Reply #100: AB-SO-FRICKIN'-LUTELY [View All]

Here's why. Even though wing nuts always try to make Hitler out as a Socialist, he was actually a right-wing authoritarian with a welfare state, and of course there was the whole "race hygiene" thing.

The most important part of fascism -- and all totalitariansim -- isn't the frills, or even the actions, but the rootless base and magical thinking that accompanies it.

For Hitler, it was racial supremacism, for the GOP it's cultural supremacism -- summed up by words like "Heartland" and "Core American Values." These loose-fitting constructs that are really overbroad descriptions of abstract things are part of the propaganda that the GOP uses.

There is also the idea of scapegoating -- which the GOP actively does to the democrats, even inciting violence amongst their rabble. They also accuse the left wing of being intellectual "elitists," when they, themselves, subscribe to a RIGHT-WING intellectual elite that finds its loyalties with the philosopher king of pre-enlightenment and manipulation of the masses to bring that king to power. In addition, the glorification of conservative institutions -- vaulting them so highly over diversity and multiculturalism -- is yet another example of their cultural supremacism.

Their propaganda is to be ADMIRED. It works like this. Typically, to some degree, all of us are reactionaries, from situation to situation. Those who haven't practiced their critical thinking through scholarship or other outlets, are much more likely to have "the totalitarian brain," which "splits" all things into "good" and "bad, "black and white."

When someone thinks this simply it is easy for a skilled propaganda master to simply interject false binaries into the template of the totalitarian brain -- hence the reference to "war is peace," and "black is white" from Orwellian fame.

It seems that the major false binaries that they are producing include:

1. If you question the president or the country, you "hate America."
2. If you're "anti-war" you don't support the troops.

These are false binaries and false dilemmas, which are logical fallacies, which are used in addition to mostly slippery slope, ad hominem and style-over-substance fallacies. They also use the tactic of accusing your opponents of what you're doing, as I outlined above.

The marriage of corporation and government is another key part of fascism, which is DEFINITELY apparent, and is even supported by Democrats in this society, though not usually to the conniving and dishonest extent that the GOP is.

The worst, however, is the "harkening" to another time -- or the appeal to a "rebirth" of America -- re-capturing the golden years of a revisionist and rootless history that they are peddling, most egregiously in the areas of the history of American foreign policy, and the establishment of America, as well as the lineage of our secular, Rousseau-cum-Jeffersonian, Enlightenment history -- which explains their disdain for the "Bill of Rights."

There's much more -- the comparison is DEFINITELY valid.