fascism
Are you wearing orange today?
JANUARY 11, 2008, is the six-year anniversary of the first arrival of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
The ACLU is calling on everyone opposed to torture, secret prisons, the suspension of habeas corpus and the overall trampling of democracy and the United States Constitution, to wear orange to symbolize the national shame that is Guantánamo Bay.
After hundreds of detentions and two Supreme Court decisions rejecting the administration's detention policies at Gitmo, the legal status of the detainees there remains unresolved and the fight continues to end unlawful detention and the denial of due process.
The ACLU is one of four organizations that have been granted status as human rights observers at the military commission proceedings. When the tribunals began in 2004, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero and two ACLU international human rights lawyers attended the proceedings and blogged about the experience so Americans could know the truth of Guantánamo.
The ACLU has continued to hold government leadership accountable by filing Freedom of Information Act requests for documents that reveal systemic torture to prisoners held in U.S. custody. So far, more than 100,000 pages of government documents detailing the torture and abuse of detainees.
fascism | Secret Prisons | Terrorism | Torture | War | ACLU | Guantanamo
Saddm Hussein's Legacy in America
We were supposed to teach the Iraqis about democracy, not the other way around.
fascism | Barking Crazy Right Wingers | Republican Party
Fascism Versus Magic

Fascist ideals of masculinity had no real use for women other than as the vessels through which passed the next generation of fascist males. Its aesthetic was built upon a world where women were the conduits for sexual release and the pride that came from having reproduced a junior version of yourself who would carry on the ideals with which you yourself had been inculcated. Women, when they were not serving their purpose as mothers, or as virgins—potential mothers—were garbage, part of the larger population of undesirables and vermin who needed to be brought to heel, to be destroyed.
In Fascist Spain, in 1944, Franco's forces had been triumphant, but there was still opposition in the countryside. It is against this background that the splendid movie, Pan's Labyrinth takes place. Billed as a "fairy tale for grownups" it is just that. An old-fashioned, pre-Victorian fairy tale. A myth. As such, it is full of disturbing nightmarescapes and brutality that will sicken you. It is also one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen.
fascism | Film | magic | Pan's Labyrinth | rationalism | the feminine | Guillermo del Toro | Mexico | Spain | laberinto del fauno
Chile has happened here in the United States
Who could have imagined that in the United States, with its independent judiciary, thousands of men could be rounded up in the night -- many only because of their Muslim religion or foreign nationality -- without recourse to a trial, without even an acknowledgment that they had been arrested? Who could have dared to suggest that there would ever be "desaparecidos" in America? And there it was as well, torture being discussed as a legitimate option to protect a community in peril, and then being used in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and even obscenely photographed in Iraq -- yes, there they were again, the depressing echoes of my Chile.
But worse perhaps than all of this was the erosion of the moral compass of America, the seeming indifference of the seeming majority to the suffering of others, the casual acceptance of "collateral damage" as an unquestioned consequence of the war on "terrorism," the demonization of an ubiquitous foe who had to be destroyed without second thoughts -- and often without first ones as well; without, in fact, any thoughtfulness at all. That was far more terrifying than the criminal attacks on New York and Washington: To realize that the Chile of strongman Augusto Pinochet was not that far away, not that difficult to imitate, that it was already hovering in the future and ready to materialize if we were not vigilant.
fascism | Militarization | State-sponsored terror | Ariel Dorfman | Augusto Pinochet | September 11
Bread and Roses for Our Daughters
Submitted by Lorraine on 6 November 2006 - 11:10am.Activism | fascism | Feminism | history | misogyny | Plan B Underground | Poetry | Reproductive Rights


























