There is no "Fascism Lite."

Coming soon: from the plutocrats who brought you Foreign Invasion Lite (Bases everywhere! Borderless drone wars!), Human Trafficking Lite (Thailand tours!), Money Laundering Lite (Switzerland! Caymans!), Sex Slavery Lite (Celeb nude video hacks!), and Racially-Based Summary Executions Lite, we’re proud to bring you Fascism Lite! 

Sarcasm aside, there is a growing force of real-life Fascism sweeping across the Earth.  In textbook-definition terms, this means that powerful governments are merging with distinctly amoral corporate entities and then working together to take over the world.  In the process, they demolish all legal precedents, presumably kicking it off with the Geneva Conventions and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and follow up by killing the environment. Oh, and they use virulent hatred of "The Other" to mobilize the minions.

Anyone who follows pro-torture, pro-war, pro-prejudice, anti-environment leaders expecting that utopia is just around the corner has probably been brainwashed by the likes of Donald Trump. What proto-fascist demagogues such as Trump, Bachmann, Hannity and Cruz so colorfully illustrate is that opportunistic hatemongers have no real plan but to unite people against enemies, and that this blind obsession with hatred will come to no good end. The inescapable outcome of obeying terracidal sadists is a dystopian mix of societal regression and ecological degradation. 

I normally direct these ranty missives toward the upper echelons of power, but I’d like to address the cheerleaders on the far Right for a moment.  You know who you are: the ones who equate Abu Ghraib with a "fraternity prank" because 'Papa Bear' O'Reilly gave you moral permission, or describe a largely innocent population of Muslim prisoners as "Animals" in order to justify their humiliating, categorically inhuman treatment at Guantanamo Bay.  Every casual slur, every little act of cruelty, every time you just keep your head down and try not to think about the moral implications, you bring yourselves closer to the edge. The problem is that they didn’t tell you where the race to the edge leads.  If civilization’s gearshift stays stuck between “Imperial Fascism” and “Human Rights with Sovereign Borders” much longer, we'll face one of two options, neither of which most of you would like:

In Plan A, the forces of Justice win, be it through revolution or rapid structural reform, and try to sort everything out in a way that’s fair to everyone. This quickly proves to involve a massive pile of litigation, because the Good Guys, given free reign, have unearthed decades worth of files and witness testimony detailing nefarious cover-ups from coups to germ warfare experiments... you know, the kind of stuff the Far Right always pretends not to notice if they think it helps their team. Everything is fair game: assassinations, biowarfare, unconstitutional invasions of privacy, you name it.  Hooray for the Good Guys!  The problem is, most of the Bad Guys get away clean.  By and large, those you might call "Middle Management" in the Conspiracy are the ones to take the fall: the spokespeople, technicians, messengers, and NSA contractors who didn’t go the Snowden route.  Names like Kissinger, Cheney, Gonzalez, Von Braun, Dow, GE, Bechtel, and Monsanto would no doubt arise in the course of investigations, but it’s hard to beat a billion-dollar legal team.

Plan B is a living nightmare in which the Fascists have finally won.  This would involve an undeclared empire comprised of the United States, England, France, and possibly (but not necessarily) Germany—an alliance which opposes human rights on principle, instead imposing a lawless, pay-to-play form of government across much of the developed world.  No more rights or protections, but those who play the game can ensure that their children are insulated from most of the fallout, in some cases literally.  You see, in ForProfitLand, there is no more Hippocratic Oath, and no pesky government watchdogs such as the EPA to protect the general public from nuclear meltdowns and toxic spills.  Like a bulldozer leaking oil and belching smog, the fascist juggernaut would spread to the ends of the earth appropriating whole cultures overnight, and assuming tacit ownership of assimilated citizens' bodies through the right of Toxic Trespass. Slavery Lite, anyone?

Plan C—amnesty for almost everyone—is slipping away. It stands to reason that there are only a few people out there who actually came up with the brilliant idea to bring back bioterrorism, torture, and treating people as property, since most human beings find these acts revolting. The true architects of atrocity should be only the ones to take the fall... and the good news is, there aren't many of them.

Posting nude videos of someone online without their permission isn't "Sex Slavery Lite;" there's nothing innocent or light-hearted about sexually using people against their will. Police forces killing unarmed people of color in the streets, trusting that the Blue Line will protect them, isn't Apartheid Lite; it's a murderous gestapo that hearkens back to Hitler's Final Solution. Letting thousands of children in Flint, Michigan suffer permanent brain damage from months of lead poisoning isn't EPA Lite; its a horrible act of state bioterrorism which has gone unpunished, from the Governor on down. A U.S. Predator Drone incursion into a sovereign nation which results in the mass killing of a wedding party, or a hospital full of sick people, isn't "War Lite;" any unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation is an unequivocal act of war, and attacking an enemy through civilian proxies is a war crime.

The problem isn't that there are no laws; there are plenty. They just aren't being enforced. What most plagues the world is the problem of privilege. The phonetic roots of the word privilege reveal its true meaning: Prive (private)+Lege (legal); in other words, private law, or the ability to buy your way out of accountability for any crime. Speaking only for myself, I think it's safe to say that this literal definition of privilege accounts for over half of what's wrong with the world these days. If the modern League of Nations concept actually made any sense, had any abiding principles, then no one would have the state-sanctioned right to tithe their way out of culpability for gross atrocities such as arming pre-ISIS terrorist cells in Syria or raining depleted uranium upon Fallujah. Sad to say, this is not how "justice" seems to work in the 21st Century. "Less justice, more privilege" is the Law of the Land now. Oh, also "Resistance is Futile."

Fascism Lite: “Because the only reason they hanged all those poor souls at Nuremberg is that Hitler never mobilized the moderates.”

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Afterthought: I try not to judge those who keep their head down for their own safety or that of their loved ones.  That's not selling out: these days, sometimes it's just survival.