Philip Atkinson, Fascist Xenophobe

Yesterday, I brought up the insane rantings of Philip Atkinson, who advocates the genocide of the Iraqi people through nuclear weapons, the transplanting of Americans into Iraq to replace the murdered Iraqis, and the transformation of George Bush from mere President into Dictator. (One wonders why Atkinson hasn't suggested that Bush be deified (astaghfirullah) considering how often he compares him to Julius and Augustus Caesar. Bad form, I guess. Anyhoo...)

More of Atkinson's insane writings have surfaced, despite Family Security Matters' (FSM) efforts at deep-sixing all of his work that they had previously published on their website. Dirt Rhodes Scholar has unearthed an article FSM published back in May in which Atkinson calls for the enslavement and murder of all Mexican immigrants into the U.S. and for the U.S. to invade Mexico (again):

Mexico is now colonizing America and imposing its language and culture on it. Though the Americans still have the strength of understanding to recognize that the Hispanic invasion should be stopped, they are unable to take the measures required to achieve this end. The very least that must be done to halt the Hispanic invasion is the mass enslavement, or execution, of the invaders, which must be followed by an American invasion of Mexico to enforce American language and values upon the Mexicans. But the citizens of the USA recoil from such ruthless violence embracing delusion instead. They pretend that their futile defense is not folly, ignore the slow but inevitable takeover of their country and persecute anyone who tries to dispel their illusions. America has lost its ability to defend itself and must eventually be overrun by people from other cultures.

My emphasis.

Atkinson is apparently ignorant of - or ignores - the history of the North American continent when he writes such trash as:

The result of this migration is inevitable. The invaders take over their new homeland by sheer weight of numbers. The original manners, customs and beliefs of the destination country are slowly replaced by those of their invaders. This can be easily seen in the USA where the actual border with Mexico is slowly moving further north every year. The culture of the white Americans is being displaced by their mainly Hispanic invaders; peace and wealth created by the white American culture are being replaced by poverty and crime brought by the invaders. This represents a take-over made obvious by the replacement of the use of the English language with Spanish. Miami is now a Spanish-speaking city even though it is technically in America -- an English-speaking country.

The Spanish colonized what is now the southwestern United States and Florida long before the Anglos arrived in those areas. (Apparently, Atkinson doesn't know this.) In fact, the bulk of the southwestern states (all of California, Nevada and Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming) belonged to Mexico in the first place, until Mexico was forced to cede that land to the U.S. under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo in 1848. (The remainder of Arizona and New Mexico were purchased by the U.S. in 1853 in a deal known as the Gadsden Purchase. Florida was purchased from Spain in 1819 as part of the terms of the Adams-Onis Treaty.)

Atkinson is a fascist xenophobe; this one article (not counting the article I referenced yesterday) displays five of the fourteen patterns of fascism. It's no surprise that even his colleagues at FSM are washing their hands of him.

Juan Cole on the Misnomer of "Islamic Fascism"

Juan Cole, whom you should read if you don't already, has been on a roll since the crisis in Lebanon began. His latest post, Bush, Islamic Fascism and the Christians of Jounieh, has a very good passage about how Bush's reference to "Islamic fascism" is both incorrect and offensive. First, some background:

Bush is on vacation, his favorite place to be during a major crisis. The August retreat is the only open admission he makes that Cheney and Rumsfeld are actually running the country, and he just doesn't need to be in his office. The only difference between his stonewalling of Lebanon and the way he let New Orleans drown is that he has put away the banjo this summer, at least in public view. He had someone tie a necktie on him and stopped manically clearing brush for long enough to come out with Condi and hold a press conference. He lied, saying that no one wants to see the violence continue. He wants to see the violence continue. Otherwise he would insist on a ceasefire. You see, if you don't have a ceasefire, the violence continues. If you oppose a ceasefire, you are saying you want the violence to continue. He does.

Then he tried to explain the war in Lebanon by saying this,

'They try to spread their jihadist message -- a message I call, it's totalitarian in nature -- Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, they try to spread it as well by taking the attack to those of us who love freedom.'

...

...[T]here are other problems with what Bush said. He contrasted "Islamic fascism" to "democracy," presumably a reference to the Lebanese Hizbullah.

This point is incorrect and offensive for many reasons.

It is a misuse of the word "Islamic." "Islamic" has to do with the ideals and achievements of the Muslims and the Muslim religion. Thus, we speak of Islamic art. We speak of Islamic ethics.

There can be Muslim fascists, just as there can be Christian fascists (and were, in Spain, Italy and Germany, and parts of Central and South America; the Spanish fascists and the Argentinian ones, e.g., were adopted by the United States government as close allies.)

But there cannot be "Islamic" fascists, because the Islamic religion enshrines values that are incompatible with fascism.

Fascism is not even a very good description of the ideology of most Muslim fundamentalists. Most fascism in the Middle East has been secular in character, as with Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Fascism involves extreme nationalism and most often racism. Muslim fundamentalist movements reject the nation-state as their primary loyalty and reject race as a basis for political action or social discrimination. Fascists exalt the state above individual rights or the rule of law. Muslim fundamentalists exalt Islamic law above the utilitarian interests of the state. Fascism exalts youth and a master race above the old and the "inferior" races. Muslim fundamentalists would never speak this way. Fascism glorifies "war as an end in itself and victory as the determinant of truth and worthiness." Muslim fundamentalists view holy war as a ritual with precise conditions and laws governing its conduct. It is not considered an end in itself.

Another excellent post by Dr. Cole is One Ring to Rule Them All, in which he speculates that the US-Israeli war on Lebanon is merely phase I of a larger strategy to deprive Asian economies (China and India in particular) of access to middle eastern oil in favor of the American economy:

Destroy Lebanon, and destroy Hizbullah, and you reduce Iran's strategic depth. Destroy the Iranian nuclear program and you leave it helpless and vulnerable to having done to it what the Israelis did to Lebanon. You leave it vulnerable to regime change, and a dragooning of Iran back into the US sphere of influence, denying it to China and assuring its 500 tcf of natural gas to US corporations. You also politically reorient the entire Gulf, with both Saddam and Khamenei gone, toward the United States. Voila, you avoid peak oil problems in the US until a technological fix can be found, and you avoid a situation where China and India have special access to Iran and the Gulf.

This one little paragraph is only a tiny bit of the larger argument; I suggest you read the entire post. (The whole post has created 81 comments to date - some of which have their own excellent analyses - which is about 3-4 times the number that Dr. Cole normally receives on any given post that he writes.)

American Fascism

The following article was written by the Rev. Charles Hoffacker, an Episcopal priest, and originally appeared in the Port Huron (MI) Times-Herald. I have some brief comments at the end.

A recent study identifies characteristics common to seven fascist regimes. Laurence W. Britt examines regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile, and Indonesia-all of them eventually overthrown - and notes these 14 patterns of national behavior that each regime engaged in to one extent or another.

• Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. This was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign.
  
  
• Disdain for human rights. Victims of human rights abuse were marginalized or abuse was concealed.
  
  
• Identification of scapegoats as a unifying cause. Scapegoating directed attention away from public problems and channeled frustration into controlled directions.
  
  
• Avid militarism. The military was used to assert national goals, intimidate other countries, and increase the ruling elite's prestige.
  
  
• Rampant sexism. Women were treated as second-class citizens. Homophobia was intensified.
  
  
• A controlled mass media. Leaders of the mass media were often compatible with the regime and kept the public unaware of the regime's excesses.
  
  
• Obsession with national security. A national security apparatus served as an instrument of internal repression.
  
  
• Religion and ruling elite tied together. Propaganda kept up the illusion that those in power were opponents of the "godless."
  
  
• Power of corporations protected. The ability of large corporations to act in relative freedom was not compromised even when personal liberties were curtailed.
  
  
• Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. The poor were seen as an underclass and viewed with suspicion or contempt.
  
  
• Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Artistic and academic freedom were considered subversive.
  
  
• Obsession with crime and punishment. Severe systems of criminal justice produced huge prison populations. Police power was almost unchecked, leading to widespread abuse.
  
  
• Rampant cronyism and corruption. The economic elite and the power elite enriched one another through unethical favoritism.
  
  
• Fraudulent elections. When elections with candidates took place, they would usually be perverted by those in power to achieve the desired result.
  

Does this sound familiar? Ample parallels can be found between Britt's portrait of fascism and events in early 21st-century America.

Fascism is an ideology built on fear. What breaks the allure of fascism is a faith too authentic to accept lies. One form of this faith is belief in a God of compassion whose perfect love casts out fear. Another is belief in the ability of a free people to govern themselves.

We do not strive for a justice based on repentance and encounter with the God of compassion. Distracted in countless ways, disconnected from one another, we remain deeply ignorant of how all people are one people.

This nation once engaged in a gigantic military struggle to defeat European fascism. We must now undertake a spiritual struggle to defeat the fascism now threatening our hearts and our public life.


Rev. Hoffacker's comment regarding "...belief in a God of compassion whose perfect love casts out fear" reminded me of an ayah in the Qur'an:

"It is but Satan who instils [into you] fear of his allies: so fear them not, but fear Me, if you are [truly] believers!" (3:175)

Is it any wonder that the fascist neo-cons, who have built their entire philosophy upon a series of lies as flimsy as a house of cards, would choose the Muslim ummah and Islam as their enemy du jour? That they have focused their attack on a religion whose members aren't interested in submitting to mere men, but who submit only to Allah (swt)?

Governments, in both their form and as individual entities, come and go; Allah (swt) and Islam remain.

"Have they, then, never journeyed about the earth and beheld what happened in the end to those [willful sinners] who lived before their time? God destroyed them utterly: and the like thereof awaits all who deny the truth." (47:10)

Hulagu Khan (1217-65), grandson of Chinggis Khan, siezed Baghdad in 1258, killing the last Abbasid caliph and making a pyramid of the skulls of Baghdad's scholars, religious leaders, and poets. What must the people of that time felt, seeing the wholesale slaughter and destruction? And yet the Mongol civilization that sacked Baghdad was long ago reduced to dust upon the wind, just as were many other civilizations that had threatened Islam in the past.

Better for all of us to fear Allah (swt). The neo-cons are merely the latest incarnation of a failed system of government.

NeoConservative Manifesto

For "b." :) I'm sure your mom won't like this one either. ;) The video is very similar in theme to the "Unclassified" video below; I also like this guy's use of animation. Run time: 2:40.

Unclassified

"What sort of community do you live in? Where would you place it on a democracy-despotism scale?" Run time: 8:26.

The More Things Change... The American Fascist

Pop quiz, hotshot. Who said the following and when?

"The really dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Admit it, this could very well apply to today's situation. In fact, it was said by then-Vice President Henry Wallace, published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944. The more things change...