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**andrekuper** · 11-30-2005, 11:12 PM

People on the 'right' tend to protest a mite bit too much with little more than character assassination whenever the word is raised. This is very suspicious behaviour (self-incriminating) and this tends to confirm the accusation rather than addressing it.

That hasn't been my experience, at least not here in Australia - I can't speak with much authority on the North American state of affairs, of course. If you took a look at the current state of Australian politics, one of the first things you would notice is the frequency with which the Howard Government and the Liberal Party in general get accused of being "fascist", by a whole spectrum of their political critics: unions, churches, student activist groups, the Greens, Labour Party MPs, and so on. And it has to be said that this is a patently ridiculous accusation - while the Liberals are a conservative party, conservatism in the Australian mould has a much more moderate political philosophy than, for example, the US Republicans or even the British Tories. In tone and policy, the Howard government are closer akin to Tony Blair's New Labour or fiscal-conservative US Democrats. Pertinent example - it is currently fashionable to cry "fascist" over the government's new industrial relations reform package, which apparently will put us back 100 years, strangle the labour union movement, and generally make us all slaves of Big Business (the avatar of all that is evil). The joke is that, even after the reforms go through, Australia will still have a labour market that is more protected and tightly regulated than such social democracies as Canada, New Zealand, Denmark and the UK!

The danger is that by crying wolf on "fascism" whenever and wherever we disagree with a conservative government's (usually democratic!) agenda, we diminish our ability to confront that political philosophy when it does rear its ugly head. China, Singapore, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, even Russia : these are examples of nation-states which are already following a fascist agenda in all but name, or starting to travel down that path, and need to be firmly confronted over the issue. The United States on the other hand is just a capitalist democracy with a bungling, disconnected, and corporate-sympathetic government which isn't going to last beyond the end of GWB's second term. I would have to credit the Bush administration and the Republican right with some level of actual competence and intelligent planning ability, before believing they could get away with implementing some sort of German or Italian-style fascist state!

11-30-2005, 11:12 PM	#10
andrekuper Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 496 Senior Member	People on the 'right' tend to protest a mite bit too much with little more than character assassination whenever the word is raised. This is very suspicious behaviour (self-incriminating) and this tends to confirm the accusation rather than addressing it. That hasn't been my experience, at least not here in Australia - I can't speak with much authority on the North American state of affairs, of course. If you took a look at the current state of Australian politics, one of the first things you would notice is the frequency with which the Howard Government and the Liberal Party in general get accused of being "fascist", by a whole spectrum of their political critics: unions, churches, student activist groups, the Greens, Labour Party MPs, and so on. And it has to be said that this is a patently ridiculous accusation - while the Liberals are a conservative party, conservatism in the Australian mould has a much more moderate political philosophy than, for example, the US Republicans or even the British Tories. In tone and policy, the Howard government are closer akin to Tony Blair's New Labour or fiscal-conservative US Democrats. Pertinent example - it is currently fashionable to cry "fascist" over the government's new industrial relations reform package, which apparently will put us back 100 years, strangle the labour union movement, and generally make us all slaves of Big Business (the avatar of all that is evil). The joke is that, even after the reforms go through, Australia will still have a labour market that is more protected and tightly regulated than such social democracies as Canada, New Zealand, Denmark and the UK! The danger is that by crying wolf on "fascism" whenever and wherever we disagree with a conservative government's (usually democratic!) agenda, we diminish our ability to confront that political philosophy when it does rear its ugly head. China, Singapore, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, even Russia : these are examples of nation-states which are already following a fascist agenda in all but name, or starting to travel down that path, and need to be firmly confronted over the issue. The United States on the other hand is just a capitalist democracy with a bungling, disconnected, and corporate-sympathetic government which isn't going to last beyond the end of GWB's second term. I would have to credit the Bush administration and the Republican right with some level of actual competence and intelligent planning ability, before believing they could get away with implementing some sort of German or Italian-style fascist state!
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