“Fascism is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe. It is true that there are certain rather creepy strains of leader-worship in the Obama camp, but I don’t think those are representative. Still, it’s easy to see why gun sales have been booming.” – Glenn Reynolds
Europeans are too jaded to believe in anything anymore. “Fascism” has really lost all meaning except as an epithet. It’s been defined as patriotism, nationalism, having a value system without MLK as a patron saint, disagreeing with Socialists, eating animals, not eating animals, belonging to the AKC, voting blue, voting red…ad infinitum.
The article he’s referencing.
http://www.wcvarones.com/2012/10/rime-of-ancient-australian.html
It’s about liberty. It’s about taking your fate into your own hands versus submitting to a poverty induced pseudo-slave mentality.
The two parties are both out for your freedoms, one by making you depend on them via disarmament and financial aid, the other via religious like brow beating and unhinged capitolism.
What can be done if the masses refuse to do the math? What can be done when our future generations are being trained to be drones in public schools? What can be done when being a third party proponent is considered terrorism?
“Fascism is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe.”
I’m glad he recognizes why lovers of liberty would choose to arm themselves, but the notion that “it-will-never-happen-here” is naive and dangerous.
Instapundit is a true believer in being prepared. He competes in IDPA (or the other one) matches, and often runs links on preparedness, bugout bags, and 2nd amendment news. He just believes in being prepared for the chaos of life. I don’t think he’s naive that it can’t happen here. Just my take from reading his blog and news articles.
I didn’t know that, although I was more speaking about the generalized notion that most folks have. It wasn’t intended to specifically impugn Instapundit.
#1 independent thinker on net
How many American gun owners would end up supporting facism if it was, you know, the correct brand of facism?
Good question. How many gun owners support the “War on Drugs?” How many support Concealed Carry Permits? How many support Driver’s Licenses, Border Check-points, DUI check-points, Auto Insurance mandates, Building permits, Food permits, Business permits, Property taxes, Zoning boards, Public education, Income taxes, Prison labor, Luxury taxes, Inheritance taxes, ….. Shall I go on?
To some degree, yes I support things like business permits and zoning laws. I wouldn’t want my neighber opening a bar in his garage. In a crowded, non frontier society there’s a need for some regulations and enforcement.
Getting consensus on what an appropriate level of government is will probably be next to impossible. Everybody has their own experience and personal beliefs to throw in the mix.
Good question. Most American gun owners lean either liberal or fascist. They could easily rationalize how a more extreme version is justified even if it means harsh actions so to create a “better and truer America”.
So if some group calling itself the Aynian Brotherhood seized power, and
(a) suspended elctions, since they don’t matter
(b) declared that the 47% who don’t pay income taxes — those who view themselves and victims and refuse to take responsibility for themselves — will be sent to labor reservations until they pay off their debt to society. Their debt will be auctioned off to private tax-payers, and the labor reservations will be privatized and run for-profit
(c) declared that the rest of you can go about your normal lives, and even keep your guns, as long as you don’t interfere with (a) and (b)
Do you really believe that American gun-owning civilians would rebel?
That depends on the severety of the infractions on our liberties. This is why smart faschists do it in tiny increments.
You guys are drinking kool-aid in an echo chamber, to mix a metaphor. Obama has been in office less than 4 years, most of it with a hostile, do-nothing Congress. He hasn’t done squat to reduce your freedom. The loss of liberty has been going on for decades, mostly due to over-zealous state legislatures, but also Congress.
I wouldn’t say he hasn’t done squat, as Obamacare and the HHS mandate beg to disagree. Obama is no FDR, but he’s been no saint either. I’d rank him as just a little worse than Bush the second.
That being said I don’t think Romney will be any different.
Obango has supported newer more extreme versions of the Patriot Act, placed two left-wing extremist onto the supreme court, his US Dept of Education have taken actions to take the local police out of the investigation when a male university student is accused of rape leaving the decision to a school board whether or not to kick him out based on some 51% belief he might have done it and thus tarnish his transcripts for life, etc etc etc. It goes on and on. Obangos international borrowing policies (following Bush) are putting huge burdens on future generations to pay off. That type of problem will result in stealing even more money from the people which limits their quality of life and freedom to do things that would otherwise have done. Obango has kept busy pushing the demographic restructuring of society giving even more privileges called rights to special class status groups ie women, blacks/minorities, gays vs. men, whites, and heterosexuals. Obango is not so much about equal opportunity but about stealing from some, and then prohibiting and blocking those same people while holding the door for others qualified or not.
Obango’s Admin (like Bush) are doing many numerous things to curtail our liberties and quality of life. Down the road it leads to corporatism which is a fancy name for fascism.
He had absolute control for his first two years and he did what he wanted to do. That’s why he lost control of Congress in 2010.
You need to look at the ‘executive orders’ he has generated ..
I don’t know if we can say that we’ve never had facism here. During ww2 FDR had 100 thousand + Americans rounded up at gun point and moved into “camps” simply because of their race. Does this qualify as facism?
Or the police telling my parents which parts of town the could and could not be in when the sun went down just 50 years ago…
Yes, it does. So does the genocide of the Native Americans (who maybe weren’t all that native since they emigrated from Asia). So does slavery and forced labor. So does suspension of the 1st Amendment by Lincoln when he found it inconvenient.
If the government can find a reason to imprison 100,000 citizens of Japanese descent, it can find a reason to put you away, too. We’ve dipped our toes into, and maybe swam in the cesspool of fascism many times before, courtesy of our federal government, and we will again.
I don’t know the details yet I’ve read that Lincoln (a progressive president too) used very heavy handed techniques that violated private citizen’s (non-military) rights and liberties who were opposed to him.
FYI,
“The Real Lincoln” by Thomas DiLorenzo is a real eye-opener.
“It is true that there are certain rather creepy strains of leader-worship in the Obama camp, but I don’t think those are representative.”
— There were some of those creepy strains with George Bush too.
We are always only one political generation away from authoritarianism and sadism. Many people, openly or not, want a supreme leader a parent-god-like figure to obey and follow. Who would have imagined in 1925 what would happen by 1945? Humans are not more evolved than centuries ago. Anything can happen to radically change people’s behavior and beliefs: famine, plague, war from within or without, climate change, political and religious oppression, economic collapse, financial destitution and currency implosion etc. Who will come to power and who blamed?
America is less free than I can ever remember. Our democratic-republic is hanging by a political thread of convenience. The elitist politicos want more big government and power over the people regardless of party. Capitalism is now transitioning down the path to fascism. As goes the economy so will even more quickly go the political system.
The democrats and republicans are the two most dangerous and destructive criminal gangs in America. Those two parties consist of mostly liberal fascists and conservative fascists even if the sheeple among their rank and file don’t know it. Fascism in its different forms unites them. Medium term I think the liberal fascists will win. Long term, for the factors mentioned above anything can happen.
Local Government is far easier to counteract than national govt. Which is why National Gov. usurps Local on a regular basis
Most of the people who write endless tomes defining and ranting about ‘fascism’ are left of center to outright marxists, so lots of emphasis is placed on what are really only surface attributes of fascism. The left wing likes to point to the racial superiority angles (from Germany – Italy’s version was never very big on this), or the suppression of labor unions (because labor unions are a leftist institution, the left wing gets in a lather when they’re banned), etc. Most of this is utter nonsense and leftist drivel.
Here’s the bright and clear demarcation for me when one crosses into fascism:
When the government tells you with whom you’re going to do business if you’re a consumer, and with whom you’re going to do business, how and for how much, if you’re the business serving the consumer. The distinction from communism is that there is private ownership of property, but the government tells private property owners what the owners are going to do with that property – or else.
In the US, we’ve had two very close calls with fascism: the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Wilson is my pick for second worst president of all time, with the first being James Buchanan. FDR turned the American economy into a top-down command economy, quite similar to what we now see in China. Wilson was an all-purpose idiot, from getting us involved in WWI when we had no real national interest to the idiotic idea of the “League of Nations,” the forerunner to the even more expensive and useless United Nations.
Both Wilson and FDR are excellent examples why we should prohibit people from the Ivy League from holding public office in the US. Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr and now Obama provide other excellent examples of why we should enact such a constitutional amendment.
The universal constant in both fascism and communism (as well as the softer ‘socialism’) economic models is that the ‘elite’ think they know better than you how to run your life. There is no better description of American politics today than this: We have a bunch of know-it-all busybodies with Ivy League credentials in the press and government who think they know so much better than everyone else what/how/when/why something should be done. That includes banning guns, regulating commerce until it stops, telling you what kind of food you should eat, when you should see a doctor, how much you should pay to see that doctor, what kind of car you should drive, whether you should own a car at all, how much you should pay for gasoline, taxing you to provide slush funds for idiotic projects here and abroad, etc.
“the ‘elite’ think they know better than you how to run your life.”
This is an excellent summation of American politics! But it’s not confined to those in office – it’s deep within the progressive mindset on all parts of the political spectrum. The true meaning of freedom, which includes -gasp!- the freedom to fail, is all but forgotten.