in a troubled world. The other day on Talk of the Nation the subject (too briefly considered—almost a sidebar) was "does the administration's attempt to conflate the Iraqi insurgency, along with sundry other Islamic movements that wish us ill, with mid-twentieth century fascism constitute a historically apt analogy?" The consensus was that it did not. I will insert here a bit from [link|http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_digbysblog_archive.html#115706421486609726|digby], who tellingly cites a few features of fascism as described by one [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini|Benito Mussolini] a man whose other well-documented sins cannot detract from his claim to substantial authority on this subject:

...The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after...

[...]

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State.......The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....

Ayup, fits the dead-enders in Iraq to a "T" if you ask me.

Anyway, one of the specialists asked responded that no, the pesky Muslim foes did not particularly resemble the Germans or the Italians of the war that began 67 years ago today. A followup question was: well, does the term "fascism" apply, as some of its blogger critics have suggested, to the Bush administration? The response went something like: "no, I think what we have now isn't fascism but an oligarchic authoritarian system."

Whereupon I went Whe-e-e-e-w! I sometimes thought, in my darkest moments, that we were edging toward fascism, but now I know that we're merely living under an Oligarchic Authoritarian System, for which I propose the extended acronym OASys. Henceforth, my good auditors, should I ever so far forget myself in the heat on online discourse as to use the term "fascism" I trust that you will understand that I meant merely "OASys," that worthy successor to Madison and Jefferson's vision of Constitutional democracy.

cordially,