Early Warning Signs of Fascism

List of the Month: Early Warnings Signs of Fascism

I don’t buy many posters, for the same reason I don’t buy many maps. Books, pictures, craft items and artworks have already taken over what wall space we have.
But when I saw this poster, I grabbed it and bought it, not caring about the price. It was the store’s last, I was told, and the store soon went out of business. So I don’t feel I am violating anything by sharing the poster’s essentials here.
First, though, some essential introductory material.
Back in the Depression, Huey Long was believed by some to be the “smartest and most dangerous of American demagogues.” It was a time when many looked with envy at Germany, where there wasn’t unemployment and things seemed to be booming—though these protofascists soon heard the boom behind that arms-industry-driven economic revival. Long, before he was assassinated, was once asked, “Do you think we’ll ever have fascism in America, Huey?”
“Sure,” he replied. “Only here, we’ll call it anti-fascism.”
I’ve been worried about American fascism ever since I saw the polls in the late 1960s showing that a majority of Americans would have supported rounding up the hippies and Vietnam protesters and putting them into concentration camps. For decades, it’s been a staple of pollsters to show that most people would not accept the Bill of Rights (the first amendments to the Constitution) were it proposed today.
But I went beyond worry when I heard the Cheney-Bush administration talking about Islamic Fascists. Through the years, these political engineering geniuses have perfected their use of preemptive accusations, deflecting criticisms by accusing their opponents of the same thing. A case in point would be their attack on Democrats for supposedly fomenting class conflict by drawing attention to the growing disparity between lower and higher incomes, and saying that Republican pro-rich and pro-corporate tax policies were the main cause. By now, the growing division between rich and poor has become a staple of economic research—the economic revival since the dot-com boom of the turn of the century has apparently benefited only those in the top 20 percent—and it’s clear that the Democrats were being accused of causing something that had a very different cause, to which they were only reacting.
Clearly the Islamic fundamentalists are not like the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany; indeed, in many ways they are more like American fundamentalists. But calling them Fascists would equate 9-11 with Pearl Harbor, in the same way that calling those three nations an Axis of Evil (do you remember which three Bush tagged as such?) attempted to link the Islamists with World War II’s Fascist Axis.
So what is fascism, really?
Rather than quote dictionary definitions, I’m going to cite the findings of Lawrence W. Britt—the conclusions listed on the poster. After researching seven fascist regimes—Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia—in April of 2003, he distilled 14 “Early Warning Signs of Fascism.” This is a list to print out, save, compare with current events—and possibly buy one of those bumper stickers saying “IF YOU AREN’T APPALLED, YOU HAVEN’T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION.”

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism.

2. Disdain for human rights.

3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause.

4. Supremacy of the military.

5. Rampant sexism.

6. Controlled mass media.

7. Obsession with national security.

8. Religion and government intertwined.

9. Corporate power protected.

10. Labor power suppressed.

11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.

14. Fraudulent elections.

As the shaggy dog story about the Foo Bird says, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”