FASCISM. THE STATE WAGES WAR AGAINST ITS CITIZENS

A Totalitarian Regime is Established in the US Camouflaged as “Law and Order”

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

[This article published in: junge Welt 12/4/2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.jungewelt.de/public_php/.]

Fascism – the mere mention of the term evokes dark menacing pictures of soldiers marching in step ready to do everything in the name of a malevolent terror-ideology. For most of us, there is something foreign about the term. It has nothing to do with us, only with “the others”. This is dangerous. When fascism is seen as a foreign ideology, the conclusion is inevitable that this cannot happen among us.

Whoever thinks this way either does not know or does not want to know the history of the US. Those gullible persons prefer the cherished myths to the ugly truths regarding the question how this country has become what it is..

What is fascism? Very simply, fascism is the totalitarian fusion of the interests of the state and capital. What is “totalitarianism”? The following criticisms were made in a final draft of an investigating committee published by the US Congress on April 23, 1976: “Parts of the government took actions unworthy of a democracy that recalls the measures of a totalitarian regime… The central investigating authority of the government (the FBI) with the legal mandate of taking action against criminality and preventing it took unlawful steps and reacted to deep-rooted social problems with force instigating further unrest.” (quoted in: Dr. Huey Newton, “War Against the Panthers. A Study of Repression in America”, 1996).

Six months before on November 19, 1975, the former democratic senator from Minnesota, Walter Mondale made a similar comment in opening the hearings on COINTELPRO activities. The question was whether measures of the FBI taken under this counter-intelligence program, a secret service project to investigate and destroy oppositional organizations, were legal and constitutional. “Yesterday this committee heard several statements of witnesses that were alarming for a free society. We heard statements that the institutions representing the law and the constitution in this country indulged in practices that broke the law and the constitution. We heard that the FBI subject to the Department of Justice took the law in its own hands and sought to punish those with unpopular ideas. We heard that the highest criminal prosecution authority of the government decided arbitrarily that it didn’t need any laws in acting against peaceful and constitutional activities of persons unpopular in their eyes and persecute and oppress them,” Senator Mondale explained. “We heard that the FBI in its work to protect the country from those with supposedly totalitarian political views acted against American citizens with measures of totalitarian societies. We heard that the FBI attempted to destroy one of our most prominent advocates of civil rights (Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr) and replace him with someone selected by the FBI.” (from: US Senate, “Hearing before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities”, volume 6-FBI, US Government Printing Office, 1976, p.61)

Thus the state waged its war with impunity against its own citizens. Now many years after these hearings and under the emergency law the US Patriot Act, what were illegal measures of oppression under the secret service program have been legalized. Persons opposing the Iraq war or other decisions of the administration of George W. Bush were beaten up, attacked with pepper spray, arrested under false charges, thrown in prison or tortured – in Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and elsewhere – because they exercised their supposed constitutional right to free speech.

They were jailed by the police and driven back in so-called “free speech zones”! This leads to the question: If police encirclements are “Free Speech zones”, what should the air outside these zones be called? “Zones of non-free speech”. All judges without exception who had to decide over hasty petitions, over the rights of demonstrators to assemble and protest unhindered against protecting the right of the police who claim the “right” to lock up demonstrators and suppress their prote4sts are completely on the side of the police.

Fascism, the totalitarian fusion of the interests of state and capital drowns the struggle of workers for the eight-hour day, for the right to organize in unions, for free holidays and collective bargaining in the blood of thousands of martyrs.

Fascism is more than a foreign-sounding word. It is firmly woven in the fabric of the social life of the US. Fascism is visible even if it tries to camouflage itself as “law and order”.