The 14 characteristics of Fascism

Fascism Anyone?

The 14 characteristics of Fascism

by Dr. Lawrence Britt

Free Inquiry magazine, Spring 2003

Dr. Britt, a political scientist, studied the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile). He found the regimes all had 14 things in common, and he calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. ]

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism -- Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights -- Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to 'look the other way' or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause -- The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military -- Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism -- The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and antigay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media -- Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or through sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in wartime, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security -- Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined -- Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected -- The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed -- Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts -- Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment -- Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses, and even forego civil liberties, in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption -- Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions, and who use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections -- Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against (or even the assassination of) opposition candidates, the use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and the manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Federal Appeals Court Finds California's Same-Sex Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

Federal Appeals Court Finds California's Same-Sex Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

A federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled on Tuesday that California’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples is unconstitutional.

Read the story» »

7 Privacy Threats the [US-]Constitution Can't Protect You Against

7 Privacy Threats the Constitution Can't Protect You Against

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Posted on February 4, 2012, Printed on February 4, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153999/7_privacy_threats_the_constitution_can%27t_protect_you_against

Last week, the Roberts Supreme Court uncharacteristically handed down a decision that doesn't radically infringe on civil liberties. The justices unanimously ruled that police overshot their authority by planting a GPS device on suspected drug dealer Antoine Jones' car without a warrant, tracking his movements for over a month. For now, Americans can rest assured that police can't secretly tag them -- at least without a warrant.
At the same time, privacy advocates pointed out -- and some of the justices admitted -- that the court's majority opinion in US vs. Jones completely skirted more pressing privacy issues. The problem, the majority argued, was that police had trespassed on Jones' private property by planting a GPS device on his car. The majority opinion did not address whether or not it's okay for law enforcement to use a sophisticated surveillance technology to log someone's movements for a whole month without a warrant.

In separate, concurring opinions Justices Alito and Sotomayor both warned of the multitude of surveillance technologies that do not require intrusion onto private property to trample privacy rights. Here's a (non-comprehensive) breakdown of existing or impending technologies that make our privacy protections wildly outdated. 

1. Everything you use, all the time.

The Jones case itself presents an outdated problem, because police don't really have to bother with the clumsy task of sneaking a device onto a car; at this point, private companies have shoehorned location trackers in most "smart" gadgets. Justice Alito pointed out that the more than 332 million phones and wireless devices in use in the US contain technology that transmits the user's location. Many cars feature GPS as well, thanks to OnStar navigation. 

"Even if police can't track you using a GPS device," Lee Tien, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells AlterNet, "if they can go to your phone company and get information on your whereabouts, what does that matter?" 

As Sotomayor pointed out in the concurring opinion, "GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations… (Disclosed in [GPS] data will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on). The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future."

Location is just the start. There has probably not been a single week since 2005 without a story about Facebook, or Google, or Verizon, or AT&T terrifying consumers and privacy advocates with some new way to collect too much information and then share it with other companies or authorities. 

The problem is that the law does not adequately address private information that has been shared with third parties, like credit card companies or Google, Facebook and the telecoms, Tien says.

As Sotomayor put it, "I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. " 

2. Cameras everywhere: License plate readers, movement tracking on cameras.

Thanks in part to a decade of Homeland Security grants, America's cities are teeming with cameras -- they're on subways, on buses, on store fronts, in restaurants, in apartment complexes, and in schools. 

In New York, the NYCLU found a five-fold increase in the number of security cameras in one area of New York between 1998 and 2005, and that was before the Bloomberg administration -- inspired by London, most heavily surveilled city in the world -- pledged to install 3,000 cameras in lower Manhattan as part of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (this plan was expanded to midtown Manhattan as well). The cameras, which stream footage to a centralized location, are equipped with video analytics that can alert police to "suspicious" activity like loitering. The NYPD, and municipalities all over the country and world also make generous use of license plate readers (LPR) that can track car movement. 

The big issue, as EFF's Tien tells AlterNet, is that these surveillance tools muddy the legal barriers between public and private that are at the heart of constitutional protections, because they're so much more sophisticated than human observation. In other words, a person might expect that what they do on a street corner can be observed, but not that their actions might be logged in a database or that they can be tracked for a month. 

3. Biometrics.

As cameras become more sophisticated and better able to capture higher quality images from further away, there's a push to merge surveillance with biometrics technology -- the use of unique physiological features, like facial features or iris patterns, to ascertain identity. 

After 9/11 many cities and airports rushed to boost their camera surveillance with facial recognition software. The tech proved disappointing, and after testing that hit a paltry 60 percent accuracy rate in one case (that's pretty bad if you're trying to figure out identity), many programs were abandoned. In the years since then, both private companies and university research labs funded with government grants have made vast improvements in facial recognition and iris scans, like 3-D face capture and "skinprint" technology (mapping of facial skin patterns). Iris scans can allegedly tell identical twins apart. 

Many private companies shill these products directly to local law enforcement agencies, a business strategy that police tend to be pretty enthusiastic about. One such success story is the MORIS device, a gadget attached to an iPhone that can run face recognition software, take digital fingerprints and grab an iris scan at a traffic stop. Starting last fall, the MORIS device has been in use in police departments all over the country. 

4. Government databases.

Privacy advocates point out that novel types of biometric technology like facial recognition and iris scans can be an unreliable form of ID in the field, but that has not discouraged government agencies from embarking on grand plans to hugely expand their biometric databases. The FBI's billion-dollar "Next Generation Identification" system (NGI) will house iris scans, palm prints, measures of voice and gait, records of tattoos, and scars and photos searchable with facial recognition technology when it's complete in 2014. The bulk of this information is expected to come from local law enforcement. 

Other government agencies have also been jazzing up their biometric databases. The DoD's ABIS contains millions of biometric records from Iraq and Afghanistan, including images of faces, fingerprints, iris scans, and voice recordings. DHS's IDENT database houses photos searchable with facial recognition. The DoJ, DHS and DoD have a mandate to make their databases "interoperational" so anyone from any agency can search the others. 

The development of the new FBI database is subject to internal review to ensure compliance with privacy laws. But privacy advocates point out that there are few bulwarks against abuses in how the information is collected and used, especially since much of this information can be picked up remotely without consent. 

5. FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology).

Then there's the tech that's supposed to peer inside your head. In 2008, the Department of Homeland security lab tested a program called Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), designed to thwart criminal activity by predicting "mal-intent." Unsavory plans are supposed to reveal themselves through physiological tells like heart rate, pheromones, electrodermal activity, and respiratory measurements, according to a 2008 privacy impact assessment. 

The 2008 privacy assessment, though, only addressed the initial laboratory testing of FAST's prophesying sensors on volunteers. According to a report in the journal Nature, sometime last year DHS also tested the technology in a large, undisclosed area in the northeastern US. 

6. Drones!

Unmanned flying vehicles, a key part of the valiant effort to transform modern warfare into a video game, are likely to become increasingly common domestically. Concerned about air safety issues, the FAA has so far restricted drone use by law enforcement, but that won't last long: Congress has instructed the agency to open six US test sites for drones, according to Bloomberg.

Border agents already use drones to track activity on the border and even inside Mexico. Also, in December the LA Times reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection generously loaned out drones to police departments. 

An ACLU report from December says that local law enforcement officials are pushing for domestic use of the new technology, as are drone manufacturers. As Glenn Greenwald points out, drone makers "continuously emphasize to investors and others that a major source of business growth for their drone products will be domestic, non-military use." 

Right now drones range in size from giant planes to hummingbird-sized, the ACLU report says, with the technology improving all the time. Some can be operated by only one officer, and others by no one at all. The report points to all the sophisticated surveillance technology that can take flight on a drone, including night vision, video analytics ("smart" surveillance that can track activities, and with improvements in biometrics, specific people), massive zoom, and the creepy see-through imaging, currently in development. 

7. Super drones that know who you are!

In September, Wired reported that the military has given out research grants to several companies to spruce up their drones with technology that lets them identify and track people on the move, or "tagging, tracking, and locating" (TTL). Noah Shachtman writes:

Perhaps the idea of spy drones already makes yournervous. Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the notion of an unblinking, robotic eye in the sky that can watch your every move. If so, you may want to click away now. Because if the Army has its way, drones won’t just be able to look at what you do. They’ll be able to recognize your face — and track you, based on how you look. If the military machines assemble enough information, they might just be able to peer into your heart.

One company claims it can equip drones with facial recognition technology that lets them build a 3-D model of a face based on a 2-D image, which would then allow the drone to ID someone, even in a crowd. They also say that if they can get a close enough look, they can tell twins apart and reveal not only individuals' identity but their social networks, reports Wired. That's not all. Shachtman continues: 

The Army also wants to identify potentially hostile behavior and intent, in order to uncover clandestine foes. Charles River Analytics is using its Army cash to build a so-called “Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS)” tool. The system would integrate data from informants’ tips, drone footage, and captured phone calls. Then it would apply “a human behavior modeling and simulation engine” that would spit out “intent-based threat assessments of individuals and groups.” In other words: This software could potentially find out which people are most likely to harbor ill will toward the U.S. military or its objectives. Feeling nervous yet?

All of these technologies are either already integrated into daily life or coming down the pike. In Constitution 3.0, Jeffrey Rosen invited scholars and futurists to envision how current civil liberties protections would fare when faced with technologies of the future (not well). One chilling possibility highlighted in the book: What if Facebook and Google decided to archive and post footage from millions of surveillance cameras?

In a speech to Brookings Institute, Rosen says this not-unlikely scenario would make it possible to, "sign onto Google or Facebook, click onto a picture of me, for example, back-click on me to see where I’d come from this morning, forward click to see where I’m going this afternoon, and basically have 24/7 surveillance of everyone in the world at all times."

Tana Ganeva is AlterNet's managing editor. Follow her on Twitter or email her at tana@alternet.org.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153999/

Angry 'Ex-Gay' Nurse Rages 'Homosexuality is Not a Civil Right' at NJ Marriage Equality Hearing

Angry 'Ex-Gay' Nurse Rages 'Homosexuality is Not a Civil Right' at NJ Marriage Equality Hearing: VIDEO
Feb 03, 2012 07:40 am |

Here's another intense video from what I would call an extremely damaged gay man and human being at yesterday's marriage equality hearing in New Jersey. Watch, AFTER THE JUMP... Greg Quinlan from Roxbury: "Homosexuality is not a civil right. Civil... read more |

Virginia Passes Adoption Bill Allowing Agencies to Deny Gays Based on Religious Beliefs

Virginia Passes Adoption Bill Allowing Agencies to Deny Gays Based on Religious Beliefs
Feb 03, 2012 11:32 am |

Earlier today I posted about the discriminatory adoption bill pending in the Virginia legislature. The bill allows private adoption agencies to deny service to gay people based on religious or moral beliefs. It passed both houses, the AP reports: The... read more |

Jewish group to offer ‘gay cure’ controversy school teaching packs

An LGBT Jewish forum has said it will offer teaching support packs to the state-funded Jewish school which became embroiled in controversy this month after showing students a slide with the logo of a ‘gay cure’ group.
Keshet UK’s Co-convenor Dave Shaw, who is a former pupil of the school in question, said the group welcomed the school’s internal review of how it deals with discussions on homosexuality, but was disappointed it had declined to meet with the group.
In an article in the Jewish Chronicle last month, students said a sixth-form discussion on homosexuality at JFS which ended with a slide displaying the logo of ‘gay cure’ group JONAH implied it was something they could explore if they thought they might be gay.
The school’s headmaster Jonathan Miller said the material in lesson discussing homosexuality had been taught for years, and told PinkNews.co.uk it was “false” to suggest references to JONAH in that lesson were designed to promote the group.
The Jewish Chronicle said at the weekend it had never suggested the school “promoted” JONAH but questioned why the anti-gay group was ever mentioned.
To mark LGBT History Month, Keshet UK said today it would be delivering teacher’s packs for every teacher at the school to equip them in their handling of homosexuality.
Dave Shaw, Co-Convenor of Keshet UK and an ex-JFS pupil, said: “We are pleased to hear from the headteacher that the school is currently conducting a review of the school’s approach to the topic of homosexuality.
“We firmly believe that as a state-funded school, JFS, like all Jewish schools, must be able to demonstrate that it meets its statutory obligation to be proactive in preventing bullying on the basis of sexuality and create an environment where all students feel included.”
A representative of the school could not be reached for comment today.