Do you think Barack Hussein 0bama is a fascist?

[Andy F]

No, he's not.

Unfortunately, the United States since the start of the Cold War in the 1930s has been evolving more & more into a "national security state," with extensive government surveillance of the citizens & with a basically imperialistic foreign policy carried out in the interests of powerful US corporations, and arguably in the interests of global capitalism as a whole.

This sort of system does have authoritarian tendencies. But it's not "fascist" in the sense that Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were.

It is true that in the past, the US government in its foreign policies has supported dictatorial governments in the Third World that were fascist, or close to it.

If Obama were to do this again -- by supporting, say, an Egyptian government headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, or a repressive monarchy in Bahrain -- he'd be acting in harmony with a long line of precedents set by other presidents.

In addition to recent Cold War repression and the hysteria often associated with the new "war on terror," the government of the United States has a habit of fairly brutally repressing leftwing dissidents at home -- and in some cases, probably rightwing dissidents also -- which dates back to Woodrow Wilson's suppression of antiwar, socialist & anarchist voices during WW I.

The massive arrests of leftwingers, and the deportation of many leftwing immigrants during the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920 were another sign that US political democracy does NOT always extend to political dissidents who seem to threaten the State or capitalism as a whole.

The gross abuses of CIA and FBI powers during the government crackdown of anti-war and black militant activists in the 1960s, especially under the FBI'S so called "COINTELPRO" program, as documented in the Church Committee Report of 1975, offer still another reminder that there are real limits on how "free" individual Americans really are to challenge the establishment.

HOWEVER -- these things, even taken together, do not make the United States a "fascist" country. Obama also is not a "fascist" leader, even if his administration is continuing some of the Bush administration's rotten policies regarding government surveillance over the citizens.

If you want to argue that the US government is less than fully democratic under Obama - as it was under Bush & Cheney, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Clinton, Nixon, Johnson & Kennedy before him -- I would agree.

But sometimes "differences in degree" add up to "differences in kind." Despite the government's abuses of basic civil liberties, American society differs in so many important degrees from fascist Italy and Germany that there really is a "difference in kind" here.

A flawed and sometimes hypocritical democracy/ republic is just NOT the same as a fascist state. Let's all make sure that we keep that difference alive, and expand it. Even when government spying and government authoritarianism aren't "fascist," they're still bad -- and Americans of left, right & center should fight against them, in defense of the Constitution.

-- democratic socialist