Oil Neofascism:
Propaganda bathed in black gold

(AP Photo/Cesar Rangel) Protests march during an anti-war demonstration in Barcelona, Spain, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2002. Several thousand people marched through Barcelona to protest against the possible attack on Iraq by the U.S. Banner reads in Catalan, " Bush, Blair, Aznar: Who pulls the Trigger" and "Stop the War in Iraq" .

“Is there no man or woman, or even a child, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?”
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, Sept. 5, 1919

Rene Cisneros

We are today witnesses of a neofacism that subtly aspires to go unnoticed, but is in fact crudely obvious. That’s why the notion that George Bush is more unbalanced that Hitler, Tony Blair more foolish than Mussolini and Ariel Sharon more an assassin than Franco is not as farfetched as one might think. The aggravating circumstance today is that Israel has nuclear weapons.

Just as the fire of Reichstag in 1933 served as an alibi and pretext for the Nazis to set off on a merciless campaign of persecutions against communists, socialists, liberals and Jews, the attacks of Sept. 11 are being used as the pretext and alibi for the “chickenhawks” of the White House to launch its imperialist agenda in the name of “civilization.”
In their moment, the Nazis were more interested in propaganda than in truth: a case in point is one of the principal Nazi figures, Herman Hoering, during the Nuremberg trials of 1945 recalled: “… all that is required is to tell the people that they are being attacked and to denounce the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and for putting the country in danger.” This was, in fact, one of the principal arguments utilized by Bush a year ago to convince public opinion of the necessity of launching a military campaign against Afghanistan. This is what is happening again in the search for the legitimacy indispensable for a war on Iraq, as any dissident is accused of being a traitor – even those who possess sufficient grounds to question the irrational, bellicose outbursts of Washington, as in the case of Scott Ritter, the former U.N. arms inspector who has openly declared that there is no proof of the existence of arms of mass destruction on Iraqi soil.
Nevertheless, this type of campaign against pacifists and dissidents is not new in the United States; one only has to recall the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy calling Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer “Jewish traitors,” just for opposing the development of bombs of mass destruction, or later heading a witch hunt against Hollywood personalities who dared to maintain an attitude critical of what was going on. And it is in the style of McCarthy that a group of Israeli and U.S. academics organized a campaign against professors and students who were bold enough to speak out against the Israeli violations of human rights, a campaign that denounced anyone perceived as “pro-Palestinian,” thereby arbitrarily intimidating freedom of expression.

But the hysteria, paranoia and neofascist racism of the U.S. government doesn’t stop there. Similar to the post-Reichstag Germany, the United States has suspended a variety of rights and constitutional liberties on its own soil. It has carried out a silent persecution against immigrants, above all of Islamic origin, and has prohibited the entrance of almost all Arab visitors -- including renowned personalities such as Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, who was recently planning to attend the New York Film Festival.

The true objective of the war on Iraq is scandalously obvious for the entire world: the absolute control of the principal petroleum zone on the planet, about which Bush and his accomplices have not hesitated for a moment to fabricate whatever lie comes to mind, no matter how absurd it might seem. The only thing lacking is that the media be more efficient in their service to the empire, as they did with Afghanistan, by means of reports that distorted what was a terrible situation for a people threatened by the inhumane “collateral damage” of those supposed “smart bombs.” How long will it take for the western media to overflow with delirious reports of the oppression of Iraqi women (which in truth cannot be denied, but neither should it be used as an argument for bombing and militarily assaulting a country)? Meanwhile, women like Amina Lawal, condemned by the Nigerian government to be stoned to death for having become pregnant after separating from her husband, waits for the western media to grant them ample coverage worthy of the injustices to which they are prisoner, injustices that nevertheless happen without the benefit of an international crusade against the governments that commit them.