Not “fascism” as in “mean people doing mean things that I don’t like,” but “fascism” in its economic sense of “large private businesses being in bed with government”?
As such, scholars argue that fascists had no economic ideology, but they did follow popular opinion, the interests of their donors and the necessities of World War II. In general, fascist governments exercised control over private property, but they did not nationalize it. Scholars also noted that big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Italian Fascist and German fascist governments. Business leaders supported the government’s political and military goals. In exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies.
Facebook is still considered to be a private company, but it does the government’s bidding – if the government is on the left. And right now, the government is on the left:
Limited government conservatism has no answer for the fused political-corporate leviathan. You aren't going to "get the government out of the economy" when corporations welcome and facilitate state intervention. Capital is the enemy, too https://t.co/FnqCijMSnE
Democrats have summoned tech executives to the Congress at least 4 times in the last year. The last time, they repeatedly and explicitly threatened regulatory and other legal punishment if they don't start censoring more: the content Dems regard as disinformation or "hate speech" https://t.co/2TV4mYCI2Z
U.S. Department of Justice officials deliberately delayed an investigation into Hunter Biden’s potential tax law violations and sketchy overseas business dealings because of the effect it could have on the presidential election, according to a Politico report.
Delaware’s U.S. Attorney David Weiss allegedly postponed allowing prosecutors to obtain search warrants and issue grand jury subpoenas last summer, after facing pressure from other officials who feared the investigation’s influence on the 2020 presidential election and now-President Joe Biden’s campaign.
And if we didn’t already know the details, we certainly could have and should have deduced the basic outline. I certainly imagined the investigation had been stalled for political reasons. It’s sad when our default position is extreme distrust of our leftist-partisan government institutions, agencies, and officials.
Are we in the Now It Can Be Told phase of the Hunter Biden story? For example [my emphasis]:
“They advised [Hunter] to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election,” reported Politico, one of the many corporate media outlets that [had] brushed off the possibility of any wrongdoing by Hunter despite the discovery of his incriminating laptop.
The protection was activated:
Shortly before Election Day, prosecutors and then-Attorney General Bill Barr worked together to keep the investigation from going fully public and decided not to appoint a special investigator for the case.
I’m in agreement with this:
DOJ’s only purpose anymore is to protect the ruling regime’s friends and persecute the regime’s political enemies. It is corrupt and unsalvageable. https://t.co/A9VACBt4hN
But I have a few questions: why is Politico reporting on this, even now? Are they offended that the DOJ protected Hunter and Joe? I very much doubt it. Or are they trying to get ahead of a story – meaning, is Hunter about to be indicted for something? Neither of these explanations seems quite satisfactory to me, but I can’t come up with any others.
Also: is there anything to be done about the DOJ? If the DOJ is so hopelessly corrupt (which I believe it is), could any Republican president effectively reform it? I have very strong doubts. It would involve getting a Republican president in there who is willing to fire nearly everyone and hire an entirely new crew, and even then it would be very difficult to find enough lawyers who are dedicated to objectively applying the law.
Yesterday in a thread on the unrest and violence in South Africa, the perennial question of what’s wrong with Africa came up. It occurs to me that it might be time to recycle a post from seven years ago that I wrote on that very question. Rather than cutting and pasting the whole thing, I’ll just post this link to it, but I suggest you read the post in its entirety. An excerpt:
The entire question is a fascinating although depressing one, and it led me to a couple of hours of reading last night, with the Google query “Why is Africa such a mess?” leading the way. What I discovered was a certain consensus, and although I don’t think it goes deep enough it’s certainly a credible piece of the whole.
The gist of it is that, after colonialism ended, when Africa had a seeming chance to set its own trajectory, its countries rejected liberal democracy and capitalism in favor of strong men and socialism. The strong men exacerbated the corruption, and the socialism led to—well, the bad economies to which socialism tends to lead. Both choices (if you can call them that) almost certainly made things worse in Africa than they would otherwise have been.
And today I’d like to add some links to a discussion of Africa by Thomas Sowell. First we have this article from 2005 entitled “Geography and man have all but killed Africa.” Here’s an excerpt:
Almost every great city in the world has risen on navigable waterways — and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent…
Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level, and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and streams must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.
Water transport was crucial in the thousands of years before there were trains or automobiles. It was crucial for developing an economy and crucial for developing a culture in touch with enough other widely scattered cultures to make use of advances in the rest of the world. But many African societies have been isolated by that continent’s dearth of both navigable rivers and harbors.
Isolated regions have almost invariably lagged behind regions in touch with a wider cultural universe…
Small, tribal societies were another consequence of geographic isolation — and the vulnerability of such societies to conquest by outsiders was another…
Many people expected great things from Africa when new independent African nations began to emerge from colonial rule in the 1960s, often headed by leaders who had been educated in Europe and America.
Unfortunately, what these new leaders brought back to Africa from the West were not the things that had made the West prosperous and powerful but the untested theories of Western intellectuals and ideologues who had taught them…
The net result was that African leaders, full of confidence because of their Western education and the adulation of the Western intelligentsia, made their people guinea pigs for half-baked theories that had contributed nothing to the rise of the West and had contributed much to its social degeneration.
In narrowly economic terms, even though it is true that too many African nations had their standards of living fall below where they had been under European imperialists, still the 1980s and 1990s saw some turnarounds. The economies of Nigeria and Ghana, for example, began to grow after the statist regimes began to allow freer operation of the marketplace, often under heavy pressure from international aid agencies that finally stopped accepting excuses and started insisting on performance.
Comparisons with Asia are less apt than comparisons with the Balkans would be, both historically and currently. The clearest parallels in sickening atrocities and blind ethnic hatreds are those between the Balkan wars and tribal warfare in Africa…Historically, both areas have been culturally fragmented by their geography..The resulting poverty and disunity of both regions likewise made both vulnerable to the outside world and sources of slaves–the Balkans supplying Europe and the Middle East with slaves for centuries before the first African was taken in bondage to the Western Hemisphere.
Geographic handicaps do not merely limit economic opportunities or inhibit political consolidation, they limit the development of the people themselves by isolating them from one another and from the outside world. Such isolated peoples are almost invariably backward and often brutal, whether they are isolated in mountainous terrain or on small islands scattered across vast reaches of water or–as in sub-Saharan Africa–isolated by a painful combination of geographic handicaps, ranging from a dearth of navigable waterways to debilitating diseases that weakened men and made draft animals virtually impossible to use over large regions.
To me, these explanations make a lot of sense – as Sowell so often does.
Riots. Will this die down, or is it the beginning of a civil war and the further disintegration of an already-disintegrating country?
It really depends on how much the government is willing to crack down. At the moment, the violence has been confined to one province, and 25,000 troops have been called up:
South Africa’s army began deploying 25,000 troops Thursday to assist police in quelling the weeklong riots and violence sparked by the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma.
In the largest deployment of soldiers since the end of White minority rule in 1994, the South African National Defence Force has also called up all of its reserve force of 12,000 troops.
In a show of force, a convoy of more than a dozen armored personnel carriers brought soldiers Thursday into Gauteng province, South Africa’s most populous, which includes the largest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria.
The violence erupted last week after Zuma began serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court for refusing to comply with a court order to testify at a state-backed inquiry investigating allegations of corruption while he was president from 2009 to 2018.
The protests in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal escalated into a spree of theft in township areas, although it has not spread to South Africa’s seven other provinces, where police are on alert…
Security forces increased their presence in the Durban suburb of Phoenix, where the riots caused racial tensions to flare. The predominantly Indian residents of Phoenix had been patrolling their area against the unrest and are accused of shooting Black people suspected of being rioters.
Margaret Thatcher made a memorable point in 1990 about socialism. Her example involved the standard of living:
Nikole Hannah-Jones, head of the 1619 Project, seems to take the same tack as the leftists in the above clip, only Hannah-Jones spoke about the situation of black people and white people in Cuba:
In 2019, around the original launch of the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones identified Cuba as a model for racial equality. The 1619 Project claims to unearth systemic racism in the United States, and the original version claimed that the “true founding” of America came not with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but with the arrival of the first slaves in Virginia in 1619 (the first slaves actually arrived far earlier). In an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Hannah-Jones suggested the U.S. should follow Cuba in fighting racism.
“Are there candidates right now — or even just places — that you think have a viable and sufficiently ambitious integration agenda, and if so, what is it?” Klein asked Hannah-Jones on his podcast, recently unearthed by The National Pulse.
“I’m definitely not an expert on race relations internationally,” Hannah-Jones began. She also admitted that “it’s also hard to look at countries that didn’t have large institutions of slavery and compare them to the United States.”
“If you want to see the most equal multi-racial democ… — it’s not a democracy — the most equal multi-racial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” Hannah-Jones said…
“Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere. I mean the Caribbean — most of the Caribbean — it’s hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small, they’re countries run by black folks, but in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism, which I’m sure no one wants to hear,” Hannah-Jones argued.
“Black Cubans especially are wary of outsiders wishing to overthrow the Castro regime. They admit the revolution has been imperfect, but it also led to the end of codified racism and brought universal education and access to jobs to black Cubans,” she argued. “Without the revolution, they wonder, where would they be?”
Where would they be? Probably a lot better off. The Cuban revolution happened in the late 50s, and I am pretty sure that without Communism the black population of Cuba would have made even more progress between then and now than it actually has made. They certainly would have had more liberty – as would the white population of Cuba.
And it’s not even as though what Hannah-Jones is saying about race relations and racism in Cuba is true. Plenty of Cubans dispute the Party line that racism is gone in Cuba:
Typically the proponents of the elimination of racism position are close to the revolutionary government, supportive of the revolution in total, and/or come from an older generation of Cubans that are more familiar with pre-revolutionary racism. They argue that the dismantling of economic class through socialism destroyed the material perpetuation of racism. In 1966, Castro himself said that, “Discrimination disappeared when class privileges disappeared.”…
While many opponents of the revolution, such as Cuban emigrants, argue that Castro created race problems on the island, the most common claim for the exacerbation of racism is the revolution’s inability to accept Afro-Cubans who want to claim a black identity. After 1961, it was simply taboo to talk about race at all. Antiracist Cuban activists who rejected a raceless approach and wanted to show pride in their blackness such as Walterio Carbonell and Juan René Betancourt in the 1960s, were punished with exile or imprisonment.
Esteban Morales Domínguez, a professor in the University of Havana, believes that “the absence of the debate on the racial problem already threatens {…} the revolution’s social project.” Carlos Moore, who has written extensively on the issue, says that “there is an unstated threat, blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead.” He says that a new generation of black Cubans are looking at politics in another way.[24] Cuban rap groups of today are fighting against this censorship; Hermanos de Causa explains the problem best by saying, “Don’t you tell me that there isn’t any [racism], because I have seen it/ don’t tell me that it doesn’t exist, because I have lived it.”
It seems that Hannah-Jones would have had to flee Cuba, or be imprisoned, for speaking the way she does. Here she’s rewarded for it. But like the good leftist that she is, she nevertheless praises Cuba for its racial policies.
I recently was on an airplane and sitting next to me was a young man in his mid-twenties, sporting a full set of complicated tattoos. He was very talkative, and as we were chatting I mentioned that the first time I ever was on an airplane was in 1960.
He was utterly flabbergasted. If I had said 1860, he could not have seemed more surprised.
He said to me that everything must have been so different back then, and I agreed it was pretty different. He wanted me to explain what it was like. One of the things I mentioned is that airplanes used to often fly without being at all full. Another was that the flight attendants wore really sharp uniforms. And still another was that the passengers dressed up for flying – such as, for women, dresses and high heels.
He was even more flabbergasted. “Why?” he asked. “Why would they dress up?” I tried to tell him that was just the way it was in general. People took pride in the way they looked and most people dressed up to go out, and that very much included plane flight.
There was more to the conversation, but that’s the part that sticks with me. That, and his utter surprise.
I love being a teacher and I care a great deal about my students, almost all of whom are non-white. This past 2020/21 school year was a sad and worrisome turning point for me as an educator. Providence K-8 teachers were introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.
Yes, I am speaking about the controversial critical race theory that has infiltrated our public schools here in Rhode Island under the umbrella of Cuturally Responsive learning and teaching, which includes a focus on identities. You won’t see the words “critical race theory” on the materials, but those are the concepts taught. The new, racialized curriculum and materials focuses almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative, and have created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before.
That is exactly what one might expect from a curriculum so racist and divisive. I can only conclude that this is the intent of those who designed and implemented this sort of poisonous indoctrination.
I believe they were also hoping it would fly under the radar. And after all, what choice do most parents have, particularly if both must work or if there’s a single parent and little time for homeschooling as well as not enough money for private school? COVID allowed more parents to see the CRT sausage being made, as it were, and now there’s more public knowledge about it and more parents incensed about it.
Not enough, but more.
To continue [emphasis mine]:
We did not need a new curriculum for students to learn about slavery and racism. We already did that, in great depth, relying in part on the writings of great African-American authors.
American history now is being retold exclusively from the perspective of oppressed peoples during the Revolutionary period through to the Civil War, and also in the literature of the Civil Rights movement. From my position in the classroom, it seemed that much of American history and literature was getting wiped out. No one of these new books, standing alone, would be problematic, it’s the new lack of diversity of perspective that is the problem. Although the 1619 Project itself has not yet been introduced, the historical perspective now has shifted to making slavery and racism the defining events of the founding and growth of America.
Public schools are now largely dominated by leftist thought and pedagoguery – especially in blue states and cities – teaching a generation of children to hate their country and that its basis is in Original Sin. This is not new, but it’s gotten far worse.
Please read the whole thing, even if think you’re already familiar with the sort of process it describes.
In 1790, Lafayette gave the wrought-iron, one-pound and three-ounce key to the Bastille to U.S. President George Washington. Washington displayed it prominently at government facilities and events in New York and in Philadelphia until shortly before his retirement in 1797. The key remains on display at Washington’s residence of Mount Vernon.
Palloy [the man in charge of disassembling the Bastille a few months after the storming] also took bricks from the Bastille and had them carved into replicas of the fortress, which he sold, along with medals allegedly made from the chains of prisoners.
