Forbidden Bookshelf's Resistance in America Collection

Friendly Fascism, The Search for an Abortionist, and Dallas '63

Nancy Howell Lee, Peter Dale Scott, Bertram Gross

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781504046206
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From creeping capitalism to abortion to government corruption, these three books shed light on controversial topics that are too often left in the dark. Curated by NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, the Forbidden Bookshelf series resurrects books from America's repressed history. All touching on bold and debated topics, these three books are more relevant today than ever. Friendly Fascism: Bertram Gross, a presidential adviser in the New Deal era, explores the insidious way that capitalist politics could subvert America's constitutional democracy. First published over three decades ago, this book predicted the threats and realities that occur when big business and big government become bedfellows, while demonstrating how US citizens can build a truer democracy. The Search for an Abortionist: Nancy Howell Lee's eye-opening account reveals the dangerous and illegal options for women seeking an abortion before Roe v. Wade. Based on interviews with 114 women, this groundbreaking work takes an intimate look at the abortion process. Dallas '63: Peter Dale Scott exposes the deep state, an intricate network within the American government, linking Wall Street influence, corrupt bureaucracy, and the military-industrial complex. Since World War II, its power has grown unchecked, and nowhere has it been more apparent than at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Scott details the CIA and FBI's involvement in the JFK assassination, and shows how events like Watergate, the Iran–Contra affair, and 9/11 are all connected to this behind-the-scenes web of corruption.

Friendly Fascism

The New Face of Power in America

Bertram Gross

To My Grandchildren

Contents

Series Introduction

Introduction

Preface, 1985

Introduction: A Patriotic Warning

ONE: The Roots of Friendly Fascism

1. The Rise and Fall of Classic Fascism

Italy, Germany, Japan • Breeding Grounds of Fascism • The Axis • Anti-Fascist Failures • Fascist Exploits • Fascist Ideologies • Destruction of the Axis • Indestructible Myths

2. The Takeoff Toward a New Corporate Society

The Sun Never Sets on America’s “Free World” • The Golden International • Big Welfare for Big Business • More Rational Corporate Planning • Technology: Starting, Stopping, Suppressing

3. The Mysterious Establishment

The Castles of Power • The Ultra-Rich • The Corporate Overseers • The Chief Executive Network • Executive Managers • Junior and Contingent Members • Conflicts Among the Few • Purges and Conversions • Purifying Ideologies

4. The Side Effects of Success

An Abundance of Frustrations • Falling Apart: Work, Community, Family • Loneliness and Alienation • Crime: The Dirty Secrets • The Erosion of Authority

5. The Challenge of a Shrinking Capitalist World

New Losses to Communism • Creeping Socialism • Third World Demands • Détente: A Cooler Cold War • Instability at the Top

6. Old Crises in New Forms

Untamed Recession • The Hidden Unemployed • The New Inflation: Hyena’s Delight • The Dynamite of Class Conflict • Limited War • Unlimited Overkill

TWO: The Specter of Friendly Fascism

7. The Unfolding Logic

Making the Most of Crises • Consolidating Power • The Cat Feet of Tyranny • Many Paths

8. Trilateral Empire or Fortress America?

American Retrenchment • A “True Empire” • Alternative Outcomes

9. The Friendly Fascist Establishment

From Floundering Establishment to Super-America, Inc. • A Righteous Presidency • Remolding Militarism • The Restructuring of the Radical Right • New Ideologies of Central Power • Triplespeak

10. Friendly Fascist Economics

More Stagflation • More Money Moving Upward • An Abundance of Shortages • More Waste and Pollution • More Nuclear Poison • More Junk and Disservices

11. Subverting Democratic Machinery

Integrating Separate Branches • Friendly Fascist Federalism • Community Carnivals • Contrapuntal Party Harmony • Union-Busting and the Slow Meltdown • The Lessons of the Watergate Conspiracy • Unhinging an Anti-Establishment White House • Coups D’Etat American-Style

12. Managing Information and Minds

Information as the March • The Symbolic Environment • Image as the Reality • Narrowing the Scope of Controversy • Manufacturing Opinion by Polling • The Electronic Throne • Monitoring as the Message • Womb-to-Tomb Dossiers • Economic and Social Vindicators • Educational Authoritarianism • Custodial Functions

13. Incentives for System Acceptance

Extended Professionalism • Job, Prometheus, Faust • For Consumers: Kidnapper Candy • Servitude’s Services • Conditional Benefactions • Rationed Payoffs • The Effulgent Aura

14. The Ladder of Terror

The Rungs of Violence • Precision Purging • Forceful Confrontation • Personal Injury • Covert Action • Conflict Among the “Slobs” • A Violence-Vigilante Culture

15. Sex, Drugs, Madness, Cults

Sex: Through Liberation to Repression • Drugs: Religion of Some People • Madness: Escape from Madness • Cults: Belonging through Submission

16. The Adaptive Hydra

Frying Pan-Fire Conflicts • Multilevel Co-optation • Creative Counterresistance • Innovative Apathetics

17. The Myths of Determinism

Impossibility: It Couldn’t Happen • Inevitability: It Will Happen Irreversibility: Eternal Servitude or Holocaust

THREE: True Democracy

18. It Hasn’t Happened Yet

The USA Today vs. Friendly Fascism, USA • Why It Has Not Yet Happened

19. The Long-Term Logic of Democracy

The Democratic Mystique • Democratic Struggles

20. The Democratic Logic in Action

A Good Neighbor in a New World Order • Democratizing the Establishment • Balancing the Economy • Democratizing the Social Base • Information for Human Liberation • Releasing Humanistic Values • Truth and Rationality

21. What Can You Do?

Yes, You … • Anyone Anywhere, Really? • High Aspirations, Realistic Expectations • My Country, Right and Wrong

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Over three decades ago, Bertram Gross wrote Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power, a prescient prediction of the coming corporate dystopia. Gross warned us that fascism always has two faces. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining, and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner’s sadistic grin. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a captive public as a force for good and promises protection against enemies real or imagined. But defy its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from fascism’s iron grip, and you are confronted by the death’s head. Gross knew that if fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true intentions behind its “friendly” face we would be successfully stripped of power, shorn of our most cherished rights, and impoverished. His prediction, sadly, has been realized. This book is prophetic and important.

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America,” Gross wrote. “Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion.”

We have undergone, as Gross foresaw, a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. Our democracy is a fiction. It is a useful fiction in the hands of the corporate state, which seeks to mask its absolute power, but it no longer exists. The consent of the governed is a cruel joke. Citizens have been demobilized as a political force. Our politics is a form of legalized bribery. Money has replaced the vote. The 35,000 lobbyists in Washington write our laws and legislation and hide their dirty work from public view. Trade agreements, which will have profound impacts on our lives, are kept secret until they become law. The fossil fuel industry has successfully thwarted the drive for sustainable energy despite the growing severity of the ecological crisis. We, like the natural world, have become mere commodities in the hands of corporations to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

Elected officials are manufactured personalities and celebrities. We vote based on how we are made to feel about corporate political puppets. The puppets, Democrat and Republican, engage in hollow acts of political theater keep the fiction of the democratic state alive. There is, however, no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are permitted virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on “American Idol.” Mass emotions are directed exclusively toward the culture wars that include battles over abortion and gay rights. We are only permitted to take emotional stands on issues that do not affect corporate power. What we call politics is no longer political.

Radicals, intellectuals, socialists, trade unionists, and independent journalists who seek to unmask corporate power are silenced or targeted for exclusion within corporate-controlled academia, the media, and government. We are indoctrinated by mass communication and mass entertainment to be “patriotic.” The “patriotic” citizen, plagued by fear of job loss and the specter of Islamic terrorism, does not protest the widespread surveillance and the militarized state. He or she is timid and afraid. He or she does not question the $1.6 trillion in defense-related spending for endless war and ubiquitous forms of mass surveillance. Military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies are seen as above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are sanctified in the name of our state religion. They are effectively removed from public discussion. And this too is a characteristic of totalitarian systems.

And yet, the civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We continue to hold up the Founding Fathers—although they supported slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, and the political disenfranchisement of the masses—and the sanctity of constitution. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary, wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state, have no real sovereignty. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it finally dominates government, is a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, described by Gross as friendly fascism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war, ecological disaster, and a dystopian nightmare.

No state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has replaced news with indoctrination, diversion, and entertainment. We are fed trivia, feel-good stories, patriotic jingoism, and celebrity gossip. The banal and the absurd saturate the airwaves. Corporations use public relations and the manipulation of images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. We are offered elaborate diversionary spectacles from sporting events to reality television. Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman arena. It is all a vast show. Choreographed political vaudeville, which cost billions of dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game.

You cannot use the word liberty when your government, as ours does, watches you twenty-four hours a day and stores all of your personal information in government computers in perpetuity. You cannot use the word liberty when you are the most photographed, monitored, and eavesdropped population in human history. You cannot use the word liberty when it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. You cannot use the word liberty when the state empowers militarized police to use indiscriminate lethal force against unarmed citizens in the streets of American cities and torture tens of thousands of citizens, most poor people of color, in the largest system of solitary confinement in the largest prison system on earth. This is the relationship between a master and a slave.

Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to corporate fascism. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, refining Gross’s thesis, would later characterize this corporate tyranny or friendly fascism as “inverted totalitarianism.” It was, as Gross and Wolin pointed out, characterized by anonymity. It purported to pay fealty to electoral politics, the constitution, and the iconography and symbols of American patriotism, but internally had seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent. Gross warned that the process by which we have been chained and shackled would be incremental and often unnoticed until it was concluded. He wrote that “a friendly fascist power structure in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, or today’s Japan would be far more sophisticated than the ‘caesarism’ of fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan. It would need no charismatic dictator nor even a titular head … it would require no one-party rule, no mass fascist party, no glorification of the State, no dissolution of legislatures, no denial of reason. Rather, it would come slowly as an outgrowth of present trends in the Establishment.”

Gross noted the danger of our corporate-induced electronic hallucin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Friendly Fascism
• About the Authors
• Copyright Page