Fascism and the US Government

Very good post over at Borepatch. Here's a taste - go read the whole thing.

This blog kills Fascists

Woodie Guthrie was a Red - he lived in the "Red Hill" district of Los Angeles in the 1930s (a neighborhood notorious for the concentration of radicals), and wrote a column for the Communist Party's Daily Worker newspaper.  He was a reliable Red, willing to be an apologist for the U.S.S.R.'s non-aggression pact with Hitler.

All that changed on June 1, 1941, as Operation Barbarossa saw the Nazi supermen storming across the border into Guthrie's Mother Russia.  He took some paint and wrote on his guitar: This machine kills fascists.

It's probably unfair to blame him for not recognizing that fascists fought on both sides of the Eastern Front.  Stalin paid lip service to the Socialist Dialectic, and the West's Useful Idiots (like Guthrie) let him get away with it, but the U.S.S.R. was fascist in all but name.  Non-Russians were second class citizens (as the population on Ukraine found out to their sorrow), the State controlled everything, and above all was the all-seeing, all-powerful fuhrer (well, General Secretary).

But Woodie knew how to get an idea popularized, and did.

We live today in a political world that people from Woodie's time simply wouldn't recognize.  The growth in the Leviathan State is steam rolling all before it - the War on (some) Drugs is crushing the Fourth Amendment, Kelo v. New London crushed the Fifth Amendment, Medicare is killing the Tenth Amendment.  Obamacare is killing the First Amendment.  The Second Amendment has - for now - fought off a series of restrictions from 1968 through 1994 that sought to kill it.  That battle is still raging.