Right off the bat: Ron Paul scares the fuck out of me.

So, we had our first antiwar meeting here in town last week, and fairly expectedly, there were several "9/11 truth" types there, some of whom I knew previously, who I'm on good terms with. Afterwards, I was chatting with a couple other attendees, and one guy said that the current regime is a perfect example of classical fascism; government collusion with corporations. I don't usually interrupt, but this is one topic that needs to be set straight. I explained that fascism is a very specific type of movement, whereas the current regime is fairly commonplace in the history of the republic form of government, paired with industrial capitalism. Of course corporations and the state are going to collude: capitalism creates the modern state (armies, police, bureaucracy, political class, etc) in order to protect its private property from the unwashed masses (that's us).

FASCISM is a mass movement, traditionally based in the middle class when it has lost its reletative status and privileges. When it loses these things, it lashes out not at the capitalist class, but at the human beings who share their class interests but are of different ethnicities and identities. Fascism seeks to transform society back to some kind of mythological idealized past. While the Nazi Party made strong left-wing pretensions early on, it quickly liquidated that tendency in the Night of the Long Knives, once it had captured power. Fascism tricks the working class into thinking that RIGHT and LEFT have something in common. They do NOT.

Which brings me to Ron Paul. Holy crap I hate Ron Paul. I'm going to put the old question of libertarianism and lezzes-faire capitalism aside, because I'm tired of arguing about it. See AnarchistFAQ.org. Ron Paul is an incredibly anti-immigrant BIGOT:http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/border-security-and-immigration-reform/ If he comes to CT, that is the basis upon which I will organize an action against him. He is using and exaserbating the xenophobic hysteria in the US today to promote himself. Anything else that could be construed to be positive about him is completely negated by that fact. He is part and parcel of the movement that includes the Minutemen, union busters, and explicit fascists. He wants to cut off all aid to these super-exploited colonized communities on the basis that they were born on the wrong side of some invisible fucking line--by which he really means that they're actually born the wrong color. You wonder why you never hear any of these creeps rail against the massive amounts of immigrants from Eastern Europe here without documentation...

So instead of funneling the popular discontent in this country against the real enemies, the capitalist class, he has embraced the populist reactionary rhetoric that is classical fascism. He is part of a growing pattern of reactionary tendencies carving out a niche on the LEFT. The '9/11 Truth Movement' has been steadily incubating for years, and as I mentioned above, they're pretty common in the antiwar movement. They have much of the energy and motivation that the mainstream antiwar movement lacks, which by comparison makes them seem awfully charismatic and appealing. Fortunately, they're also full of wingnuts.

This phenomanon fits into this general New Fascism because it presupposes one fact: that "America" (whatever the fuck that is) could never have fucked up so badly as we did on 9/11; that it must have been intentional on our part, otherwise those dirty foreigners could never have struck such a blow against the omnipotent, all-powerful US government. It ignores the fact that the system, from the various agencies, the corporations, the political groupings, etc., are not a single entity. It is numerous warring factions vying for control and power over the others. The fact that they got caught off guard or missed something or just plain fucked up is no major oddity. I have other arguments against it, but I'm going to focus on what makes it reactionary, not what I disagree with.

This is all inside the general context of US politics, where traditional conservatives, progressives, and non-ideological outraged regular folks have been pushed to the margins. This makes for an odd coalition, which is also of considerable size, and therefore quite dangerous. I don't expect Ron Paul to win so much as a primary, let alone the election. But in light of the lack of a meaningful opposition movement in the US, I expect the New Fascism to grow and expand. Soon after, it will be co-opted by the mainstream, and we can expect an encore of the aftermath of the Minuteman phenomanon: anti-immigrant legislation, raids and terrorism against the working class immigrant communities in this country.

At some point, and soon, there has got to be a break between those of us who are in favor of reactionary politics, and those who oppose it.