By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS
I recently came across a fascinating book of history and political
science on the development of fascism in a nation-state. For your
edification, I am here presenting a few excerpts, with certain edits and
alterations for present relevance.
"A wholly definitive study is still impossible, because of the
timing, and because many indispensable sources of information, such as
party and organizational archives, such documents as income tax returns,
intra-leadership communications, and "classified [for various reasons]
documents," are as yet closed to scholars (unless leaked). With regard
to many events, judgments must be based upon admittedly incomplete
evidence. These difficulties, which always beset the student of
contemporary politics, are aggravated here by the determined and
well-organized efforts of the new government and party-in-power to
discourage incisive research into its methods and objectives and to
misrepresent many of its goals and techniques for reasons of political
expediency. Deception is a political imperative in all government. In
this regime, it is an applied science and a fine art."
"The new leaders who 'think with their hearts' repudiate all
objectivity and scientific detachment as evil products of liberalism...
Under these circumstances any effort at objectivity implies per se
the adoption of an attitude evoking negative emotional response from
the officials under observation. Like every form of highly emotionalized
and subjectivized mass politics, Trumpism demands acceptance or
rejection, period.
Only a social revolution can destroy the Trumpist state. Only an
upheaval in which the political power of the economically-dominant
sector of the ruling class is permanently broken by mass action from
below can offer hope of weakening the grip upon the sources of power of
the Trumpist state. The new Trumpist absolutism is the only possible
source of power for the ruling class in the age of increasingly
concentrated monopoly capitalism, since it protects their interests far
better than any imaginable alternative.
In the run-up to Trumpism, the true left in the United States
accepted this view of the situation. "But their small size, the
destruction of the militant trade unionism that they had led many years
before, undertaken by a concerted effort of the ruling class across the
nation, and the incredibly destructive in-fighting over who indeed were
the 'true leftists,' especially in relationship to the history of the
Soviet Union and its leadership, and over the 'lesser of the evils'
proposition, with the resulting failure to form a Popular Front,
rendered them very limited in what they were able to do to effectively
fight the onslaught of Trumpism.
Click here for the full article.
Source: OpEdNews.com (OEN)
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