"War is education
- especially for the loser."
-Marshal
MacLuhan.
The corporatist
state outlined by Mussolini's Third Way included labour, business and government
building a Futurist paradise of permanent mechanical war - with an iron
fist to smash all ideas outside the photo-op frame.
It could be said that the
function of a fascist government is simply to enforce its own rule; resources
dedicated to fighting crime, poverty or sickness are re-routed to crush
dissent. Weapons and armies are built to expand the government's
jurisdiction. New rules are invented to invade intimate spaces with
fanciful constriction.
Programs are a distraction;
enforcement of power is central. Privatization of government services,
erosion of welfare institutions, reduction in funding to education, coupled
with the New World Order of the post-Sept 11 security state - in which
the intrusion of surveillance, the humiliation of arrest, the threat of
brutal force replace all other social interactions - create a subtle new
framework.
Morality, as per Nietsche,
is replaced with aesthetic conformity. The New Fascist Aesthetic
transcends Aryans in flashy jackboots with their preposterous goose-stepping.
Now it includes black fascists in Holland mourning their dead gay leaders.
How could white supremacists demand special treatment from a machine that
drinks blood?
For those who reject fascism,
the only fate is to be consumed by it, to have their bodies, minds, and
ideology converted into spectacles of Victory. For totalitarianism
to confront rebel ideas would make hegemony disintegrate; the reiteration
of rebel failure is the only argument necessary. The ass-kickings
in Grenada, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and everywhere
else are ends unto themselves; not simply distracting events but the substitution
of Victory for real policy.
The audience at the Victory
Party are manipulated and propagandized with the spectacle of rebels' defeat.
To borrow Debord: construction of victorious spectacles could form the
entire fabric of Fascist social economy. The remystification of the
fourth wall - the brutal enforcement of disbelief suspension - turns citizens
into frightened spectators, afraid to break the cycle of lies, seeing their
prides, hopes and dreams dashed by proxy, over and over.
