Reading Melissa Hellmann’s Guardian column on the ‘conservative’ attack on US higher education, I was struck instantly by the cowardice inherent in labelling racism, religionism, creationism, and other bigotry as somehow ‘conservative’ values rather than the indicators of a barbarian kind of fascism.
How will American progressives ever win against the fascists who’ve hijacked the Republican Party if they cannot even summon the courage to correctly name their opponents?
This is not solely an American problem.
In Australia, too, media workers are too cowardly to call out the creeping fascism in the Coalition parties that dishonestly calls itself conservatism, but is, in reality, far more right wing, extremist, and fascist.
What could possibly be more fascist than to call for a state-imposed national holiday of flag-waving, jingoist nationalism? Not a matter of choice, but one of force, including the dog whistling call to violently disrupt supermarkets who won’t stock the jingoist nationalist paraphernalia that was once innocent fun, before the rhetoric of the Coalition made it the signal garb of racist thugs rioting against Middle Eastern migrants in Sydney, and elsewhere.
What was more fascist than manufacturing a faux religious virtue for a state-imposed politicization of the public service to effect a federally-mandated persecution of the poor, the weak, the old, the sick, and those in despair? Wrapping up in the cheap hucksterism of Pentecostal ‘prosperity theology’ the illegal scam called ‘Robodebt’, indentured servitude and its associated demeaning punishments called ‘mutual obligations’, elder abuse and starvation in Commonwealth and private retirement homes in the name of economic efficiency, coarse and careless treatment of veterans leaving our heroes so distraught that suicide seems the only option to them.
These were all deliberate policy choices by the Coalition, most gregariously advertised under Morrison. They all relied on public servants to collaborate in demeaning people and taking away their humanity. To willingly make second-class citizens of Australians. And it was all done as if the state exists to do exactly that: punish those who cannot fight back against the fascists coming for them.
Most of these policies remain unchanged. Having a government calling itself Labor is not a guarantee that it is in any way less barbarous. And we all let it happen, because we are too timid to point with our fingers and say ‘that’s a fascist attitude’ or ‘that’s a fascist policy’.
Some people argue that the term fascist has been misused so much it no longer carries meaning. I suspect that may be true for people who never think for themselves.
What concerns me much more is that the terms ‘progressive’, ‘conservative’, and ‘right wing’ have been so abused we can no longer see hidden under that terminology the reality of corruption, mercenary tendencies, and creeping bourgeois fascism whose adherents want all the benefits of a regimented underclass without getting their hands dirty in the process … because they have not the courage of their convictions.
It’s hard to tell who are the bigger cowards: the fascists or everyone else who permits them to call themselves conservatives.
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