Sorry about this blog being so long . . . but each time I tried to re-write to shorten it,
Obama is not a "natural born" citizen.
Obama will create "death panels" to pull the plug on grandma.
Obama is planning to "brown-shirt" the youth of public schools.
Obama is a Fascist.
Obama is a Nazi.
Obama is a Socialist.
Obama is . . . hell, just fill-in the blank.
Obama is, well, evil... at least to the ditto-head crowd.
What the hell has become of civil discourse in this country?
It's gone to hell, is what.
I know that much of this Obama-bashing nonsense is pure artifice.... an artificial construct full of distortions and far more lies by clever men who dupe otherwise well-meaning people... but seriously now....
a Nazi?
Do Americans even know what a Nazi is!?!
Back in April, I was scrolling through some open, unanswered questions at Yahoo Answers when I came across a query posed by a woman who was puzzled by the latest anti-Obama tactic: calling him a Fascist.
She wanted to know what was up with that?
I answered. It was the first time that someone chose my answer at the "best" of the lot.
Obviously, lots of people are confused about the terminology being casually and indiscriminately tossed around so, as a political scientist, I figure it wouldn't hurt to explain a few things to those who might be dazed, confused, or bewildered by the current talk-radio cacophony.
First, a bit of history:
Back as a sophomore and political science novice, I often wondered why it seemed that, in the world of politics, the more extreme one got, the more likely one was to tend towards a totalitarian governmental system.
Communists were pretty extreme, it seemed, and yet despite Marx's ideal of a government-less society, Russia and China and Cuba, and all the rest ended up with little more than dictatorships. Russia wasn't Marx's Leftist Utopia; it was simply a country held hostage to a ruthless strongman.
On the other hand, Nazism was also extreme , yet it also ended up with a nominally-'elected' strongman who was little more than a dictatorship, only this time on the political right.
Later, I was to discover that the reason that either extreme ends up looking like the other is that once you push a political agenda to an extreme, the more you don't abide criticism of your ideal. The process of silencing criticism is, sure as rain, an indicator of dictatorial troubles ahead.
The major difference between Nazism and Communism isn't so much one of substance but of style.
As you move from a neutral democratic center, a society is forced into a position of favoring one of two competing interests: the worker or the employer.
You see, in the world that has existed since the industrial revolution, there have been two classes of people: men who make and run capital and those who work for those people. This disparity has always existed, of course, but only since the advent of large corporations -- whose mission was to guarantee a return on investment and, hence by implication, assure that the rich get richer -- has the disparity been quite so political and transparent.
When you move from the political center towards the political right, you favor business at the expense of the labor force. Go very far in that equation and you've got yourself a Fascist state: one in which the government and corporations (well, corporate owners, really) work in concert against the general welfare of the working class.
Go a little further to the right and you've got yourself a Nazi government, in which the government doesn't just work in concert with business: it's hard to tell the difference between who's running the government and who's running business.
On the opposite side, if you move to the political left you'll eventually find yourself with a nice case of Socialism. Socialism is called this because the government and working classes have a "social" relationship: government works to favor working people at the expense of corporate interests and those with money.
Go a little further and you've got yourself a Communist government, in which the government doesn't just favor the working masses, it owns and operates the means of production at the expense of any monied classes or private corporations.
In either extreme, the government takes control.
It's just a matter of who it favors once it does: working people (the proletariat) or people with money (the oligarchs). Either way, the government abides little criticism or freedom to dissent.
That's why this business of calling Obama a Nazi or a Fascist is so laughable.
Obama may not be the raving liberal many of us hoped he would be, but he's certainly not a Fascist.
... and he's even less a Nazi.
I'm wondering if he's even capable of being a Socialist.
Speaking of Socialist -- a term that had some traction in the post-WWII era and still seems to resonate with some neo-cons still: The term, as I suggested earlier, stems from the word "social," which means a society (oops... I can't be defining a word using a form of the word... so let's say "a system of common interaction") in which people are treated more-or-less equally and for the common good.
It's this egalitarian nature that many Europeans find so appealing and why most advanced European countries are, themselves, Socialist.
Proudly so.
I think Obama would like to have a society based on amicable social criteria but I'm beginning to wonder if he's really got the makings of a true Socialist.
Whatever he might be -- personally, I like the word pragmatist for him but since that has an entirely different meaning in the world of political science, I'll demure -- he certainly isn't a Fascist.
Or a Nazi.
Or a Communist.
So shut the f*** up, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and Rush.
Either you don't know what you're talking about (.... BINGO!) or you're deliberately trying to confuse those mindless dittoheads who watch and listen to your every word.
Oh, I DO wish we could get more students into some basic political science classes, so more people would understand the meanings of the terms being thrown around so fast and loose....
... but then, I say that about history, too, and see where that's gotten me.
Nowhere.
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