Posted by
glen ropella on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584803.html
On 01/15/2014 12:34 PM, Arlo Barnes wrote:
> A friend of mine claims a necessary but not sufficient condition is that
> there is a strong corporate involvement in government, like all the
> contractors (IBM among them) in WWII.
I've often agreed with this. But I'm starting to disagree because our
growth toward global government has been (is) much slower than our
growth toward multi-national corporations. Our corporations are not yet
identifiable with government. But they are close. With extensive
lobbying, organizations like ALEC, tax breaks for locating facilities,
control of large swaths of land in 3rd world countries and even out into
the oceans, etc., I'm having trouble imagining a government that has
weak corporate involvement. And if such involvement is universal, then
it can't be a distinctive characteristic of one government from another.
> Also, there is the etymological
> metaphor<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche#Similar figures of
> speech>- a fascis / fasces, as used as a symbol by the Roman legions,
> was/were an ax used to chop kindling, with said kindling bound by leather strips around
> the handle of the ax for easy transport. My 9th grade history teacher
> claimed that in fascism, people are uniformly and completely directed
> towards a common societal goal ([...]) in the same way that the kindling sticks
> are bound to support the handle.
I wonder if that's a bit of overreach. if that were the extent of our
definition, we could call any group (of people or, say, insects) fascist
as long as they were uniformly and completely directed towards a common
societal goal. But the implication of the kindling sticks is that any
one stick is indistinguishable from the other sticks. So, it's less
about uniform, complete orientation and more about depersonalization ...
or objectification ... or specialization ... the idea that any given
human is really more of a replaceable cog in a machine. If that were
the case, then what we're really saying is that fascist regimes are
tightly analogous to mechanism/machines, a well engineered society ...
which puts the Star Trek Federation at risk of being fascist. ;-)
--
⇒⇐ glen
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