by The Dharma Bum » Tue Feb 12, 2013 9:07 am
Actually, technically speaking, fascism is a form of social order where there exists centralized authority, stringent economic controls, and ideology that holds that states the needs of the individual are of less importance than than needs of the State.
So yes, we have had a quasi-fascist social order throughout the 20th century. Pretty much a prerequisite for superpower status so in the post war era that transformation into a fascist state seems to have been accelerated. Now the current series of conflicts seems to be having the same effect on our social order again.
It's becoming more exclusive, more controlled, and most tellingly, more incompetent every day.
Bureaucratic bungling is the hallmark of the totalitarian state, and that is because micromanagement on that level is quite impossible. A great example of what will happen if the security state is allowed to progress to it's highest expression is the German Democratic Republic (commonly known as East Germany) which at one point had fully half of the population involved in either spying on or informing on the other half of the population.
The only reason this dysfunctional condition could exist is because the USSR propped them up. However, we don't have a big daddy to prop us up, so we may want to rethink our current course of action.