Putin - Accusations of Fascism are Flying High and Low

By: Andrew_McKillop

Pointing The Finger
Tablet magazine, which describes itself 'A New Read On Jewish Life' said in its April 4 issue that Putin for obvious reasons is falsely claiming the Kiev Flash Mob government's rise to power was ..”not a popular movement for democracy, European integration, and honest government”. Tablet says Putin pretends that the Kiev Flash Mob rose to power in  “a coup executed by nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-semites”. Tablet magazine writer James Kirchick then said that Jewish leaders in Ukraine have taken out full-page advertisements in the 'New York Times', Canada's 'National Post', and Israel's 'Ha’aretz' to face down Putin’s allegations of creeping fascism in their homeland.  These ads told Putin:  “Your certainty of the growth of anti-semitism in the Ukraine does not correspond to the actual facts. It seems you have confused Ukraine with Russia.”

The trick is to confuse fascism with anti-semitism, and then keep the accusations and denials of “fascism” flying – usually low or very low. Propaganda bizniss, as we know, is not truth business.

Bottom feeding the “Putin is Fascist” trough, the former British Ambassador to Moscow, Andrew Wood in a special feature article published by 'The American Interest', March 13,  gave a long a list of why, for him as a former British Ambassador, Putin is “almost a fascist”. Not quite however, as long as BP  and other UK commercial interests continue to invest in Russia! According to the British Embassy, this investment was 46 billion GBP for the year 2011-2012.

Wood makes the astonishing claim – totally inverting and trashing the truth – that the Kiev Flash Mob, which he calls “the authorities”, are not using simplist, populist and misleading anti-Russian propaganda, and did not achieve power through mob violence.  Wood says: “The new Ukrainian authorities have not resorted to mobs in trying to construct a new future for Ukraine”. How did they rise to power? For Russian media they rose like scum in a bottle through mob violence.

Mussolini Did It Better 
Fascism has to be traced back to Benito Mussolini, before any charges and denials of “continuous, simplistic, distorted, populist or lying fascistic propaganda” are bandied around. No doubt a hero for Andrew Wood, a certain Mr Winston Churchill several times accompanied Benito Mussolini on “Il Duce's” campaign roadshows. Churchill was an open and declared admirer of Mussolini.

Before World War II, that is. Later on, Churchill creatively “forgot” this fact.

One central reason for Churchill's admiration of Mussolini was crystal clear. Apart from “Il Duce's” ability whip up the crowds and garner big voter support, his initial and highly confused economic model for Italy was “Corporatism”. This was at the heart of fascist tradition, exactly like the equally short-lived Nazi tradition. In other words, the Tyrant rules with his hand-picked Oligarchs.

As proven in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Corporatism can work for a certain short while – luck holds out, but only for a while, as proven in Mr Wood's Great Britain, John McCain's USA, or elsewhere in the “liberal market capitalist” societies, where Crony Capitalism and Corporatism are exactly identical twins. And the economy tanks.

In the absence of one single clear Tyrant, called “iconic” or “the inamorata of the people”, the Crony Corporate band of insanely overpaid CEOs occupy the scene and play the markets hoping their luck holds out. Upstream of them, the bankster clique provides the wherewithal. What else is different?

Fascist economic policies, cooked up by the band around Il Duce, were as born-to-fail as the Nazi economic miracle of Hjalmar Schlecht – and importantly were ultra-Keynesian long before Mr John Maynard Keynes rushed his 'General Theory' to print in 1936. Call it deficit spending to reward the Oligarchs or Crony Capitalists, and very few others. Getting the people to swallow this and come back for more of course needs simplist, populist and misleading propaganda – and for Churchill, as well as Mussolini and Hitler, the favored external target and whipping boy was Communist Russia.

Andrew Wood is forced to admit that the oligarch head count in Ukraine is impressive, whether they backed the pro-Russian government of Yanukovych, or switched to the Flash Mob. In Russia however, its oligarchs are more tied to the state, and the role of state corporations in Russia is strong but the bottom line is that when the Tyrant overthrows the state, and declares himself the State, we will have Fascism and Nazism.

Today, the mudslinging directed at Putin by western glove puppet media relies on claims there is “a fascist agenda” at work in Russia, totally trashing the truth one more time. The collapse of the USSR and the retreat of 'Gorby' to peddle Pepsi Cola at a Pizza Hut was – for Putin – a geopolitical disaster but was not an economic disaster. It was a retreat from Tyrant-economics, whose last avatar was Gorbachev's Perestroika, which could only fail because “fascist agenda economics”, whether they are Peddled With Pepsi or not, are a disaster.

Fascism Starts And Ends With the Mob
To be sure there are mobs and mobs. Crowds at a League 1 football match or Michael Jackson concert (while Our Hero 'Jacko' was still alive) are not exactly the same as those which turn out for a public hanging, or in Saudi Arabia, a public whipping. They however do have common features. For Fascism and Nazism, with no shadow of doubt, “crowd consensus” was vital to its development.

The well-known Italian historian Renzo de Felice for at least 20 years from the 1970s to 1990s published on the theme of why and how fascism and antifascism became so powerful. http://www.academicroom.com/article/renzo-de-felice-and-historiography-italian-fascist

Absolutely critical to this process, according to de Felice, the roles of anti-semitism and anti-Stalinism (often called anti-communism) were intrinsic or obligatory. As de Felice and all historians studying both Fascism and Nazism underline, the “sweet spots and high times” for these degenerate and nihilistic doctrines were however very, very short. For Mussolini, it was only 1929-36.

Before and after, Italian fascism was an economic disaster and the mob, or crowd, were rarely on board and cheering. They were unemployed and faced rising prices. An “economic miracle”, and other “bread and circus” shows were therefore necessary – if only for the Tyrant to survive. While Hitler homed-in on the Jews as favored whipping boys to amuse the mob, Mussolini bizarrely chose the country of Ethiopia and its then-Emperor, as the target of mass hatred! Mussolini made massive use of chemical weapons in this absurd and of course criminal war – to demonstrate Italian technological superiority.

While de Felice is described by many as the foremost expert on fascism, his critics say he ignored or under-estimated the philosophy of fascism, and its similarities and differences with Nazism and Stalinism. All of them in fact drew exclusively on “Western-based” philosophy and tradition. The critical and major difference – as several “post-de Felice” historians of fascism say -  was that Marxism (if not Stalinism) is Christian and Enlightenment-era in its philosophical sources, but fascism and Nazism drew on Nihilism and post-rational European philosophy.

Both Mussolini and Hitler tried to avoid that fact from being too clear – to keep the Church on board – but this subterfuge wore very thin in a short period of time. Fascism and Nazism became openly near-pagan or “heroic” philosophies, driven by the insane lust for power of the Tyrants – Hitler and Mussolini.  Stalin the Tyrant applied his own “restructured Marxism” to pursue his violent goals.

There is a fundamental difference. Nihilism is post-rational. The bases of Christian philosophy, heavily used (but never admitted) by Marx himself, can be traced back to far before the era of Christ, even to the Ancient Greek Milesians. What is called “Western rational philosophy” is entirely dependent on this historical source. 19th century Nihilism denied it. The founding claim of Nietsche, who the Nazi regime's ideologists quoted as often as Heidegger, was that “God is dead”.

Whip Up The Mob - And Regret It
Mob rule was contemptuously dismissed by Plato and Socrates as merely an interstitial stage or parenthesis in a grim cycle of Bad Governance. In their analysis, Bad Government staggers and shudders between what we can call Crony Democracy, through Oligarchy and then Tyranny, to Anarchy. They argued that when government is ruled by the oligarchs, they will be overthrown and superceded by the Tyrant. He will then be smashed by Anarchy.

Mob rule begets mob rule during the anarchic phase. It features fantasy and delirium, along with the mindless violence. The Tyrant can slow, but not stop the process by directing the mob's rage against any handy whipping boy, The Enemy of the People. War is inevitable, either civil or international.

The western ideal of democracy is therefore, itself, a double-edged sword. Power, like wealth, tends to concentrate itself in fewer and fewer sticky fingers – measured by the economy and its failings.

Carefully choosing the word “demagogue” to label Putin, instead of Tyrant, the former UK ambassador to Russia, Andrew Wood, claims the Russian economy is now “parasited by Putin” without using that exact wording. To be sure, BP's wheeler-dealing in Russia has very seriously blown back for the Honorable Corporation which once was Anglo Iranian Oil – still reeling from its pollution disaster in the Gulf of Mexico – but to lay the blame on Vladimir Putin and his “demagoguery” is excessive.

Putin has himself called the Ukrainian situation “a mess”, but he lays the blame on the West and its Kiev Flash Mob “government”. Where mob rule goes in Ukraine, from now on, is not easy to forecast but Anarchy is certainly rising.

Using Plato-Socrates metrics, we should expect one or more tyrants, probably small, to poke up on the radar screen before disappearing forever from the screen, like Flight MH370. How much damage they do before they are laid low by the same mobs they feed on – Mussolini was hung upside down and whipped to death by an angry mob in April 1945 – will be for time to tell. We know the process if not the timelines.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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