U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
This morning in the New York Times, i.e., here, a chilling piece on the ongoing rewiring of this country into a soft-totalitarianism. (Don’t like the term, and haven’t been able to come up with a new one that would describe the exact nature of what is going on — fascism isn’t right, even if a number of its features are beginning to ooze through the cracks of the “democratic” make-up of the US). Here is the opening para of Scott Shane’s article:
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
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Authoritarianism? Business-as-usual? Neoconservatism? It IS hard to come up with a word for what’s going on in the US now.
there is nothing incongruent between fascism and democracy
many commentators dont want to use the term because the US is still a representative democracy, and many peeps still see fascism as “undemocractic” ( the anti-fascists REALLY have to critically examine this term)…but, it was a prominent neo-nazi (whose name naturally escapes me now) who predicted that fascism wld make its appearance in the NA context under the ruse/disguise of “democracy”
That was the Kingfish, Huey Long, gov of Louisiana.
It’s hard to see the US as a representative democracy when it is no longer representative (e.g., the Abramoff scandal) and no longer democratic (fixed elections through rigged voting machines). I don’t know the right political term for it but it is certainly a Grand Illusion.
Actually the US government may never have truly been representative, as the formation of the Senate mitigated proportional representation and opened the door for the upper class to gain disproportionate representation. On the other hand, while US elections have been subject to fraud for many years (e.g., Chicago was allegedly rigged in favor of Kennedy in 1960), the depths to which the entire electoral system can be and has been controlled during the last six years by a small number of relatively invisible people beholden to right-wing partisan interests is eerily reminiscent of Edward Luttwak’s _Coup D’Etat_.