Populist-Fascist Social Movements: their emergence and their ends

January 27, 1889 was the date of decision. The day started out quite nice and sunny for a rough winter in that beautiful, modernized city of Paris. Construction workers had almost completed the stunning Eiffel Tower for the upcoming Worlds Fair in October. Many French people thought there was a confidence in the air. France recently suffered terrible losses to Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, and then there was the Commune Civil War that followed in 1871.

About twenty years earlier, the late dictator, Napoleon III, had commissioned an architect to demolish most of the medieval winding streets that had made Paris so romantic. The city still had its charms though, even with its wide boulevards that could march whole armies to better exterminate recalcitrant revolutionaries. This urban project was the first successful modern gentrification undertaking. Also around this time, French artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals had become world-famous through producing works that displayed the modern trends of Impressionism, Realism and Symbolism.

But there was another rumbling in the air that day. A French general by the name of General Boulanger had become the talk of the nation. This great and honorable man seemed to have fortune on his side. He was ready to retake his beloved France with the movement that supported him to power. This opportune winter moment was the day for his sunny ‘coup d’état.’

That French term meant that this military adventurer and strongman had to seize the day, take over the state, become a new Caesar, dictator – and even a tyrant. General Boulanger won the election to the French Parliament, La Chambre des députés, but he couldn’t bear to sit among the corrupt deputies that most French citizens hated. His ‘political movement’ wanted him to declare himself President, lead the French Army to disband the corrupt Congress and win back territories that the Second German Empire, or Second Reich, had seized during the last war.

The corrupt French press could not resist him, and they transformed the general into a greater than life, ‘Hero of the Nation.’ But there was more to the man than his press persona. The political mobilization that supported him was the real power behind such a figure. A bizarre political cabal had already mobilized angry French citizens, mostly conservative ones, who saw their country turn into something they hated. The French Third Republic was quite corrupt and the ideals of French Revolution seemed to matter little to the ambitious band of politicians in Paris.

A movement coalesced between old Monarchists, (Boulanger even spoke to Napoleon’s exiled family living in Switzerland), devout Catholics, and militarists who wanted to see France avenge its humiliating defeat against Germany, and possibly even – defeat the great British Empire and complete Napoleon’s sacred dream of the ‘L’empire français universel.’

The Boulanger political deployment started off as a propaganda agitation campaign. It next moved into a street mode of action, and then resorted to selective violence against its political enemies. Now they had their symbol personified in a dignified general that showed his public face against the corrupt republic.

The problem with this social movement was that it did not represent the whole of the country. Courageous French intellectuals began to expose the shaded groups behind the Man, and especially the political alliances in the shadows that hated the ideals of the French Revolution, which most of the French population did still support.

With the exposures against him, General Boulanger got scared, lost his honor and courage, and he flaked out with his coup d’état. The scheming plotter in the costume of a French general would eventually kill himself just two years later. This political moment in French History became the Boulanger Affair. It represented the first modern populist-social movement of France. This movement attempted to destroy the country in order to save it.

Populist-fascist social movements are the most powerful hegemonic political blocks in modern democratic countries. They emerge when the entire democratic system begins to rot from the inside. Corruption becomes rampant, the legislature transforms into paid off hacks, and the government turns into another tyrannical regime. Anger increases substantially through the citizenry, and especially among the male population. The term populism signifies a political movement geared for a large section of the people, or the ‘nation.’

Populist-fascist movements grab their power through unifying angry elite institutions with angry social movements, most often religious ones. Religious social movements work wonderfully because they have the best social meeting spaces: churches, mosques, synagogues and temples. Through uniting powerful people with powerful social movements, the populist-fascist social movements transcend into optimum political forces or complete counter-hegemonic blocks against the state – while making alliances with other scheming sections of the state. These contradictions are not apparent among the street level activists.

Once the populist-social alliances increase their organizing into mobilizations, they move powerfully into the political field, through both agitation and violence. They ultimately hope to seize the state in order to murder their enemies. They lost in 1880s in France, but they almost won about a hundred years later in the United States.

America in the mid 1980s and into the 90s was a volatile place. Right-wing intellectuals have often talked about that time in history as a type of ‘restoration’ under President Reagan – but it was anything like that. What really happened was that elements of the Republican Party, implying certain members of the old guard that surrounded Nixon, the disgraced former president, decided to form a powerful political alliance, or a new hegemonic block. This block would emerge as a powerful force in dividing the Democratic party electorate, which allowed that party to control the US Congress for over twenty years.

First, they forged an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, which had about a quarter of the US population. The Catholic Church was always the strange Christian group looking on the outside compared to the standard Mainline Protestant Churches of America, such as the Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians. But now they had a substantial part of the population, (about one quarter), and with special thanks to President Reagan allowing a Vatican ambassador to D.C. and signing the Immigration Reform Act into law – the first dice was cast.

Later, right-wing activists helped this base achieve even greater mobilization and power. The conservative activists in the Catholic Church set up the Moral Majority Organization using a Baptist political-preacher, (from the South), as a front man, named Jerry Falwell. Catholic conservatives would use this same strategy through mobilizing other single issue front group-crusades, such as fighting against the separation between Church and State, anti-homosexuality, anti-pornography, anti-teenage rebellion, anti-illegal drugs, anti-sex education, exposing Satanism in rock music and popular culture, and most importantly, anti-abortion.

Those particular political mobilizations proceeded into the street agitations. The single issue that could unite them was abortion. Phony anti-abortion evangelists, or disguised Catholic preachers, entered the parachurch world of Evangelicals that met in rented spaces, such as movie theaters, Mainline Protestant churches and even inside Masonic halls! These religious movements represented the Charismatic types that ‘spoke in tongues,’ or unintelligible gibberish, fell on the floor through being ‘slain in the spirit’; while selected parishioners blurted out prophetic statements during the worship, and the church goers danced sexually to Christian musicians playing a type of repetitive soft rock beat with militarized church lyrics, such as ‘Army, marching, warfare, battle, victory, etc.’

These disguised abortion preachers even entered the sacred Protestant spaces of Southern Baptist churches. For the first time in its religious history, the Roman Catholic Church forged a strong political alliance with its most hated rivals – the heretics, under the common single issue of abortion. History has always been so absurd.

The anti-abortion evangelists successfully mobilized these hurting people, or ‘heretics,’ into joining the crusade against abortion in America. In the beginning of the crusade, the main groups against abortion in America were political committees formed through the US Catholic Bishop’s Conference.

Suddenly, a populist-fascist social movement had conceived its nativity on the American political scene. Even former pro-choice Republicans, such as the Reagan successor, President Bush, joined the crusade. All of a sudden, angry activists were attacking, confronting and surrounding women’s health centers across the States, and then in the early 90s, the movement resorted to the common tactics of religious fanatics through murdering doctors and health providers across the country. A homegrown political terrorist net birthed, but America’s political police, the FBI, refused to take down the movement. A certain element of America’s political and intelligence elites had a big stake in the anti-abortion assemblage.

But the six laws of history had to come into play, and the Roman Catholic Church failed to understand the cultural blocks that had formed within the United States up to that time. American women had already achieved substantial power in society through fighting two previous waves of feminist agitation. Many American women had already attained important career and lifestyle choices in their lives, and they were not going to give up their hard-won privileges due to some anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-contraception religious fanatics.

America’s Women organizations countered the movement through fully allying with the Democratic party and mobilizing, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of citizens to annually march on D.C., something the anti-abortionists could not do. Some political elites in Washington stood aghast. Their sick plans of ‘national salvation and resurgence’ met a strong political counterforce.

The Republican Party countered with their Convention of 1992, which featured speeches of selected religious fanatics and fascists in order to scare the opposition. It did just the opposite. They looked quite bad on TV. The conservative Southern Democrat, Clinton, seized on the scare and placed himself into the political center. He won the presidency and all of a sudden, the federal government changed its tolerant policy with the populist-fascists, while they began to hunt the most extreme terrorists inside of the anti-abortion crusade.

The populist-fascist crusaders attacked President Clinton mercilessly through the press. But the president was also an expert killer like the ones that preceded him. He had the US government exterminate the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco as a warning and a lesson to the defiant holdouts in the Movement. It worked.

Abortion stayed legal in the US, even with a Supreme Court that had a Catholic majority. The Mormons decided to bolt from the anti-abortion alliance and leave it to the Catholic Church and the rattled Evangelicals. And then ‘Mala Fortuna,’ or Bad Fortune, stabbed the Catholic Church in the foot. Media headlines exposed to the public that the Catholic Church had protected pedophile priests and perverts within its ranks. The public exposure of such crimes permanently damaged the reputation of the Catholic Church in American culture. The Roman Catholic Church would never be able to return to its short glory that it possessed during the 80s and 90s.

The mobilization did work in intimidating many doctors from performing abortions. Now, it is difficult to find abortion providers in many parts of the States. But there also exists the abortion pill that does not require surgical procedures.

This anti-abortion movement has kept up the protests, but it could not seize the state in order to complete its extermination of the ‘evil ones.’ It achieved a stalemate. A hundred years earlier in France, it lost.

In Spain however, during the 1930s, it won. The Spanish populist-fascist movement won because it had the backing of foreign intervention: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the secret support of the British and American governments.

For us Anarchists, this modern political story can help us recognize the political environments that encourage these movements, how they mobilize, and how we can ultimately help destroy them.

Populist-fascist social movements lose when a more powerful alliance of institutions and the people reject their plans. They stalemate or tie when they meet equally powerful social-cultural-political mobilizations. They win when they have the outside support of powerful foreign governments.

The Amerikan Empire V: The Greatest Brainwashing Show in History

Living and surviving in the United States of America is like no other experience. Propaganda overload and brainwashing overdose entail part of the process. For those of us unfortunately born here, the corporate media have inundated, attacked and cudgelled us into accepting certain ways of thinking since we were children sitting in front of the TV ‘boob tube.’ This image-emotional thinking spawns from a nefarious concoction that has mixed the fine arts of media spectacle, hip TV advertising, and a hard dose of sociopathic mythology.

We Americans can never fully extirpate those monstrosities out of our mental systems – unless we become full on ex-pats and embrace completely the new culture that we happen to live in. And this does not just mean becoming an advanced level speaker in the new language. It also means redirecting the mind into a completely distinct mindset.

I actually performed this mental release program through living in Europe for about five years, and I was able to change my thinking completely. But, when I returned to the States after my living overseas adventure, I was surprised with the change of cultural scenery. The United States did not change that much really. I had changed.

I first remember seeing flags flying everywhere representing the United States government. In no other country in the world does one see so many government flags crowding into the frontal sight view. In the rest of the world, the state apparatuses put out the flags for visits of foreign dignitaries or for special occasions, such as Independence Days or Revolution Days. But in the USA, regular citizens and many businesses hang out the flags on their automobile antennas, on auto bumper stickers, front license plates, on their shirts, pants, shoes, asses, jackets, on the doors of their private homes, and grandly displayed on brick walls, vacant windows, high ceilings and even floors.

I realized that some Americans actually believed that the Flag, which was really one of the symbols of the US government in Washington D.C., also represented them as a people. The Flag was for them too – and they could do what they liked with it. The US government had successfully transformed one of their symbols into a popular culture hip item. In no other country in the world has this seductive method worked so splendidly. The Amerikan Flag has transformed itself into an idol fetish symbol.

The other symbols of the US government are the Statue of Liberty, the Bald Eagle clutching arrows and branches over the Seal of Stars and Bars, the US Dollar, the White House, the US Congress Capitol building, Mt. Rushmore, and the Uncle Sam character. Yet, how many Americans put up the other symbols around their homes, businesses and cars – or even on their clothes?

I also noticed the terribly repressive nature of the laws compared to many of the foreign countries where I had traveled and lived. The nasty cop presence was everywhere looking for victims to harass, detain, arrest, and even imprison. The repressive nature of the laws and police state terror also showed their scars on the everyday American people. In big city Amerika, it was terrible. Paranoia and suspicion truly ran deep. I felt the violence in the eyes, while spotting the fear on the faces.

Actions that in other countries that had no legal consequences, possessed the potential for serious crime infractions in the USA, like drinking alcohol in public, physically fighting back against a person that had insulted you publicly or physically threatened you, or looking at a pretty woman or man in a public library. I was frightened myself, but I embraced Anarchism while living in Europe, so I was going to do something inside this Evil Empire. And if there was so much tension, hatred and fear on the streets, then why did a good part of the American public still embrace the symbols of the US government as part of their own identities?

The most dangerous and most sophisticated power of the Amerikan Empire is its corporate media propaganda and brainwashing control. This indoctrination power is even more powerful and dangerous than its military power because this system slowly rots out the insides of people’s brains. This media propaganda, emotional manipulation and brainwashing system have been, and always will be, the greatest indoctrination program in human history. No other empire, class based society or political culture has been able to compete with having such a high percentage of its own citizens visibly identify with the state’s ideological political goals. Many citizens of different countries around the world would say that they are proud to live in their respective countries, but Amerikan patriotism and exceptionalism are quite different breeds of activities.

Most US citizens revert to a type of immediate defense of government policy regardless of the facts or the truth. The Fascist governments of Europe and Latin American tried to create a similar world through murdering many of their own citizens that did not accept the new order. They failed at their goals because the tactics were too brutal for human consumption. The Communist governments of eastern Europe tried to create a particular mind control system among its worker-citizens, yet they failed too. Only ancient monotheistic religious ideologies, such as Christianity and Islam, can actually compete with, and resist, the ideology of American patriotism and exceptionalism.

The American propaganda ‘greatest show on earth’ uses some very important methods in maintaining its hold on many American’s minds. The first method guarantees a compliant corporate press media group that keeps up the public lies of ‘independent’ and ‘objective.’ The second method makes sure that alternative viewpoints and the actual history of the situation, versus the official government lies, are kept marginalized, isolated, and outside of the corporate media. The American public has become the most ignorant and ill-informed populace in world history.

The third method operates on the corporate media and government intellectuals who regularly destroy the English language with contradictory phraseology, such as ‘surgical strikes,’ ‘medical experts,’ scientific studies,’ ‘tax rebates,’ ‘affordable care acts,’ ‘public education,’ ‘department of defense,’ ‘institutions of justice,’ ‘freedom fighter,’ ‘assault weapon bans,’ ‘human rights sanctions,’ and ‘humanitarian interventions.’ The fourth method runs on the corporate media system regularly using old theatrical stunts in order to hammer its viewpoints across the public spectrum: constant repetition of key ideas, emotional image manipulations, plot breakup and suspense building through continual advertising cuts, and destruction-war-technology-violence-special effects mega shows. Some good examples of the US government’s brainwashing methods were the gradual re-education methods and repression used during the 1970s-1990s, when the political-economic-military elites had decided to destroy the cultural legacy of the ‘Sixties.’

The changes from the Sixties blew up in the 1970s. The elites in power were in shock – and they were scared. Many Americans lost respect for most government and corporate entities. The corporatist elites knew that a revolution was not on the near horizon – but they weren’t exactly sure. They had to do something. And so they did.

If a foreign person were to judge those times, 70s-90s, just through watching American television, her or she would think that the United States was the embodiment of the Fourth Reich. In many ways, it was, and especially for those unfortunates stuck in the American prison gulag, or for those unfortunates that were victims of American state terrorism overseas, like in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Libya, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Iran and Iraq.

It was during this tumultuous period that American television erupted into a terrible outbreak of cop shows. The other popular sitcoms were family shows, which was normal in a society where divorce and alternative family arrangements were changing the greater society. But the cop shows came and they stayed.

The television ‘hey day’ of cop shows actually began in the late sixties and early seventies. This was not a coincidence. If the adept cultural historian looked into that period in American history, he/she would find a culture of widespread distrust, and even outright rebellion, against police forces and government agents. In fact, cop and spy shows increased substantially during the seventies TV period.

Every type of cop imaginable came into being on TV. Such colorful examples have included the cool and hip, undercover agent snitch-cops, such as ‘Mod Squad,’ the good-looking, suave cop of ‘Rockford Files,’ and the weathered, tough talking, urban cops such as ‘Kojak’ and ‘Baretta.’ There were other cop genres, such as ‘Hawaii 5-O,’ ‘SWAT,’ ‘Barney Miller,’ ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ ‘Ba Ba Black sheep,’ ‘Chips,’ etc. The major TV networks saturated the next decade, the eighties, with an even more diverse variety of cop shows, from realistic and serious, urban precinct stories of ‘Hill Street Blues,’ to the young and hip, good looking narcs of ’21 Jump Street.’ By the end of the eighties, cops even had their very own, a real life docudrama where they arrested and destroyed the lives of real citizens, called ‘COPS.’

Meanwhile, Hollywood began to premier particular movies that displayed the US military in a more jovial fashion, such as ‘Private Benjamin,’ ‘An Officer and a Gentleman,’ ‘Top Gun,’ and ‘Stripes.’ The Eighties was also the period when movies finally dealt with the ‘Vietnam Syndrome,’ such as ‘Deer Hunter,’ ‘Rambo’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. The corporate media did not show the true story about what happened to the five million murdered Indochinese victims, but instead, focused on the mentally disturbed US servicemen who came back to a country that ignored them, and so they became worse off when they returned. Those veterans were the true sufferers due to an ungrateful public and a neglectful VA administration. Not one movie plot mentioned the real culprit: an US government lie to begin a war, (The Gulf of Tonkin Incident), and a forced draft on working class youth, which used them as live bait and as paid assassins for the upper ranks of the officer class and political elites. Even the German governments after WW II did not conduct a media campaign of their Wehrmacht veterans as ‘victims’ of Allied hypocrisy.

In the middle of the 1980s, the US government committed a despicable act of tyranny against the state governments and young Americans. It willfully, and without any citizen or state consent whatsoever, rose the drinking age from 18 to 21, and gave the US government a cultural mandate to control a good amount of the personal behavior of its young people. This underhanded policy also gave enormous powers to one non-government and non-elected moral crusading agency, which soon had power over the lives of millions of young citizens. The group called itself Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Prohibition was back.

After the raise in the drinking age, police forces then set up roadblocks on the nation’s roads where they forced drivers to stop, and conducted illegal searches of ‘drivers under the influence of alcohol.’ The federal and state governments enabled another domestic war against the citizenry: the imprisonment of intoxicated drivers. These actions outrageously violated the fourth amendment to the Constitution, yet there was very little public outrage. Driving under the influence ‘crimes’ are actually the only crimes on the books that do not secure the constitutional right to have a trial by jury in the United States. Some dangerous legal precedents were set.

In the mid to late 1980s, the corporate media began to inflame the hysterics in the US government’s phony ‘war against drugs.’ Local police forces under the paramilitary SWAT acronym commenced the now common practice of breaking down private doors in working class neighborhoods, and willfully murdering suspected ‘drug dealers’ or ‘uncontrollable addicts’ without any sufficient notification. Most of the victims of these institutional murders were simply American citizens who were minding their own business and unlucky enough to experience such acts of state terrorism.

Another good example of such US government, corporate media mythology event during the 80s was the sudden death of an African-American college basketball player, named Len Bias, after a night of partying. The liars in the media blamed his death on the use of ‘crack’ cocaine, but the basketball player actually used a whole lot of drugs, both legal and illegal, such as alcohol and energy drinks during his partying escapade. The corporate media played up the hype, and then saturated the public news broadcasts with cities under siege from drug peddlers, gang bangers, gangsta rap thugs and ‘crack babies.’ Why was there no media debate about infants born with mutations and severe illnesses due to all of the legal drugs forced on women during pregnancy by respectable doctors?

Millions of unfortunate young people caught up in the easy money sham entered the American prison-concentration camp system for longer years of penal servitude than most murderers and rapists, and most of them were African-Americans and Latinos. The Meth corporate media hysteria next opened up and the police moved slowly into ‘trailer trash’ residential areas, mostly filled with lower class young people of white skin privilege. The prison population jumped substantially once again, but the police forces continued to focus on the young African-American population in regards to drug crimes. Crack cocaine prison sentencing was almost a hundred times greater than regular Cocaine sentencing.

This 1980s-90s media exaggerated, drug and crime hysteria actually copied the earlier Satanic, child abuse hysteria in the middle part of that decade. The corporate media once again inflamed Americans about child day care centers abusing children and the growing threat of Satanism in American communities. All of sudden, fanatical Evangelical Christian cops and previously unknown ‘social workers’ popped on the TV talk shows warning Americans about the coming Satanic sacrifice danger. Accusations flew across the US like in the old witch hunting eras of Early Modern Europe. A shameless media huckster Geraldo Rivera did a one-hour national TV special on ‘Satanism.’ Still today, innocent US citizens have been putrefying in prison and have completely lost their lives from that terrible period of legal witch-hunting.

Amazingly, by the late eighties, one of the most hated institutions in American society, the US military had become the most respected institution in the United States. After the debacles of Korea and Vietnam, the American alternative media exposed the US military’s corruption in favor of high-ranking officers and its continuous lies to the public. Other media outlets exposed the US government’s genocidal horrors, mass murders, and judicial oppression against soldiers of conscience, A little over ten years ago, most American university ROTC officer programs had to close down their doors due to the successive fire bombings and destructive attacks against their offices.

As the reader can see, most of those seventies and eighties TV cop shows and Hollywood ‘Vietnam’ movies most definitely had their desired effect. They kept the young people in a type of infantile state of watching the local paramilitaries arrest, beat up and imprison the unfortunates in police traps. Kids could laugh at the antics of the poor, working class and minorities caught up in the dragnet. But their laughs were soon to end because then the cops moved into greater terrains that were more fertile, like robbing people’s personal property through ‘civil forfeiture.’ Now the police have been targeting everybody. Meanwhile, the US Military is on the warpath across the Earth. The Vietnam Debacle is over.

These days, DUIs are even more costly and sanctioned, while the cops don’t care who they grab driving around late at night. The corporate media also wanted to get rid of the ‘Vietnam syndrome,’ which meant a hesitance of using American troops in combat. The beginning of the Invasion against Iraq in 1990 successfully finished off that concern. The US Military is currently in overdrive with over a thousand bases around the world, and many of us don’t even know how many countries the US is currently in war against.

The media drug and crime hysteria, with the Satanic abuse hysteria also functioned magnificently. Most Americans believed the corporate media then, and they still do. The US government would exterminate a religious group using various federal agencies who burned alive most of the children inside that building. The US govt. exterminated them over buying some ‘guns from out of state.’ This was the Waco extermination campaign against the Branch Davidian religious group in the 90s.

The corporate media used the same exact lies about ritual abuse against the children in Waco, as they had previously done in 80s with the Satanic abuse scares. And of course, the US government mythologized the attack on the World Trade Center Towers in NYC as the 9/11 Event. Again, the corporate-government media used the same exact lies from the Drug War hysteria: a secret cabal of evildoers led by a sinister evil man overseas pulled off the nefarious deeds. In the 80s, it was the evil Latino, narco-terrorist drug lord, Pablo Escobar, but after the 9/11 Event, it was the evil Muslim, Arab terrorist of Osama Ben Laden.

Unfortunately, we are dealing with the greatest brainwashing show in world history. We cannot counter it, nor can we construct a rival to such unbelievable media propaganda power. Even the corporatist elites know this. We have the Internet, but they still hold the real power of the TV screen and the cinema. Most Americans still get a good amount of their information from those two sources.

But pathological liars, and especially the sociopaths in power who believe their own lies, eventually catch themselves in their own snares. Lying uncontrollably leads to greater secrecy, greater cover-ups, and greater outrages. When around 20% of the population can finally see the true visage of the Monster, then the propaganda show will burn in its own foils. And this will happen eventually. At the same time, the Anarchist waits patiently.