2. uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition
For this condition to hold, we would need to observe systematic and regular use of police authority to imprision, exile, or eliminate political opponents and media expressing opposing viewpoints to the government.
Unless I'm missing something, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi continue to serve in Congress without police interference. Howard Dean is still DNC chairman. The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Village Voice are still publishing. Liberal talk radio has been a relative market failure, but has not been interfered with by the state. Various liberal blogs and Internet sites are fully operational.
Evidently, condition 2 fails.
I have one friend who was shot by a police officer in a legal protest. Another was arrested in a legal protest at the RNC. They are not alone in this regard. This is direct violence and censorship toward dissenting citizens engaged in peacefull protest.
Habeas Corpus has effectivly been suspended.
Opposition views are directly barred from participating in Bush's "Town Hall" meetings (i.e. Read "Big, 'Gimme a reach around' groupthink Bush worship meetings")
The absurd failures of members of the executive branch are either ignored or rather rewarded (i.e George Tenent) to mask the abject failure of the administration to conduct itself appropriatly in international relationships. If this isn't propaganda I don't know what is.
Direct measures are currently being taken to ensure the impotence of the minority party in Congress.
Zero accountability for anyone for the anyone regarding civil and human rights violations of both citizens of this country and others.
With specific regards to:
Liberal talk radio has been a relative market failure, but has not been interfered with by the state. Various liberal blogs and Internet sites are fully operational.
Why then the conservative assault on independent public radio and TV? Certainly they are not an arm of liberalism. Why the recent legal precident that blogs are not protected under the same rights that protect journalists? (i.e. Apple vs. Bloggers)
3. engages in severe economic and social regimentation
There is no state-sponsored paramilitary political youth organization in which participation is mandatory for ages 12-18.
There is no system of mandatory political indoctrination or paramilitary training of adults.
There isn't even military conscription.
All the things you listed are military regimentation. Certainly economic and social regimentation can occur without conscription activities.
That being said, I may have to give you this one because I can't think of any good examples of this. In particular, the areas concerning social issues and the economy have been neglected rather than regimented. I don't really think this makes it any better than regimentation though since at least regimentation is in pursuit of stability while the abuse of said by the Bush administration is simply leading to the destruction of our nation.
So there you go; 3 out of 5 plus 1 which is in particular worse off then what we would happen if we were a true fascist nation.
Like I said before, I have changed by views on this because I don't feel that we are really on the road to fascism. Rather, I think that we live in a greed saturated, self-serving, short-sighted, imbecilic bastardization of American values for the personal gain of the few. While some if not many of their tendencies are fascist, they lack the actual idealism for a particular social system but instead are only interested in keeping the age old immoral balance of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
This is in particular
WORSE than fascism in my opinion.
FOX has a pretty good system they have cooked up. 10 mil people watch the show on the network, FOX. Then 5 mil, different people, tune into FOX News to get outraged by it. I just hope that those good, God fearing people at FOX continue to battle those morally bankrupt people at FOX.
-- Lewis Black, The Daily Show
™ Version 4.2
