Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Rumsfeld says we must be Fascist to defeat Fascist


Sources are reporting that in a speech today to the American Legion, Donald Rumsfeld made the claim

any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere

Any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about the "rising threat of a new type of fascism" is a bad thing Mr Runsfeld? Am I reading this right? Let's examine this statement for what it means. Confusion results when there is a lack of clarity. In the sense Mr Rumsfeld made this statement, an answer is not clear when there is disagreement. We must all agree to a specific course of action for there to be no moral or intellectual clarity.

Now, let's look at a definition of fascism:

A social and political ideology with the primary guiding principle that the state or nation is the highest priority, rather than personal or individual freedoms.

Fascism does not allow deviation from the states view. The state decides the best course of action and the people are expected to follow it without question. This is exactly what Mr Rumsfeld is insisting is best for our country in his address. We should drop our complaints and diverging viewpoints so that there is no 'confusion'. We must all support the official state view. How is this not fascism? How can they claim to want democracy for every country but our own?

Want to know something even more frightening about our country and fascism? It was the father of Fascism, Benito Mussolini who said "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." Think about that the next time you think about Haliburton.

Update 0:
Read this about Rumsfeld. Anything about Rumsfeld that starts with August kills poetry.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Railing against fascism is just a clever way for Republicans to insinuate that Democrats are Hitler appeasers/French/weak without saying it outright.

I'm glad to hear you're joining LITW.

- JP

Shane C. Mason said...

Wacko,

Wow, I think I just heard all of that on Bush's MSN interview. Are you plagerist? :)

Thanks JP, I look forward to posting there. Wondering what to debut with... I am thinking that Monica Lindeen doesn't get enough coverage.

Anonymous said...

I do hope Tester picks up on this under reported position of the Republican party. They're all a bunch of Fascists!

Anonymous said...

Fascism is a word, like "democracy", that has been so abused as to have been stripped of meaning. To call someone a fascist is to say "I don't like you!"

I'll go with FDR's definition - it makes more sense to me:
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if a people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."

By that definition, fascism ahs been knocking at our door for a long long time - as long as I have been alive.

Next Willard said...

very good. conservatives view the world as good and evil and they fear that if the american public fails to only see their nation as the essence of goodness then the nation will fail. this simply isn't right. liberals, on the other hand, susually realize that their nation is not always "good" and can be, at times, evil, but this doesn't change the fact that we, as liberals, hold a great hope that our nation can be good and righteous, but we must work hard for that standing.