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Fascism: What it is and how to fight it

The Arizona massacre, the Tea Party and the capitalist state

Published Jan 30, 2011 10:05 PM

The following is the first of two articles loosely based on a talk given at a Workers World Party membership meeting on Jan. 21. Read part 2 at www.workers.org/2011/us/fascism_part2_0217/

The Arizona massacre and attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by Jared Loughner has raised questions on the role of the ultra-right, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and fascism in U.S politics.

The public discussion of this subject arose quickly in the hours after the massacre. It was particularly sharpened when the sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, declared Arizona to be the “mecca of prejudice and bigotry.”

What happened next is of considerable importance to the working class and the oppressed. It is quite telling.

The event was so horrendous that it immediately drew the attention of the capitalist media and then all classes in society. The masses were, of course, horrified and intensely curious to find an answer as to what led to such an assassination attempt and killing spree. Without any specific information, and even knowing that Loughner was probably mentally disturbed, the natural instinct would be to connect the event with the political climate in Arizona, or the rise of the Tea Party, or the right-wing media, or all of them. Any one of these assumptions would be not only reasonable but expected, given the political situation.

Consider just the background in Arizona. Giffords had just gone through an election campaign during which her Tea Party-backed opponent invited his followers to participate with him in firing off rounds from an M16. This was in addition to the fact that Sarah Palin showed Giffords’ district in the crosshairs of a gun sight on her web page.

Anti-immigrant racism is at a fever pitch in Arizona, where the new law SB1070 declared open season on immigrants and undocumented workers. Ethnic studies are being declared subversive by the racist authorities. A move to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants born in the U.S. has been put forward, a denial of their Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Shefiff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County set up a virtual police state over the years for African-American prisoners and for Latinas and Latinos. He introduced chain gangs and other brutal methods of humiliating prisoners.

The Minutemen are extremely active in Arizona. This is a fascist-style group of vigilantes who mobilize to inflict terror on undocumented immigrants coming across the border and those who are in the U.S. as well. They are one of the most vicious expressions of racism in the Southwest as a whole.

Arizona has long been a breeding ground of racism and reaction. This is primarily based upon the fact that it is a settler state. The ruling classes have had to carry out the most extreme oppression in order to secure and hold the land stolen from both Mexico and the Indigenous peoples and to exploit their labor. It is officially 20 percent Latino/a and has 14 Native tribes numbering more than 200,000 people. From the 1860s to the 1880s, Geronimo and Cochise, Apache warriors, fought legendary heroic battles to ward off the genocidal white settlers in the north of the state.

It has a smaller African-American population, which is downtrodden and subjected to ferocious racism.

The senior senator from Arizona, John McCain III, has both a racist and militarist tradition. McCain was in the vanguard of the racist resistance when the state refused to approve Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a holiday. The resistance lasted from 1983, when the federal King holiday was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, until 1992, when it was finally passed in Arizona under the pressure of a national boycott. McCain was forced to reverse his position.

Both his grandfather and his father were four-star admirals in the Pacific Command over a period covering World War II and the Vietnam War. His father was the head of the Pacific Command during Vietnam. Sen. McCain is close to the military and to the military-industrial complex, which has enormous economic influence in Arizona and is extremely reactionary politically.

William Rehnquist, the right-wing former chief justice of the Supreme Court, became infamous in his early years in Arizona as a bully who engaged in intimidation of Black and Latino/a voters at the polls. As a lawyer for the Republican Party, he organized and led “Operation Eagle” in southern Phoenix, where flying squads of lawyers invaded African-American and Latino/a neighborhoods to stop people from voting. He had to be physically thrown out of the polling places in 1962 in order to stop him. In 1964 Rehnquist opposed a Phoenix ordinance that allowed Black and Latino/a people to enter segregated stores and restaurants. Rehnquist and significant sections of the Arizona ruling class were as intransigent as the Klan and the segregationists in Mississippi and Alabama.

McCain follows in the tradition of Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the leader of the extreme right wing of the capitalist establishment in the 1950s and 1960s. Goldwater’s program included abolishing welfare and threatening nuclear war with the USSR. His following included the John Birch Society and other fascist organizations.

Given both the immediate and historical background of Arizona, all generations would naturally gravitate to the theory that the ultra-right had some connection to the assassination attempt.

But what happened after Sheriff Dupnik unexpectedly made a broadside accusation against the extreme right? All organs of the ruling class — the media, the politicians and talk radio — went on a massive campaign to erase any political connection to the right wing from the minds of the people.

This campaign culminated in the memorial ceremony at Arizona State University, where President Barack Obama gave a major talk.

The writer is author of the book “Low-Wage Capitalism,” a Marxist analysis of globalization and its effects on the U.S. working class. He has also written numerous articles and spoken on the present economic crisis. For further information, visit www.lowwagecapitalism.com.