Stacy Summary:  So the Koch Brothers’ Freedom Works (and, yes, they keep posting on our Youtube videos, comments similar to many ‘independent’ minded folks here) have hired the two most popular with the ‘grassroots’ demagogues, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.  The mission is to “Restore Honor” (perfect fascist propaganda tool to use such a vague concept as ‘honor’) and “Take Back the Country,” um, for the Republicans, known here as the Red Team: “What happens this year will make what happened in 1994 look like a Sunday picnic.” Anyone here attending the ‘grassroots for Joe SixPack’ shindig put together by the two brothers worth $35 billion?  Are you hoping to get ‘educated’ by Glenn Beck, cuz I hear that:

“He talks to you and not at you,” said Wojtowicz, who was meeting in Washington with about 40 members of the Chicago Tea Patriots group. “He’s giving you an education.”

In related news, as with the last time that fascism emerged out of economic depression, we once again find the Japanese. I just read an article in the Herald Tribune which is bizarrely not available anywhere online; so I will summarize and type in a few quotes here.  The title is “Venting frustration in Japan,” and it chronicles the rise of new extreme right groups in Japan  called the ‘Net right’ (for the fact that they organize via the internet) and that, unlike the Old Right groups, have stepped up personal confrontations in a manner that is unheard of in Japan.  From the article:

“the largest group appears to be the cumbersomely named Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan, known here by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai, which has about 9,000 members.”

One could also perhaps read the American version as “Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Mexicans, Blacks or Gays in America.”

The far right Japanese groups meet online and then hold noisy demonstrations in meat space; which often include confronting Korean or Phillipine school children, taunting them to go home.  More:

“Since first appearing last year, these protests have aimed at not just Japan’s half-million ethnic Koreans but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes.  In that case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

Tags:   1984 · fascism94 Comments