Opinion Time to call it fascism? By Douglas Lummis	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
ファシズムと呼ぶときがきたのか？ 米国はファシズム国家なのだろうか？ その問いに対する筆者の答えはNOなのだが…。

A friend who teaches political science in the United States wrote to tell me that he is going to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) to speak on the topic, "Is It Time to Call It Fascism?" It's remarkable that this question is being debated in the mainstream APSA! This is a sign of how bad things have gotten in the United States.

Still, my friend is going to argue that the answer is "no," and I agree. "Fascism" is a term describing a specific kind of regime, and doesn't simply mean "very, very bad." The political situation in the United States is different from Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. To describe it, some new term is needed.

Under a fascist regime, every individual and social group is reorganized under the control of the government, and dissent becomes impossible. In the United States today freedom of opinion and freedom of the press still exist. True, many of the newspapers have been aping the government line, but this is voluntary. People are not thrown in prison for opposing the government's policies.

And while it is true that George W. Bush evidently cheated in both of his presidential elections, this by itself does not completely destroy the electoral system.

And while it is also true that the Bush administration has blatantly violated the Constitution (for example, by throwing people in prison without charging them with any crimes) it is still possible to challenge these actions in the courts, and some human-rights lawyers are doing so.

And unlike fascism, the Bush regime is not overtly anti-semitic or anti-black. Rather, it has invented a new category of human being, called "the terrorist," who it says can be treated the way the Nazis once treated the Jews and the State of Mississippi once treated African Americans. That is, the government's attitude toward "the terrorist" has all the characteristics of racism, though "the terrorist" is not a race.

I suppose if you are a prisoner in the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay or in the Abu Ghraib Prison, the U.S. government's face appears as fascist, whereas if you are an ordinary citizen of the United States (at least, not of Middle-Eastern descent), it does not seem so.

If the new U.S. regime cannot be described as fascist, then what is it? I see it as a republic that has made itself into an empire. The new rights the United States has granted to itself, namely the right of pre-emptive attack, the right to carry out regime change in foreign countries, and the right to arrest foreigners in foreign countries are all rights of empire. In reality, these are not "rights" at all, but violations of international law. And once a government becomes an overt lawbreaker in its foreign policy, this criminal tendency will begin to leak back into its domestic policies. This, I suppose, is why even mainstream political scientists have begun toying with the word "fascism." But I think the word "empire" is more accurate.

Shukan ST: Sept. 16, 2005

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