Fertile Ground
Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America
There was nothing more inflammatory in my first book, about the 1994 invasion and occupation of Haiti, than my assertion that Special Operations was a hotbed of racism and reaction. “Hideous Dream – A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000) was my personal account of that operation, and I was explicit not only about the significant number of white supremacists in Special Operations but how the attitudes of these extremists connected with the less explicit white male supremacy of white patriarchal American society and defined, in some respects, the attitude taken by U.S. occupation forces in Haiti toward the Haitian population.
The resistance to this allegation was particularly fierce, and not merely from those inside the Special Operations “community,” whose outrage was more public-relations stagecraft than anything else. There was outrage from people who hadn’t a moment of actual experience in the military at all. This is an affront to something sacred in the public imaginary of a thoroughly militarized United States: that we are an international beacon of civilized virtue, and that our military is the masculine epitome of that virtue standing between our suburban security and the dark chaos of the Outside. Questioning the mystique of the armed forces is tantamount to lunacy at best and treason at worst.
It’s a great article and well worth your time. I’ve previously argued that we’re already living in a fascist state (there’s a movie too, and that post could use an update in the post-Minuteman world). Rather than focus on endpoint analysis, Goff’s article goes over much the same ground, but also addresses some root causes responsible for making that fascism acceptable. A how-did-we-get-here look (or, pedantically, a look at how some key elements for the establishment of a fascist state are already normative values in American society). All this from someone who was SpecOps for many years.
Much of the article focuses on the neonazis in the military – and how the invasion of Iraq has accelerated our military’s destruction from within by neonazis – but there are asides to Straussian ideology, master-race impulses, gender issues, and the like. This is more of a precis for a journal article, but in internet terms, it’s a tome. Go read it.
