Saturday, March 31, 2018

Trump Will Never Tweet That He Has Decided To Institute Fascism Per Se

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The regime is moving at break-neck speed to set its neo-fascist agenda in cement and change the country fundamentally. “Billboards. TV campaigns. Radio programs. The anti-immigrant government… uses different levers to influence public opinion… Even school textbooks… [T]he far-right leader’s message is now woven into the school curriculum.” The country’s Constitution has been re-written and the judiciary reshaped. The leader’s appointees or supporters dominate many artistic institutions and universities. A growing number of plays and exhibitions have had nationalist undertones. Religious groups and nongovernment organizations critical of [his party] have seen funding dry up. He has especially vilified pro-democracy organizations funded by the Hungarian-American philanthropist, George Soros… National opinion surveys are used to steer public opinion as much as collect it, while history is also up for grabs. The government has jousted with educators over textbooks while promoting a narrative of… victimhood and ethnocentrism.”

Steve Bannon: “He’s my hero… the most significant guy on the scene right now.” But “That scene, some say, is the unraveling of democracy… on the “threshold of autocracy.” Another supporter insists that “The government is using its democratic legitimacy not only to reform the state but to reform the society… This is common in democratic societies.”

The leader is doing what he can “to increase the life span of his governance.” And a vert well-connected “right-wing theorist has written widely that the duty of nongovernmental groups is to preserve national identity and uphold Christian values. Most tellingly, he argues that since an elected government represents the will of the people— and since civil society should strive to fulfill the people’s will— then civil society exists to carry out a ruling party’s manifesto, rather than to challenge it. “Obviously, civil society needs to help and support the government to follow through with its promises,” [he] said in an interview this month. “This is an incredibly important thing.”

But while tax dollars are channeled towards government supporters, the government has simultaneously squeezed alternative sources of funding for NGOs that oppose its ideas, especially human rights groups and arts groups, universities and churches.

Sounds like what the Trumpist Regime is headed for, but this was something I read in the NY Times when Roland was trying to persuade me to go back to Hungary with him. To close for comfort?
think tank called Veritas, has a more demonstrably political aim. Its main mission is to provide revisionist interpretations of 20th-century Hungarian history— including the reign of Miklos Horthy, the autocrat who led Hungary before and during the Second World War.

Soon after Veritas was founded in 2014, its director, Sandor Szakaly, gave a sense of what this revision might involve. He described the deportation of Jews under Horthy in 1941 as a mere “police action against aliens.”

This kind of revisionism has also crept into the national curriculum. High school graduates can now be tested on the new preamble to the Hungarian Constitution— a controversial text which implies that Hungarian nationality is exclusively Christian, even though Hungary has a substantial Jewish minority. Its wording also reduces the agency of Hungarian officials in the final year of the Second World War, during which time hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered.

To exert greater influence over churches and synagogues themselves, Fidesz has also stripped hundreds of religious institutions of their legal status, and scrapped their state funding.
And like Trump, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s elected fascist leader is a Putin puppet. Don’t recall Hungary’s rehabilitated national hero, Admiral Miklos Horthy? About a year ago were tried putting his legacy into the context of another Hungarian fascist and current day admirer of his (and Trump, Sebastian Gorka. Or watch this if you want to get a better idea of where Trump’s brand of neo-fascism is leading:



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5 Comments:

At 9:51 PM, Blogger News Nag said...

I'm glad you've posted about the fascist/Nazi history of Hungary and how that deviant hatred has again metastasized into power there. That the far right fascist forces of hatred and sadistic exclusion have come to power in the United States, and have been in power in Russia for many years now, is dismaying and frightening. It's really hard to contemplate the scabrous depth of depravity the world is sliding into almost unconsciously. You can practically feel the pull of the maelstrom of the basest instincts of those fascists leading their countries and regions toward catastrophe, first for their opponents and then spreading to the fascists themselves and those who have been willingly governed by them. The fascist leaders' sordid ambitions will pull everyone and all countries down with them if something isn't done to slow and then stymie the mega-metastasis of the new worldwide Reich. Thanks for doing your part to educate the ignorant and the apathetic (and the cynical who don't really ever seem to feel suffering but spread it gratuitously and maliciously by their almost gleeful dejection and the vanity of their self-cultivated pessimism). Your realpolitik at your blog is the opposite of cynicism, holding open the door to activism and hope.

 
At 1:20 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Modern expressions of fascism must be connected to the financial interests which benefit from it. Corporations are themselves mini versions of fascist states, and their domination of national governments gives them the opportunity to reshape entire societies along fascist lines.

It comes down to "Qui bono?" - who benefits. corporations love it when they can dump their expenses on the general public and not have to share their profits. Major league sports stadia are perfect examples. They are generally built using the taxes and eminent domain powers of the society in which they are located, but the ownership remains private and generally untaxed.

The national infrastructure is another fine example. Corporations are heavier users of things like roads and power generation, but the costs thereof are borne by the public.

The public does eventually catch on to the scam, which is when the policing powers of the captured governments are applied against the public to defend corporate profits at public expense.

This is the reason fascist governments exist: to defend private capital from the public it exploits. There is no other rationale.

Trump is clearly a corporatist. Trump controls the government. Trump benefits. The rest of us cover the costs. Thus, the US is already under a fascist government.

 
At 7:22 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Two nice comments above. However, 1:20 I disagree that the public ever catches on. They didn't in Germany. They haven't here. And the public seems to go "all in" more every day. The American public is far more stupid and gullible than the german public was. And the American public has several more potential scapegoat demographics that we hate.

Again I point out pedantically that trump exists because there is no left in American politics. Obamanation didn't undo any of the galloping fascism of cheney/bush. Cheney/bush only expanded the galloping fascism of Reagan/bush and normalized it for stupid democrat voters.

Obamanation and the democrap FDR congress refused to undo any of it; further normalized the corporatism/privatization meme; expanded the foreign and arbitrary war/murder memes; refused to reconcile torture and further normalized it; and moved the democrap party further into neo-fascism and, ironically, toward intolerance.

If they fixed stuff in 2009, no trump.

 
At 7:26 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

meant to point out above that CLINTON expanded/normalized the Reagan galloping fascism. He and democraps gave us bob rubin and all the lege required for TBTF, $20 trillion in fraud and the 2008 crash.

cheney/bush expanded CLINTON'S galloping fascism.

 
At 10:44 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

yes, fascism preceded trump by 36 years.

Full-on naziism is next. trump could do that. Bolton lays the groundwork for that quite nicely.

 

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