The USA is a fascist dictatorship

And it always has been

There are crimes that expose not only what people are but what they’ve always been. The U.S.-sponsored Holocaust in Gaza is arguably the worst crime in human history. It has shown that the USA is a fascist dictatorship, and always has been.

A live streamed Holocaust

Of course, in absolute numbers, the Holocaust in Gaza can never equal the one perpetrated by Nazi Germany, not even if the Israelis murdered every one of Gaza’s two million inhabitants. But absolute numbers are not the only way to judge the severity of a crime. The Nazis, as Raul Hilberg explained in his widely acclaimed study, put considerable effort into hiding the Holocaust from the German people, especially German Jews and other European Jews, to make it easier to carry out. That doesn’t mean the German public could not have known what was happening, or should be excused for supporting the Nazis. But it was much easier to hide crimes during the 1940s than it is today, when anyone with a cellphone can watch Palestinians being murdered and starved every single day.

The USA owes its very existance to genocide, just like “Israel”. After slavery was abolished, the USA remained an obvious racial apartheid state well into the 1960s. And since the 1960s the USA directly perpetrated or otherwise sponsored atrocities all over the world. But I still balked at calling the post-civil rights era USA a dictatorship until very recently. Why?

First, I thought that despite grave and glaring limitations, the USA’s democratic rituals and tolerance for protest imposed very inadequate but still important constraints on the government’s brutality.

Second, closely related to that, I thought that calling the USA a dictatorship discouraged leftists from growing political parties that were serious about using whatever openings existed, however small, to challenge power.

All empires are dictatorships

I fell into the trap of assessing whether or not the USA was a dictatorship by looking at it internally - by how much impact US citizens have on its government. That’s no way to judge an empire that exerts a murderous authority over hundreds of millions of people in Latin America alone- and billions worldwide. Calling the USA a democracy is like calling the Zionist monstrosity in “Israel” a democracy by ignoring Palestinians.

And now, Gaza has put all the concessions the US elite ever made to their own people - every limited freedom and social program - into a clearer perspective. When demoralization and apathy are not enough to keep people quiet, when marginalization of dissident views in mass media no longer works, we see what the US government does within its own borders. For now, the most blatant criminalization of anti-genocide speech inside the US is aimed at non-citizens, but terrorizing non-citizens is what empires are all about. The geographic location of an empire’s brutality doesn’t matter for the purposes of assessing it as an empire (i.e. a dictatorship).

Fascism was always with US

In 1939, a young John F Kennedy wrote in his diary that fascism was right for Germany and Italy. President Harry Truman, who dropped atomic bombs on Japan, had once signed up to be a Klu Klux Klan member. In 1971, then California governor Ronald Reagan in a telephone conversation referred to “monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”. Jimmy Carter, while governor of Georgia, declared a “American Fighting Man’s Day” in the state to counter the conviction of William Calley, the perpetrator of the My Lai massacre.

Fascism, as Roderick Day argued, is the genocidal component of capitalism that is always operative but not always prominent within the borders of the richest capitalist states.

Until the collapse of the USSR from its leadership's errors and betrayals, the USA was threatened by a powerful ideological and military rival. For decades, the existence of the USSR (and the “loss of China” in 1949) drove concessions to workers within the USA. But even before the USSR’s collapse, the US began to roll back concessions because they were seen as excessive and a threat to the empire.

The USSR’s collapse did not halt the relative decline of U.S. imperial might. By the late 1990’s, as the Asian “tigers” were humiliated by the U.S.-dominated IMF, China’s economy kept growing remarkably. China’s apparent accommodation to western imperialism was looking very suspect for that reason alone. Today, both factions of the USA’s one party state, Republicans and Democrats, are openly determined to destroy China.

The U.S elite lost fear of their own people as they rolled back concessions to them for decades, but they did not lose their fear of imperial decline. That fear has only intensified and driven them to increasingly “roll the dice” as the late Glen Ford put it in 2014. The USA’s fascist nature will be increasingly flaunted rather than disguised.. If “the Revolution will not be televised”, the fascist counter-Revolution certainly will be. The dictatorship’s hard core base will eat up displays of cruelty in lieu of dignity for themselves. Over a century ago, Karl Marx explained why capitalism needed to be overthrown. US imperialism and fascism have proven him correct.

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