At 01:17 PM 6/5/96 -0400, Hallam-Baker wrote:
rather than reasoned argument. His dislike for the Clinton is well known - he recently accused the administration of being fascist. I know of no evidence that the Clinton administration has a genocide policy, it is an insult to the 10 million civilians murdered by Hitler to use the term facist simply as a term of abuse, especialy if it is being used as a substitute for an argument.
Fascism has no intrinsic link to genocide. It is a theory of economics, basically, in which the state has ultimate authority over production and distribution without (as in socialism) actually _owning_ the means of production or distribution. This is generally accomplished through cartelization, the creatin of industry-wide councils in which the representatives of the most powerful firms set policy in conjunction with the representatives of the government. The US has been at least moderately fascist since the 1920s (Hoover was a big fan of cartelization, and pushed it actively). While the mechanisms of the modern regulatory state aren't those of classic fascist theory, in practice most strongly regulated industries in this country operate _exactly_ the way fascist theory says they should. And various of Clinton's policies have, in fact, been fascist in this sense. The man has no doctrinal commitment to fascism (under that name or any other), but in practical terms virtually all modern Western politics are either fascist or socialist. None of this is secret lore, by the way. -- Bruce Baugh bruce@aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce