The blogger formerly known as PDiddie, at Brains and Eggs, looks at how close we have come to fascism. Not to be shrugged off.
The political dichotomies ... form a continuum not along a straight line left and right but rather as a clock face, where moderates or centrists are located at 6:00 and the extreme right and left wings converge at 12:00. With this in mind, it is easy to see that it is but a small step from totalitarian left to totalitarian right. There is not much difference in these extremes except their social standings.
Leon Trotsky called both of these enigmas of mankind ‘fascist’. The right wing corporate conservative unites with the petty bourgeoisie left wing social (usually religious) conservatives. He called left wingers “social democrats” and “social fascists”.
Once the petty bourgeoisie were compelled to change course, they were employed to fight the street battles, to get bloody, and take the risks. This is just what the Republican Party needed, an Army – not in this case to fight a war but to win the battle at the polls.
I think there's another trend here, and that's the one which keeps urging us to "move on." Certainly the move-on-sters are the ones who'd just as soon we didn't call them on their mistakes and crimes -- the current administration is very eager to have us move on and they are helped by a media which sees the value of endless new stories, no matter how violent. A fresh, bloody, action-filled war story in far away Iraq is certainly more interesting to watch on a large flat screen than people sitting around a table trying to figure out how to prevent another 9/11.
I'm troubled by how easily we are persuaded to never look back, never apply the old rules to bad actions. Carpetbagger looks at this:
To the extent that a discussion about the events of 2002 and 2003 won't save any lives or resolve the ongoing crisis, the point is accurate. But in terms of a basic standard of accountability, it's seems wildly irresponsible to say that whether the White House intentionally misled the world about a war is no longer a question worth asking.
Which leads me to Python. In one classic scene, John Cleese's Sir Lancelot storms a castle, sword in hand, murdering most of a wedding party based on the
mistaken intelligencebelief that someone was in desperate need of a rescue. The castle owner, anxious to curry favor with Lancelot, encourages the survivors of the attack to let bygones by bygones. As the castle owner tells his guests, "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed whom…."The let's-not-worry-about-2002 argument is effectively making the same kind of pitch. Let's not bicker and argue over whether the president intentionally launched a war under false pretenses and manipulated intelligence to bolster a decision he'd already made; what's done is done. That's in the past. It's irrelevant now. The important thing is to look forward.
It's not that I'm against a plan for the future; it's that the questions about the recent past deserve answers. Is it unreasonable to think we might be able to do both, applying some standards of accountability for what's happened while also crafting a plan for the future of Iraq?
We'd damn well better.