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Author Topic:   The Trouble with Bush's 'Islamofascism'
DayDreamer
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posted August 26, 2006 07:56 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
The Trouble with Bush's 'Islamofascism'

By Katha Pollitt, The Nation
Posted on August 26, 2006, Printed on August 26, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/40850/


If you thought the War on Terror was bad, get ready for the international disasters that the "war on Islamic fascism" will produce.


If you control the language, you control the debate. As the Bush Administration's Middle Eastern policy sinks ever deeper into bloody incoherence, the "war on terror" has been getting a quiet linguistic makeover. It's becoming the "war on Islamic fascism." The term has been around for a while -- Nexis takes it back to 1990, when the writer and historian Malise Ruthven used "Islamo-fascism" in the London Independent to describe the authoritarian governments of the Muslim world; after 9/11 it was picked up by neocons and prowar pundits, including Stephen Schwartz in the Spectator and Christopher Hitchens in this magazine, to describe a broad swath of Muslim bad guys from Osama to the mullahs of Iran.

But the term moved into the mainstream this August when Bush referred to the recently thwarted Britain-based suicide attack plot on airplanes as "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists." Joe Lieberman compares Iraq to "the Spanish Civil War, which was the harbinger of what was to come." The move away from "war on terrorism" arrives not a moment too soon for language fussbudgets who had problems with the idea of making war on a tactic. To say nothing of those who wondered why, if terrorism was the problem, invading Iraq was the solution. (From the President's August 21 press conference: Q: "But what did Iraq have to do with September 11?" A: "Nothing." Now he tells us!)

What's wrong with "Islamo-fascism"? For starters, it's a terrible historical analogy. Italian Fascism, German Nazism and other European fascist movements of the 1920s and '30s were nationalist and secular, closely allied with international capital and aimed at creating powerful, up-to-date, all-encompassing states. Some of the trappings might have been anti-modernist -- Mussolini looked back to ancient Rome, the Nazis were fascinated by Nordic mythology and other Wagnerian folderol -- but the basic thrust was modern, bureaucratic and rational. You wouldn't find a fascist leader consulting the Bible to figure out how to organize the banking system or the penal code or the women's fashion industry. Even its anti-Semitism was "scientific": The problem was the Jews' genetic inferiority and otherness, which countless biologists, anthropologists and medical researchers were called upon to prove -- not that the Jews killed Christ and refused to accept the true faith.

Call me pedantic, but if only to remind us that the worst barbarities of the modern era were committed by the most modern people, I think it is worth preserving "fascism" as a term with specific historical content.

Second, and more important, "Islamo-fascism" conflates a wide variety of disparate states, movements and organizations as if, like the fascists, they all want similar things and are working together to achieve them. Neocons have called Saddam Hussein and the Baathists of Syria Islamo-fascists, but these relatively secular nationalist tyrants have nothing in common with shadowy, stateless, fundamentalist Al Qaeda -- as even Bush now acknowledges -- or with the Taliban, who want to return Afghanistan to the seventh century; and the Taliban aren't much like Iran, which is different from (and somewhat less repressive than) Saudi Arabia -- whoops, our big ally in the Middle East! Who are the "Islamo-fascists" in Saudi Arabia -- the current regime or its religious-fanatical opponents? It was under the actually existing US-supported government that female students were forced back into their burning school rather than be allowed to escape unveiled. Under that government people are lashed and beheaded, women can't vote or drive, non-Muslim worship is forbidden, a religious dress code is enforced by the state through violence and Wahhabism -- the "Islamo-fascist" denomination--is exported around the globe.

"Islamo-fascism" looks like an analytic term, but really it's an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim world as a simple matter of Us versus Them, with war to the end the only answer, as with Hitler. If you doubt that every other British Muslim under the age of 30 is ready to blow himself up for Allah, or that shredding the Constitution is the way to protect ourselves from suicide bombers, if you think that Hamas might be less popular if Palestinians were less miserable, you get cast as Neville Chamberlain, while Bush plays FDR. "Islamo-fascism" rescues the neocons from harsh verdicts on the invasion of Iraq ("cakewalk... roses... sweetmeats... Chalabi") by reframing that ongoing debacle as a minor chapter in a much larger story of evil madmen who want to fly the green flag of Islam over the capitals of the West. Suddenly it's just a detail that Saddam wasn't connected with 9/11, had no WMDs, was not poised to attack the United States or Israel -- he hated freedom, and that was enough. It doesn't matter, either, that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites seem less interested in uniting the umma than in murdering one another. With luck we'll be so scared we won't ask why anyone should listen to another word from people who were spectacularly wrong about the biggest politico-military initiative of the past thirty years, and their balding heads will continue to glow on our TV screens for many nights to come. On to Tehran!

It remains to be seen if "Islamo-fascism" will win back the socially liberal "security moms" who voted for Bush in 2004 but have recently been moving toward the Democrats. But the word is already getting a big reaction in the Muslim world. As I write the New York Times is carrying a full page "open letter" to Bush from the Al Kharafi Group, the mammoth Kuwaiti construction company, featuring photos of dead and wounded Lebanese civilians. "We think there is a misunderstanding in determining: "'Who deserves to be accused of being a fascist'!!!!"

"Islamo-fascism" enrages to no purpose the dwindling number of Muslims who don't already hate us. At the same time, it clouds with ideology a range of situations -- Lebanon, Palestine, airplane and subway bombings, Afghanistan, Iraq -- we need to see clearly and distinctly and deal with in a focused way. No wonder the people who brought us the disaster in Iraq are so fond of it.

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/40850/

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TINK
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posted August 26, 2006 08:18 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I'd tend to agree that the term "fascist" in the strict sense doesn't apply. There's a lack of corporate culture, for instance. Well, at least for the majority, at least for now. Anyway ... what term would you use, DD?

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DayDreamer
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posted August 27, 2006 12:43 AM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Personally, and Im sure Im speaking for most Muslims, I do not want the name of my religion used in those terms...with fascist beside it. It can be called anything else that does not include a word of my faith.

These are my sentiments about the term as well...

quote:
But the word is already getting a big reaction in the Muslim world. As I write the New York Times is carrying a full page "open letter" to Bush from the Al Kharafi Group, the mammoth Kuwaiti construction company, featuring photos of dead and wounded Lebanese civilians. "We think there is a misunderstanding in determining: "'Who deserves to be accused of being a fascist'!!!!"

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TINK
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posted August 27, 2006 07:29 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Well, I can think of plenty of people I might be tempted to call a Christian fascist. I recently caught the tail end of a movie called The Handmaid's Tale. Have you heard of it? It was a fairly decent book. It was written in the mid 80's, during the heyday of Pat Robertson and Tammy Faye Baker and the like. Scary stuff.

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Mirandee
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posted August 27, 2006 09:04 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I read the book "A Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood ( a Canadian citizen ) years ago and it is scary stuff. It was even scarier when the Religious Right became so prominent in U.S. politics in recent years. I haven't seen the movie but the book was very good.

I agree with the word fascist in the same context with a religion. I know that I would be very offended if anyone used the term "Catholic fascist." So I can imagine how insulting that is to those who practice the Islamic religion.

It makes you wonder about the sensitivity or even the plain common sense of these Madison Ave. people that Bush has working in his administration. And it makes you wonder that about this administration as a whole. God help us!

The idea is the same as commercials. They seem to think we are all air heads who will believe anything they present to us if they pump it up, glamorize it, or convince us that we really need and just have to have it. Commericials and ads are all a subtle form of brainwashing as is this new term for the "War on Terror."

I have nothing but mistrust of any government that uses fear as a means of governing its people. Anyone should mistrust a government that uses that tactic. History has documented the motives of those who used fear to govern in the past. It is what Saddam Hussein governed with, it is what Hitler governed with, it is what Julius Caesar governed with just to name a few.

FDR stated that: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Very wise words.

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lotusheartone
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posted August 27, 2006 09:53 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
What is the opposite of FEAR???

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jwhop
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From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
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posted August 27, 2006 10:09 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself"

FDR dispatched American bombers to bomb and firebomb the hell out of most major cities in Japan and Germany, utterly destroying them. By the end of World War II, those cities looked like the ruins of a long dead civilization...except the ruins were still smoldering and I'm not talking about Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Is that what you would have America do to nations with terrorist regimes who send their terrorist proxies out to attack the United States and other Western nations...since you saw fit to quote the American President who authorized it?

This is an article and comment on the left and "progressives" by a prominent and lifelong member of the left elite.

It's clear Christopher Hitchins is disgusted with what the left has become on which he hangs the label "contemptible". He's in good company.

New York City
Stranger in a Strange Land
The dismay of an honorable man of the left
by Christopher Hitchens

October 6, the day immediately preceding the first U.S. counterstroke against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, found me on a panel at the New York Film Festival. The discussion, on the art of political cinema, had been arranged many months before. But as the chairman announced, the events of September 11 would now provide the atmospheric conditioning for our deliberations. I thus sat on a stage with Oliver Stone, who spoke with feeling about something he termed "the revolt of September 11," and with bell hooks, who informed a well-filled auditorium of the Lincoln Center that those who had experienced Spike Lee's movie about the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church in 1963 would understand that "state terrorism" was nothing new in America.

These were not off-the-cuff observations. I challenged Stone to reconsider his view of the immolation of the World Trade Center as a "revolt." He ignored me. Later he added that this rebellion would soon be joined by the anti-globalization forces of the Seattle protesters. When he was asked by a member of the audience to comment on the applause for the September 11 massacres in Arab streets and camps, he responded that the French Revolution, too, had been greeted by popular enthusiasm.

Although those who don't read The Nation, the New Statesman, and the London Review of Books, and who haven't come across Susan Sontag's disdainful geopolitical analysis in the pages of The New Yorker, may not be aware of it, these views are, sadly, not uncommon on the political left. Indeed, I would surmise that audience approval of Stone's and hooks's propositions was something near fifty-fifty. Clapping and hissing are feeble and fickle indicators, true. At different times, in combating both Stone and hooks, I got my own fair share of each. But let's say that three weeks after a mass murder had devastated the downtown district, and at a moment when the miasma from the site could still be felt and smelled, a ticket-buying audience of liberal New Yorkers awarded blame more or less evenhandedly between the members of al Qaeda and the directors of U.S. foreign policy. (And not just of foreign policy: Stone drew applause for his assertion that there was an intimate tie between the New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington attacks and the Florida ballot recount, which was, he asserted, "a complete vindication of the fact that capitalism has destroyed democracy.")

By this time I was entering my twenty-sixth day of active and engaged antagonism toward this sort of talk, or thought, and was impressed despite myself by the realization that I was the first person Stone and hooks and some audience members appeared to have met who did not agree with them. Or perhaps I should rephrase that: I was the first person on the political left they had met who did not echo or ratify their view. As it happens, I know enough about Marxism, for example, to state without overmuch reservation that capitalism, for all its contradictions, is superior to feudalism and serfdom, which is what bin Laden and the Taliban stand for. (Stone, when I put this to him after the event, retorted that his father had spent many years on Wall Street, and thus he knew the topic quite well.)

Having paged through the combined reactions of Sontag, Noam Chomsky, and many others, I am put very much in mind of something from the opening of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It's not the sentence about the historical relation between tragedy and farce. It's the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know. This work of self-reassurance and of hectic, hasty assimilation to the familiar is most marked in the case of Chomsky, whose prose now manifests that symptom first captured in, I recall, words by Dr. Charcot—"le beau calme de l'hysterique." For Chomsky, everything these days is a "truism"; for him it verges on the platitudinous to be obliged to state, once again for those who may have missed it, that the September 11 crime is a mere bagatelle when set beside the offenses of the Empire. From this it's not a very big step to the conclusion that we must change the subject, and change it at once, to Palestine or East Timor or Angola or Iraq. All radical polemic may now proceed as it did before the rude interruption. "Nothing new," as the spin doctors have taught us to say. There's a distinct similarity between this world view and that of the religious dogmatists who regard September 11 in the light of a divine judgment on a sinful society. But to know even what a newspaper reader knows about the Taliban and its zealous destruction of all culture and all science and all human emancipation, and to compare its most noteworthy if not its most awful atrocity to the fall of the Bastille ...

I take a trawl through my e-mail and my mailbag. "Why sing the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic'? Don't they know John Brown was the first terrorist?" ... "What about the civilian casualties in Vietnam, Guatemala, Gaza [fill in as necessary] ...?" This goes on all day, and it goes on while I sleep, so that I open a new batch each morning. Everyone writes to me as if he or she were bravely making a point for the very first time it had ever been made. And so I ask myself, in the spirit of self-criticism that I am enjoining upon these reflexive correspondents, whether I have any responsibility for this dismal tide of dreary traffic, this mob of pseudo-refugees taking shelter in half-baked moral equivalence. Professor Chomsky's preferred comparative case study is Bill Clinton's rocketing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998—a piece of promiscuous violence that took an uncounted number of African lives as part of Clinton's effort to "look presidential" (and also one of many fainthearted earlier attempts to "target" Osama bin Laden). At the time, I wrote several columns denouncing the atrocity, and the racism and cynicism that lay behind it. I also denounced the vileness of the public enthusiasm for the raid, which I think was at least comparable to the gloating of the dispossessed and the stateless over September 11. Now I get all this thrown back at me by people who didn't read it on the first occasion and who appear to believe that only Chomsky has the civic courage to bring the raid up. (He didn't bring it up at the time.) Kipling is back in fashion these days, because of the North-West Frontier, so when I ask myself the question, I also allow myself this couplet from If, in which we are asked, "If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools..."

It is perfectly true that most Americans were somewhat indifferent to the outside world as it was before September 11, and also highly ignorant of it—a point on which the self-blaming faction insists. While attention was elsewhere, a deadly and irreconcilable enemy was laying plans and training recruits. This enemy—unless we are to flatter him by crediting his own propaganda—cares no more for the wretched of the West Bank than did Saddam Hussein when he announced that the road to Palestine and Jerusalem led through Kuwait and Kurdistan. But a lethal and remorseless foe is a troubling thing in more than one way. Not only may he wish you harm; he may force you to think and to act. And these responsibilities—because thinking and acting are responsibilities—may be disconcerting. The ancient Greeks were so impressed and terrified by the Furies that they re-baptized them the Eumenides—"the Kindly Ones"—the better to adjust to them. Members of the left, along with the far larger number of squishy "progressives," have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought. The majority of those "progressives" who take comfort from Stone and Chomsky are not committed, militant anti-imperialists or anti-capitalists. Nothing so muscular. They are of the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I believe I can prove this by means of a brief rhetorical experiment. It runs as follows. Very well, I will stipulate that September 11 was revenge for past American crimes. Specifically, and with supporting detail, I will agree that it was revenge for the crime of past indifference to, and collusion with, the Taliban. May we now agree to cancel this crime by removing from the Taliban the power of enslavement that it exerts over Afghans, and which it hopes to extend? Dead silence from progressives. Couldn't we talk about the ozone layer instead? In other words, all the learned and conscientious objections, as well as all the silly or sinister ones, boil down to this: Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government. (The words "our own" should of course be appropriately ironized, with the necessary quotation marks.) To do so would be a betrayal of the Cherokees.

Some part of this is at least intelligible. My daughter goes to school just across the river from the Pentagon; her good-hearted teachers proposed an "Amity Walk" for children of all nations, to culminate at the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on Massachusetts Avenue. The event would demonstrate that children had no quarrel with anybody. It would not stress the fact that a death squad had just hit a target a few hundred yards away, and would have liked to crash another planeload of hostages anywhere in downtown Washington, and was thwarted in this only by civilians willing to use desperate force. But I had my own reasons, which were no less internationalist, for opposing anything so dismal, and for keeping my child away from anything so inane. I didn't like General Westmoreland or Colonel North or General Pinochet, and I have said more about this than some people. (I did not, like Oliver Stone, become rich or famous by romancing Camelot or by making an unwatchable three-hour movie showing Nixon's and Kissinger's human and vulnerable sides.) I detest General Sharon, and have done so for many years. My face is set against religious and racial demagogues. I believe I know an enemy when I see one. My chief concern when faced with such an antagonist is not that there will be "over-reaction" on the part of those who will fight the adversary—which seems to be the only thing about the recent attacks and the civilized world's response to them that makes the left anxious.

At his best, Noam Chomsky used to insist that there was a distinction to be drawn between state crimes and insurgent crimes, or between the violence of the emperor and the violence of the pirate. The Taliban-bin Laden alliance is a horrific and novel blend of the two. It employs the methods of the anarchist and the rebel in one declension, being surreptitious and covert and relying on the drama of the individual "martyr." But it also draws on the support of police and military and financial systems, and on the base indulgence of certain established and well-funded religious and theocratic leaderships. It throws acid in the faces of unveiled women. It destroys and burns museums and libraries. (Do we need to submit to our own guilt to "understand" this?) It is an elemental challenge, still terrifying even when one appreciates the appalling fact that its program of medieval stultification cannot actually be realized but will nevertheless be fought for. How contemptible it is, and how lowering to the spirit, that America's liberals should have cried so loudly before they had even been hurt, and that they should have been able to be so stoic only when ignoring the cries of others.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200112/hitchens

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Mirandee
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posted August 28, 2006 12:52 AM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Lotus, the opposite of fear is love.

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DayDreamer
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posted August 28, 2006 02:08 AM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Tink,

If I was in a country where Muslims were a majority and didn't feel threatened people would take that term the wrong way and start profiling than I wouldn't mind the term as much.

Since Im in North America and feel that people are abusing that term to label anyone who so happens to be Muslim (whether they practice it or not or use/abuse it or not) as some kind of threat I will be 100% against it.

Yes Ive heard of Handmaid's tale...by Canadian Margaret Atwood...never got around to reading it...but I did watch a bit of the movie version of it...seems like a good movie...but I dont know the whole story. why do you ask?

Mirandee,

Such tactics are one of the reasons I do not trust our governments. Our governments general discourse (besides their actions) regarding foreign affairs is a huge red flag. It drives me insane that we have idiots running our countries.

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Petron
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posted August 28, 2006 08:29 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

talk about fascists!!

*********

Katherine Harris And 'Just Us' Moments

It is time to give thanks for the “just us” moment, the time when politicians and other public figures let their hair down and say what they really feel to, you know, “between you and me"—and an often-mortified public.

Rep. Katherine Harris gave us the latest “just us” moment of frankness last week in an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness . In that interview, she is quoted as saying, in essence, that God “chooses our rulers” and that the Founding Fathers intended a theocracy in America rather than “a nation of secular laws”:

quote:
… that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that certainly isn’t what God intended.

She also said:

quote:
If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin.

We know that her comments were uttered in a “just us” moment because Harris essentially said so this past weekend. The Orlando Sentinel quotes her as saying that "my comments were specifically directed toward a Christian group” and that "my rallying cry has always been people of all faiths should be involved."

Harris' comments line up with the philosophy of groups such as Wallbuilders, the organization founded by former Texas Republican Party vice chairman David Barton to promote the notion, inelegantly expressed by Harris, that America was founded as a Christian nation. Harris is trying to resuscitate a sputtering Senate campaign aimed at defeating incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, and she clearly believes one way to do that is to set herself up a standard-bearer for such Christian Right extremists. (And extreme they are: The Pew Research Center said that while 60 percent of "white evangelicals" in a poll released Aug. 24 believe that the Bible, not "the will of the people," should be the primary guide for U.S. lawmaking, only 16 percent of "mainline" Protestants and 23 percent of Catholics agreed.) Based on the reaction, her interview with the Baptist publication hasn’t helped with the broader public.

Late Monday, this reaction came in from Kim Baldwin, director of public policy at the Interfaith Alliance :

The founders of our nation believed that all Americans should have the right to worship according to their own beliefs, or not to worship at all. So strong was their commitment to religious freedom that they enshrined it in the first sentence of the Bill of Rights. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." In order for society to benefit, religious belief and practice must be free and voluntary. And in matters of faith, government must not take sides and must serve all citizens regardless of their religious belief or non-belief. Because the United States is one nation of many faiths, no citizen’s rights or opportunities should depend on religious beliefs or practices. If there is not freedom from the imposition of religion, there is not freedom for the free practice of religion.

A column today on TomPaine.com looks at another “just us” moment, in which former United Nations ambassador and congressman Andrew Young complained in the Los Angeles Sentinel , an African-American newspaper, about the succession of Jews, Koreans and now Arab store owners in African-American neighborhoods who “have been overcharging us—selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables.” That statement, and his conclusion that Wal-Mart should put these stores out of business, cost him his job as a Wal-Mart front-man in urban communities. It also resulted in him releasing a statement in which he said, "I retract those comments."

“Just us” moments can happen in big crowds as well as intimate interviews. Just ask Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who earlier this month regaled a crowd of campaign supporters with a racial slur directed at S.R. Sidarth, an Indian-American man filming the event for Democratic challenger Jim Webb. Allen, basking in the support of like-minded southern Virginians, felt perfectly comfortable calling the darker-skinned Sidarth a type of monkey and saying to him, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia"—even though Sidarth was born in Virginia, unlike Allen, who was born in Whittier, Calif. It was only when the political condemnation was deafening did Allen pick up the phone to call Sidarth and apologize.

Usually, the apologies and retractions rarely do much to undo the damage done by the original comment, and that is as it should be. We all have our just-us moments, where we tell raw truths about what’s really going on inside our minds and hearts that are then carefully refined and filtered for the rest of the world. And now that we have gotten a new look at Katherine Harris’ politics without its make-up, we are reminded how important it is to see these moments in all of their ugliness.
--Isaiah J. Poole | Monday, August 28, 2006 12:47 PM

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/28/katherine_harris_and_just_us_moments.php


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TINK
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posted August 28, 2006 09:00 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
DD ~ I brought it up because the society that existed in the book, one where fanatical Christian extremists took control of the government, is an example of the sort of thing that might tempt me to use the term Christian fascist. Of course, as I said, "fascist" by strict definition doesn't really work, but you know what I mean.

If someone were to use the term Christian fascist in my presence, I don't imagine I'd be offended. I'm neither a Christian fanatic nor do I deny they exist. I've certainly heard people complain about the Religious Right and, quite frankly, I agree with them. Falwell and his friends are nuts. But they still comprise, thank Heavens, only a small percentage of those who would call themselves Christian. No doubt you've noticed that pockets of the same sort of crooked thinking exists in Islam as well. And Judaism too. Hell, even Buddhism has its dark and scary underbelly.

But I think I understand what you're saying here ...

quote:
Since Im in North America and feel that people are abusing that term to label anyone who so happens to be Muslim (whether they practice it or not or use/abuse it or not) as some kind of threat I will be 100% against it.

Today one could casually point out a few of the more unappetizing aspects of Japanese society without causing much of a fuss, but if one were to do it in 1942 California it might take on a distinctly different feel. In fact, it might be dangerous. War camps and such.

Am I understanding you correctly?

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DayDreamer
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posted September 03, 2006 02:45 AM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
LOL Petron....I like how he put the ending together....

quote:
We all have our just-us moments, where we tell raw truths about what’s really going on inside our minds and hearts that are then carefully refined and filtered for the rest of the world. And now that we have gotten a new look at Katherine Harris’ politics without its make-up, we are reminded how important it is to see these moments in all of their ugliness.


Tink, we could label people of various religions/beliefs as fascists...but what does it take to be thrown into the category of a fascist. I think there's great irony in Bush and his neo-cons throwing this term around with Islam the name of a religion over a billion follow with it...doing so, so carelessly.

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DayDreamer
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posted September 03, 2006 02:50 AM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
here's some of the irony...

George W Bush and the 14 points of fascism

http://oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm

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AcousticGod
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posted September 03, 2006 06:40 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for AcousticGod     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Good article DD and Petron. I've also seen the 14 points of Fascism argument a few places now. Makes for an interesting read.

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Rainbow~
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posted September 03, 2006 08:06 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I think Mirandee posted that awhile back and so did I....*sigh*

(I'm outta here)

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DayDreamer
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posted September 05, 2006 11:35 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I thought the article (and pic) looked familiar.

(Where is everyone hiding...or did everyone go on vacation without me?)

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Lialei
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posted September 06, 2006 08:54 AM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
*giggles at DD*

it's so nice and peaceful, isn't it?

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TINK
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posted September 06, 2006 11:42 AM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I agree, DD. It is certainly ironic.

It's a cliche, I know, but a cliche containing a basic truth - the Republican Party's far right elements have been known to flirt with fascism and, as Jwhop so often reminds us, the extreme end of the Democratic Party tend to lean towards Socialism. Either way, as amusing as it is to watch the pot calling the kettle black it doesn't change the fact that they're both still black.

Sorry to disappoint you, LiaLei

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Lialei
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posted September 06, 2006 12:48 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
What I don't understand is why the far extremes need to be continually pointed out.

Speaking of the humble everyday American working man/woman, most aren't this extreme. They seem to go unrepresented, a silenced voice lost in the righteous fury of polarities that aren't even of them.

GU seems a representative microcosm, of the ways we become so immersed in these rigid, irreconcilable thought systems that have no valid pertenence to who/where we truly are, which is more often at a more striving harmony, if we only shrug off the ridiculous labels and carry onwards in our truer present frequencies.
I know, easier said than done.

No disappointments, Tink.

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TINK
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posted September 06, 2006 02:47 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
The extremes don't need to be pointed out. The make themselves known quite well on their own, don't they?. It's part of their charm.

The laws of nature, human and otherwise, seem to dictate that one extreme calls forth another. The world becomes increasingly unbalanced and disturbed, both on a social and individual scale.

I think the extremes, within and without, need to be acknowledged and dealt with by those humble everyday working man/woman you mentioned. Sadly, in my experience, many of them don't appear to be interested in much more than American Idol and Labor Day shopping sales. This isn't really my idea btw of social and political moderation. This is my idea of the age-old Bread and Circus tactic. Personally, I'm not one to stick my moderate head in the sand.

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Lialei
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posted September 06, 2006 03:35 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Yeah,
Ignoring it exists would do no good either.
I certainly couldn't refute how strongly it affects American politics.
What I guess I was trying to say, is that when we are aggressively coherced to be branded with the labels ourselves,
the energy we might have used in other ways, that we expend on defending ourselves end up exhausted, so we're back at square one.
Maybe come up with a multi-purpose response?
ie~ "Your bag, not mine."

As someone who just experienced the horror of working Labor Day/"Day before the first day of school" in retail, I would have to sadly agree with your overall assessment.
I don't know why anything suprises me anymore.

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salome
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posted September 06, 2006 03:56 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
bread and circus wh*re here...


i went shopping on labor day for my little boy...didnt know there were sales though!

old navy... *sigh* ...i was never that trendy as a little one.

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TINK
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posted September 06, 2006 04:11 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Lialei, I totally agree that labels are altogether poopy. A lot of us are just more complicated than your average label allows. The worst part is, pin one of those dreaded label things on someone often enough and they just might start living up to the hype.

Damn it, Salome! Stop contributing to the decline and fall of western civilization!!

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