag they disrupted the meetings. Apparently the Germans loved this political theater and their influence grew. Eventually they got powerful enough that they could run the house. Hindenburg [danke, bluefrog], seeking to keep things under control, appointed Hitler Chancellor. This was supposed to be a figurehead position, but Hitler was having none of that. He pretty much declared himself emperor. Then to solidify his power he pretty much made Germany in to a gun free Puritan paradise. Obama is doing none of these things. That doesn't seem to be stopping the right wing hate machine, however. This is why we have the fantasy of the Revolution. What's more than a little disconcerting is the fact that in order to believe in the Revolution you already have to believe the system is fundamentally broken. I'm not sure how it got broken so quickly, seeing as how during the Administration that vacated the Oval Office back in January it was unpatriotic to question the President. But that's where we are. Because the fact is, Hitler wanted nothing but power and stopped at nothing to get it. Laws don't matter in the face of naked ambition. So if Obama is actually Hitler, he'll trample the Constitution on his way to destroying everything America stands for. I honestly believe that there are people among the gun hoarders who honestly believe that tanks will be rumbling down their street tomorrow. I also think that they plan to yell, "You'll get my guns when you tear them out of my cold, dead hands!" and run out in to the street and somehow single-handedly win back all the freedoms we've "lost." There is, of course, absolutely no way this will ever happen. Logistically speaking, always take the organized, trained, technologically superior professional army over the disorganized militia. The only time this should be ignored is in the event of extreme local superiority where the militia can throw numbers at the professional force in huge quantities. I doubt this situation would ever appear. There's also the guerrilla situation, but I highly doubt that Mao's maxim of the guerrilla fighter as a fish swimming among the people really applies in this situation. I strongly suspect that in the event of a Revolution most of the country will come down on the side of the Tories. Moreover, the United States didn't actually win the American Revolution. The British lost it and the French helped them along. That's one of those dirty little secrets that nobody likes to hear, but it's totally true. England was a small island nation with expanding global concerns and Continental concerns in Europe. An island cannot rule a continent against the continent's will for very long, especially when the island can't actually devote its full resources to the fight. Once the colonists started bitching the end result was a foregone conclusion. A theoretical Revolution against Obama won't be able to rely on any advantage. The Revolutionaries will be outnumbered, isolated, and outgunned. And there's absolutely no way any other nation would step in to play the role of France. Still, they hold on to this fantasy that one day we'll know the truth. One day we'll see Obama's real intentions, we'll learn that the liberals were really evil and bent on conquest. One day we'll be saved by the true patriots. I can't help but hear Rorschach whenever I think about those who fantasize about the Revolution. "[They] will look up and shout, 'Save us.' And I'll whisper, 'No.'" Can't you hear it? EDIT: Doom Bunker. Not Threat Bunker. Why can't I keep that straight? *EDIT 2: I originally spelled this "isogesis," which is how I learned the word at some point in the misty past. Seeing as how I don't know where I learned the word, I can't say why. It seems to be a common phonetic spelling error, however. A modicum of critical thought about Greek prefixes probably would have cleared that problem right up, however.

Dream Harder

Citizen, criminal, child, woman and man the keys to the kingdom are in your own hands The New Life starts here --The Waterboys, “The New Life" I love the point of convergence. They’re almost impossible to explain to another accurately, since convergence is a deeply personal realization. It is, in a sense, religious; the epiphany replaced by the eureka. Everything that I know and any number of things I’ve been thinking about suddenly join together, crystallize, invoke a moment of deeper truth. And in the same moment convergence exists it’s destroyed. It never returns in quite the way it first showed up, because in the same way all the thoughts and experiences have raced towards that moment, they explode outward, launching new thoughts that race outwards on their own vectors, inviting their own moment of convergence that may well never be found. Gershom Gorenberg juxtaposes two ideas in his final thoughts from The End of Days, those thoughts in turn borrowed partially from the work of a theologian named Darrell Fasching.

People are not just storytellers, Fasching says, but “story dwellers,” shaped by and living out the tales they tell.

This is followed immediately by:

The tale of apocalypse is one of blessed catastrophe, in which the children of light gain bliss and the children of darkness burn. The story was acted out most fully by Hitler, a self-proclaimed messiah…

One of the things that fascinates me is the way it became so popular over the course of the Bush Administration to refer to pretty much everyone as a fascist. It always left me with the urge to say, “You keep using that word. I don’t think you know what it means.” The problem, I now see, is that people only look at the symptoms of fascism and say, “Ah, so you’re a fascist.” Were it up to me -- and I think we can all agree that it should be -- I’d drop the word from the lexicon. The word has become like a sweater with a stretched neck hole, pulled outward until it is shapeless and without much value. We can’t name the disease by looking at the symptoms, at least not using the lenses we use. The political debate in America is about the conservative v. the liberal, and about extremely specific and not altogether useful definitions thereof. Hitler was neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama, yet the enemies of the latter two try to convince us that they’re each a latter-day Hitler using the arcane mathematics of misunderstood history and loudmouthed rhetoric. It’s a useless, dangerous attitude that completely ignores the basis of fascism. Moreover, in turning any and all debate about what happened to bring Hitler or Mussolini to power in to a reflection of the provincialized struggles of today’s politics, we risk ignoring the true dangers of the dangerous thought process that gives rise to state-based extremism. See, the basis of mid-20th Century fascism was neither conservativism nor liberalism. For that matter, Marxist philosophy mirrored fascism in ways that are useful and instructive. The basic structures underpinning fascism and communism weren’t political or economic. They were millennial. I don’t have outright proof, but I’m pretty sure it’s no accident that Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich would have taken the exact same amount of time as Jesus’ Millennial Kingdom. There’s a certain magic that’s been handed over to the number 1000 in Western civilization that stretches back at least as far as John of Patmos’s trippy anti-Imperial screed. I’d suspect, too, that this is the reason a certain subset of the population greeted the crossing of the threshold to 1000 and 2000 CE with a mixture of eschatological hope and terror. They’d confused a millennium with The Millennium. [As an aside, I suspect that Mussolini’s promise to return the Mediterranean to “a Roman lake” is also a version of Millennialism, with Hitler’s future vision and Mussolini’s historical nostalgia each taking one aspect of the search. Italy was Eden, Germany was Heaven. Mythology has a habit of lamenting a time when men were better and the world was perfect and promising a time in the future when this state of perfection will once again be achieved. The search for the Millennial society can work in either direction and undoubtedly is impacted as much by the history of the society making the promises as anything else.] Marxism, meanwhile, was a form of Millennialism, too. In resetting the historical frame in to a class struggle and promising an overthrow of the economic powers that be Marx re-directed eschatological energies but didn’t actually change the message. The Other stopped being the tribe next door or the forces of evil and instead became the rich. The point of Millennialism is to claim that this or that power is what is holding down the coming of paradise and if the obstacle can simply be removed then paradise will arrive. This, too, is a mile marker on the road to the ultimate answer to the question of how good German people could stand by while the Jews were being loaded in to cattle cars bound for Auschwitz and Dachau. It’s the exact same reason why otherwise decent Christians can blithely ignore the implied message of the final damnation of billions in Revelation while fervently praying and hoping for the coming of the event that will banish so many in to the outer darkness. The pyre lit by the burning of the faithless is the source of the consuming fire that will burn the impurities from the faithful. Germany burned the Jews to purify the Aryan people. That purity was necessary for them to take their rightful place as the leaders of a peaceful world created in their own image. There really is no historian of eschatological Christianity that I am aware of. There are plenty who talk about the various movements, but it’s often regarded as being the sort of thing that requires a primer and little more. In the interests of adding to the babble, now seems like a good time to point out the dominant form of eschatological thinking has only recently switched to premillennialism, mostly with Hal Lindsay and The Late, Great Planet Earth back about thirty years ago. Premillennialism is the familiar idea of the Rapture and the seven years of Tribulation after which time Jesus will reappear and set up his Millennial Kingdom. This is the “theology” of Left Behind. At the time of the World Wars the predominant eschatology was amillennialism or postmillennialism. The amillennialist thinks that we’ve basically been living in the End Times since Jesus, so things might change tomorrow or when the sun goes supernova and there’s just no telling. An amillennialist probably won’t do much to bring about the Second Coming. The postmillennialist is actually more dangerous than a premillennialist, however. They believe that it’s their responsibility to create the Millennium, after which time Jesus will return and make things permanent. This bizarre utopianist movement is what brought Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in to the public and political arena. It’s also a tradition that stretches back to Cromwell’s England, John Calvin’s Geneva and pretty much any place a Christian has taken power and removed freedom in the name of religious unity. While the premillennialist is likely to throw up his or her hands and basically say, “God’s wrath be upon you,” (and, for the record, my friend who left Christianity at the same time I did and I both have stories about people who basically did that, making a token effort at re-conversion then saying, “Well, you’ll be sorry when Jesus comes back.” Classy) the postmillennialist is likely to see him- or herself as an agent of god’s wrath. This is the millennialism of the Concentration Camp and the Siberian gulag. Whether they’re called “sinners,” “Jews,” or “dissidents,” the impure are being removed to refine the Chosen. This, too, is why millennial movements will eat their own tails if allowed to survive long enough. The distinctions between “pure” and “impure” become smaller and smaller as the promised salvation tarries longer and longer. I also strongly suspect that the Italian version of fascism is slightly more benign than the German, since Mussolini was promising a return to historical prominence, not a new, perfected world. Not that it makes much of a difference to the victims, whether external or internal. Although this does allow me to delve in to an interesting idea: the Antichrist. One of the things that baffles outsiders about the hoped-for Second Coming is that Jesus basically comes off as an asshole in the turgid eschatological wet dreams of folks like Lindsay and LaHaye. They warn us to be leery of people who bring peace because the first sign of the Antichrist is that he will make wars cease. For the most part the end of war seems pretty good, so it’s a bit strange that this is a sign to worry and a thing to resist. What the millennialist is saying isn’t that peace is bad, it’s that any peace but theirs is bad. That thought should be fairly self-explanatory, especially in light of the concept of fascism as millennialism. But the character of the Antichrist* must be understood in light of the Jewish world from Alexander the Great through John of Patmos. There are three great empire builders who need to be understood in order to understand the world at the time of Jesus: Cyrus the Great of Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Romans. Cyrus was an innovative guy. He realized that taking the land of an enemy did no good if the people on the land hated him. So he instituted a system wherein the conquered were allowed to keep their own religion and identity (within reason) and conquered lands were governed by satraps who had a great deal of local power and respect but still had to answer to the throne. Alexander borrowed from and built on the Persian system, going so far as to merge mythologies to say, “Hey, we have a common bond,” bring local troops in to his army, and leave his troops behind as colonies instead of garrisons. The system started by Cyrus and expanded by Alexander reached its height with the Romans. At the height of the Empire -- which stretched from England to Africa and Iberia to the Middle East -- the lands inside the borders of the Empire largely enjoyed the period known as Pax Romana: Roman Peace. The Jewish people, or at least the ones still in Palestine, didn’t take too well to the Persians. Or Alexander. Or the Seleucids. Or the Ptolemies. Or the Romans. Basically, the Jews didn’t like being ruled from afar. It was probably a cultural aversion that went back to Jacob’s sojourn in Egypt. At the time of Joseph, so the scriptures say, the Pharaoh honored Jacob’s family, promised them peace, as it were. Then came Pharaohs who didn’t remember what Joseph had done for the Egyptians and they brought slavers’ whips along. This is the call to arms behind the Maccabean Revolt. This is the promise of the Messiah who comes to cast off Roman shackles. This is Zionism. Without self-rule in the Promised Land the Jewish people cannot trust anyone who promises them peace. Christianity, as a religion started by Jews, carries this forward in its own cultural memory. This is why people who want to teach evolution in schools and allow homosexuals to marry cannot be trusted. Sure, they say that they won’t take away religion and morality, but they can’t be trusted to follow through. So if there is to be peace, it has to be the peace of the Kingdom. It’s really too bad, too. Not only do they dwell in a horrible story that teaches them not to trust others and to pray for the peace of the pyre, they force us to dwell in that story, too. And then they tell us it’s our fault. -------------------------- *For the record, there is no Biblical Antichrist and I have no intention of making it seem like there is one. The Antichrist has been stitched together like Frankenstein’s Monster from several different places in the Bible. However, since they believe that there will be a literal Antichrist, it’s necessary to engage the concept as if it does exist. They’re story dwellers, after all, and it doesn’t matter if the story they’re telling makes no sense to anyone else. EDIT: Forgot to italicize a couple book titles and used "tales" when I meant "tails." Oops. Also, I love the phrase, "turgid eschatological wet dreams." Just thought I'd point that out.

Annotated Bibliography: Source Material

My prof for History 491, a class that was basically a semester-long research paper to get out of the history undergrad program, had us write papers on subjects somehow related to Alexander the Great. For the first half of the semester he had us basically write practice research papers every week that were focused on some smaller aspect of the overall experience in order to make sure we actually understood what we were doing and how to do it. The very first paper was an evaluation of two essays, one written by W.W. Tarn and the other by Ernst Badian. A good eighty years ago Tarn was the top name in Alexander studies. According to him, A the G was basically the world's first and greatest Eagle Scout. He was a perfect gentleman who was trying to take over the world in order to bring peace, joy, understanding, and, I think, fuzzy wuzzy puppies to all the peoples of the planet. Badian was the first modern historian to really challenge Tarn's opinion. According to him, Alexander was the ur-Hitler, combined with a bit of Pol Pot and doing his level-headed best to make Satan look like a good guy. It was a good object lesson with which to begin the research paper. Namely: consider the source. I was reminded of this lesson as I wandered my local library muttering curses and invective against the Dewey and his thrice-damned decimals under my breath. The word "fascism" is so loaded that it's difficult to find balanced source material on the subject. This, I suppose, shouldn't have come as a surprise. At the very least it should have been the second biggest surprise behind the part where I noticed they filed Ann Coulter books under non-fiction... Anyway, I set out a two-fold plan to look at the roots of fascism. First, I picked up some actual history stuff. Second, I grabbed a few books on the actual topic, specifically looking for intellectual interpretation and searching for interesting perspectives if neutral ones weren't to be found. What follows is a quick and dirty annotated bibliography of my initial set of sources. It's been, like, two months since I used Turabian for anything, so, y'know, I'm pretty prepped. (Also, as I write this I'm watching the new American Gladiators. So if I suddenly get dumber you'll know why brother.) Brendon, Piers. The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. The subtitle of this one is pretty self-explanatory. It looks at the world of the 1930s, tracing the various threads of political and national changes throughout the 1930s and how they ultimately led to World War II. As Fascism was a huge part of the univers of the 1930s, it comes up a time or two. De Felice, Renzo. Interpretations of Fascism. Translated by Brenda Huff Everett. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977. De Felice's book looks mostly to Italian fascism. His general theory seems to be something Jonah Goldberg would agree with, that fascism as a generic movement is a product of the Enlightenment and progressive politics, but that Nazism and and Mussolini's variety of the movement hijacked classical fascism and turned it in to a right-wing, ultra nationalistic ideology. Although that part where he says that Nazism is a hijack of fascism would probably take him right back out of the Jonah Goldberg club... Hamilton, Alastair. The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919-1945. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1971. Hamilton's book looks at the phenomenon of artists and authors choosing and defending a fascist ideology. It looks at four regions: Germany, Italy, England, and France and tries to explain how some intellectuals could run counter to the generally anti-fascism mentality of their peers. Kedward, Harry Roderick. Fascism in Western Europe, 1900-1945. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Fascism is Western Europe is the closest to a straight history of fascism I could find. It looks at the common roots of fascism throughout the various nations and how it developed or was stifled, depending. At the end, Kedward attempts to offer a usable definition of the ideology, much like I intend to do. Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Keegan is one of the pre-eminent historians of the Second World War. This particular book is mostly focused on the actual execution of the war itself, but it begins with a couple chapters on the nature of the populations of the nations, from which I expect to glean some amount of insight Overy, Richard, and Andrew Wheatcroft. The Road to War: The Origins of World War II. London: MacMillan London Limited, 1989. I wanted to find a couple actual book on the origins of World War II as an outgrowth of World War I. This one breaks everything down according to the interwar history of the main combatant nations. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1983. This is the big one. Shirer first published The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1950 and it has been in print in various incarnations pretty much ever since. Why? Because William Shirer has incriminating photographs of some of the most important people in the publishing business. Wait, no, that's not it. It's the gold standard of histories of Nazi Germany against which pretty much every other history of World War II must be measured against, kind of like any history of the fall of the Roman Empire must be measured against Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I'm only mentioning that because my copies of both are approximately the same size: a heart-pounding 1500 pages. Sontag, Raymond J. A Broken World 1919-1939. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. A Broken World functions as a compantion to The Road to War but it breaks the interwar period down by topic instead instead of nation. I'm not entirely sure what else there is to say about that. So there you have it. I haven't even gotten to the part where I read books that accuse anyone and everyone who disagrees with the author of being Nazis and there are eight books in my bibliography. I hope you all appreciate the sacrifices I make in the name of historical understanding. But, hey, birds gotta sing, bees gotta buzz and historians gotta, um, do history stuff. Editorial note: On a real bibliographic entry the top line is flush left and each subsequent line is indented a tab set. Blogspot doesn't seem to want to let me do that. So for anyone out there who is attempting to use me as an example of research paper writing, bear in mind that this is the case. Otherwise, remain calm. I know what I'm doing. I'm an unpaid internet historian...

Jack-Booted Thuggery

I apparently hate myself. Really. I'm already (ahem) working on this Mythology Project thing. It's going to take a while, I think. However, I've noticed that there's a lot of egregious misuse of a certain massively misunderstood word: Fascism. People have been throwing it in any direction that they think it will stick, mostly toward the Neocons. However, at the beginning of the year I read Christopher Hedges American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and put it down feeling a bit nonplussed. Today I ran across some excerpts of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. I've described the Hedges book as "Chicken Little-esque" in it's panicked assertion that every tiny bit of greed, politicking, and stupidity from the Christian right is proof of some vast, multifaceted conspiracy to take over the country in the name of Jeebus. As of yet I'm not entirely sure what to call Goldberg's book. Between the smiley face with a Hitler mustache on the cover and the assertions of things like, "Hitler was a vegetarian and lots of Liberals are vegetarians, therefore the Liberals are actually the fascists in our midst," I'd like to actually call Goldberg's book political satire. Sadly, from what I can tell of his other stuff, he doesn't seem to have a sense of humor (which is a common problem on the conservative side of the spectrum. If there's a sense of humor to be found, it's usually hard to tell). Anyway, somewhere between the two books mentioned above, anything else I find and historical works like my ancient copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I want to take a look at the meaning of the word fascism. Whatever the denotation or connotation, I don't think it means what we think it means. Unlike my attempt to look at the word myth, I think that looking at the meaning of "fascist" is something that will actually have a fairly great importance. The word as it is currently being used is, at best, a diluted hinderance to actual understanding. At worst, it's dangerous. And, at the very least, nothing good comes from a dialogue that consists of, "You're a fascist!" "No! You're a fascist!" I have, thus far, seen only limited definitions of the word, mostly intended to suit one party that wants to demonize an opponent. I mostly see those definitions leveled at the Bush Administration. The funny thing is, that sort of usage can usually be replaced with the more prosaic "Police State." Christopher Hedges' working definition works better as "Theocratic State." Taking him seriously, Jonah Goldberg's seems to find fascism in what I think of as the "Nanny State." I suspect that, in the end, I will find aspects of fascism that cover the Police, Theocratic, and Nanny States. I also suspect that I will find aspects of all three that fall outside of any attempted classical definition of fascism. Were I a betting man I would also place a hefty sum of money on creating no definition that will be at all satisfying to any of the parties currently tossing the term around. I might also go insane at some point during this endeavor. Oh, and as a side note: For anyone interested in the study of history as a science, I'm kind of hoping that this will function as a useful primer. I'm not currently working up to a research paper, dissertation, doctoral thesis, or book on the topic, but I will be following certain aspects of the research process as I learned them. This post would be closely akin to a research proposal with a light sketch of my topic, my intended plan of attack and what I hope to get out of said research. I will probably be choosing my research materials next. However, as I said, this isn't going to be making its way in to some larger work, and somehow I doubt that a 20-page research paper would work in blog format. What I will probably end up posting will be short(ish) article abstract/book review-style entries that all center on this topic and focus on one particular work for the topic at hand. In short, I won't be handing in a rough draft and I won't be submitting this to peer review at any point in the near future...