The Incredible and Dirty Rotten Opposition

Remember the days when it was called the Loyal Opposition? Call it Fascism today!
by Charlie Leck

One day we will learn the truth about this movement that has sprung up in America in opposition to Obama’s plan to reform the health care institution. I predict we will discover that it is one of the dirtiest and most dishonest movements in the history of the United States. (More about that in my conclusion.)

The town hall meetings about health care have been sabotaged not by ordinary people who are opposed to the health care legislation in Congress, but this is a highly organized movement that has whipped up opposition by telling some of the most incredible lies we have ever heard in America. I think we will one day discover that this organizing effort was paid for by elements of the current health care industry that are scared to death that they are going to be financially damaged by the current legislation.

I recently received an email that was chock full of lies, misrepresentations and misinterpretations about the House of Representatives’ version of the health care bill.

One minor example of all these lies is that “there will be a government committee that determines what treatments/benefits you get.”

That’s one of the stark, filthy lies told in this email! Yet it comes with a reference to the proposed bill itself: Page 30, Section 123 of HR3200. However, if you actually go to the House of Representatives’ file that is noted, and read for yourself Section 123, it doesn’t say anything like that at all. This is a big file, but, if you want, try it out: [Click here to go to HR3200 on the Library of Congress web site.]

The purveyors of these lies, of course, fully expect that the reader of the email will not bother to track each of the liar’s references to the House Bill. If one does track them, one finds each of them to be gross distortions of what is stated in the bill. And, there are a host of other citations that are being sent around to people. All of them are incredibly bad interpretations of what the document really says. Calling them misinterpretations is being charitable. In fact, they are out and out lies.

It is these kinds of fabrications that incite those who attend these town hall meetings. If one has witnessed community organizing in action and in real life, as I have, one can see the elements of such organizing in the meetings. This, however, is not honest community organizing. People are gathered, fed the lies, whipped to a fierce anger and then pushed to attend the meetings and urged to disrupt them.

Now, take one more step with me. Read and understand the definition of Fascisim that is given to us by one the America's most distinguished and highly regarded historians, Robert Paxton, who is also considered the leading scholar in America on the development of fascist movements. This is important to understand.

"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline….

"Fascism is… a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

What you are witnessing in these very militant and aggressive town hall meetings against health care reform is a union between the Conservative elites in America and the crowd of common and ordinary people that these elites have frightened to death with lies about where change is going. This is a massive and impeccable job of organizing against an institutional change in the way health care is administered in this nation.

The “Conservative elites” mentioned above can be identified easily as those who would be most financially impacted by these changes in the system and the Republican politicians who consider them their constituents.

The Obama victory and the establishment of a more progressive political movement in Congress have shaken the Republican Party to its core. Those who run the conservative wing of politics in America don’t believe that this progressive movement can be unseated in the near-term future through the traditional electoral process. Therefore, they have turned to more aggressive and questionable non-democratic tactics.

Just in!
I just went to the AlterNet web site where I can get some remarkable 'alternative' news and they have headlined this story this morning: INSIDE STORY ON TOWN HALL RIOTS: RIGHT WING SHOCK TROOPS DO CORPORATE AMERICA'S DIRTY WORK! This is an article very worth reading.

These techniques all center around striking fear in the hearts and souls of common, every day, working Americans. There is only one actual way to do this of course. The public must be lied to. They must be told things about what health care reform will do to them that are absolutely not true. The lies read like this:

“Your health care will be rationed.”

“The Health Choices Commission will choose your Health Care Benefits for you. You have no choice.”

“Health Care will be provided to all non U.S. citizens, illegal or otherwise.”

“Government will have real-time access to individual’s finances and a national ID Health Card will be issued.”

“Government will have direct access to your bank accounts for electrictronic funds transfers.”

This is only a small sampling of the vast and extensive lies that the Conservative Elite is spreading among people in order to frighten them. When one reads the bill, there is nothing said about such things and it would be impossible to even mistakenly infer that such things MIGHT happen!

What we are seeing here is the most massive and extensively organized attempt to lie to and frighten the American people that I have seen in my lifetime. This movement is not just a coincidental amalgamation of various segments of conservative society. This is highly organized movement that is driven from a central force somewhere. Someday history will tell this story to our children and this moment will be correctly identified as America’s fascist flirtation.

Democracy can only be based on the truth. Without the truth, Americans cannot make the wise and important decisions that are necessary to drive a Democracy. Fascist movements do not care about truth or democracy but only about outcomes.

Just in!
The NY Times Primer on the Details of Health Care Reform was published in their newspaper today (Monday).

For now, read these two comments about how fascisim works and see if it doesn't sound familiar.

“Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....” [Fordham University: Modern History Sourcebook]

“...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone…” [Fordham University: Modern History Sourcebook]