XI: Obama as Social Fascist 397The BUF also preached vitalism and the Shavian superman [i.e., the superman concept of the
playwright and essayist George Bernard Shaw], while stressing Britain’s civilizing and imperial
mission in the world ‘to rescue great nations from decadence, and march together towards a higher
and nobler order of civilization.’” (Payne 305) Strip away this imperial rhetoric and replace it with
Obama’s Afrocentric multicultural relativism, and the similarities are striking.
PALINGENESIS: THE FASCIST QUEST FOR UTOPIA
Fascism has been described by some writers as being “palingenetic,” meaning that it represents
an attempt to launch a rebirth of the national spirit, culture, and society. (Payne 5) Fascism
generally proposes to do this through a form of cultural populism which rejects ideology, rejects
parliamentary methods, and claims to merge the interests of different social and economic classes
under the heading of national unity. It was always concerned with promoting and fostering mass
mobilization for national goals.
In 2003, Dr. Lawrence Brit listed “Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism,” with the
implication that they established that the Bush administration was a fascist regime. This list has
been widely read and reproduced on the internet. Brit’s characteristics of fascism include powerful
and continuing nationalism; disdain for the recognition of human rights; identification of
enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause; supremacy of the military; rampant sexism; controlled
mass media; obsession with national security; religion and government intertwined; corporate
power protected; labor power suppressed; disdain for intellectuals and the arts; obsession with crime
and punishment; rampant corruption and cronyism; and fraudulent elections. This list captures some
aspects of a consolidated and established fascist society, but it misses others totally or even turns
them on their head. Take for example the supremacy of the military: Hitler’s entire dictatorship
contradicts the ideas that professional military people should direct wars: supreme power was kept
in Hitler’s own hands, to the point that the German Army tried to assassinate him, and he retaliated
by liquidating many of the most famous commanders, including Rommel. Key traditionalist
members of the German General Staff like Halder were ousted or forced to kow-tow to Nazi hacks
and yes-men like Keitel and Zeitzler. Or again: disdain for intellectuals and the arts would hardly
apply to Italian fascism, which was founded in part by leading writers, sculptors, architects, and
artists like D’Annunzio and Marinetti. Other characteristics listed by Brit would apply to many
kinds of dictatorships and authoritarian governments, and not just fascist ones.^218
CONFUSION ABOUT FASCIST MASS MOVEMENTS
An attempt to obscure the real nature of fascism as an anti-establishment, anti-parliamentary
mass movement came from the former CIA employee Ray McGovern. McGovern was one of those
left-liberal personalities who had stubbornly refused to go beyond the CIA’s blowback theory of
9/11 to examine the more realistic alternative explanations of the MIHOP school.^219 In the March-
April 2008, McGovern authored an article entitled “History’s Lessons: Creeping Fascism – Lessons
from the Past.” (consortiumnews.com) Here McGovern presented the question of fascism solely and
exclusively as a problem of top-down police state measures, with no reference whatsoever to
historical fascism as a mass movement of idealistic students, goons, and guttersnipes backed by
financiers and operating under anti-politician and anti-establishment cover. Fascism for McGovern
was a matter of Bush’s violation of the FISA wiretap law and similar top-down measures.
Interestingly, McGovern cited the late, notorious, British agent of German nationality, Sebastian
Haffner. Haffner had written about the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, criticizing the