JUSTICE 101

The Shadow · Sat Jul 14, 2007 6:22 pm It's the year 2500...

and all the representative democracies have been conquered, the Constitution and the Magna Carta burned and all books on democracy are banned. So is free speech. NOW... there are only two camps left and you must choose one or be annihilated. You may choose the left with communism or the right with fascism. Which do you choose and why?

Stefan · Sat Jul 14, 2007 7:22 pm

Ha, ha... that's a depressing prospect. Shadow, you're asking us to choose between two horrible, repressive systems. I honestly don't know which. I'd probably be shot in any of them.

Actually, it would be more interesting to hear what you would choose. You lived under Franco for eight years. What do you think? Would you say that the decades preceding your years in Spain were harder on the people there? I suppose the civil war years were the worst. Did Franco soften as he got older? He did after all allow for the monarchy to be restored again after his death. What are your experiences?

It fascinates me that most visions of the future are so bleak. There's a majority of democracies throughout the world now. I guess writers find it more interesting to imagine a world where those democracies have faltered and regular folks are forced to try and restore the old ideals.

The Shadow · Sat Jul 14, 2007 10:59 pm

I will add some comments later after a few more have answered. However I must say that this scenario did exist but not on the global level I have painted here, This was the situation in Eastern Europe, The Western Republics of the USSR, Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic States.

Yes Stefan, Sci-fi writers and others choose this kind of thing to write about. A happy world doesn't sell or translate into blockbuster films.

Beth · Sun Jul 15, 2007 3:10 am

I choose........THE DARK SIDE...........

Luke........I am your father........Luke......

Niether. I'd hide out on an island or they would have to kill me. I have said it before, I will never submit to that. And I mean it. There is no choice between the two. Not for me.

homerskid · Sun Jul 15, 2007 1:05 pm

Well neither is acceptable.

I would hide out somewhere until that Tom Cruise space craft arrives,and hitch a ride outta here!

The Shadow · Sun Jul 15, 2007 7:26 pm

After I got out of the military I returned to the Orient and in the spring of 1968 decided to go to Spain. A trip through the Soviet Union proved to be the most economic way to make the trip and I got a special deal for a six week stay and tour of Moscow and the Western republics with a trip across Russia on the Trans Siberian Railway, The first leg of the trip was from Yokohama to the Russian Pacific port of Nakhodka. The trio took about 48 hours, For some reason the port of Vladivostok was closed so we were brought to a smaller facility. As there were military instlations no photographing was allowed. One Japanese man took some photos and he was immediately taken into custody by the police. The port was very busy and there was a great mix of Asians and European faces in the city.

We then boarded a train for the city of Khabarovsk to the north. A day's train ride, There i began to see how communism works. There was a boringness about the architecture that seemed to infect the people as well as the buildings. Everything was the same yellowish color with the same pale green trim.. When we reached our hotel there was a horde of kids waiting for us. They wanted coins. Not for monetary value but to collect. They traded for the famous Soviet lapel pins that ranged from hero of the state to best worker. Plenty of Soviet flag pins too. The people were kind seemed very happy but there is a desolation about Siberia that makes you feel you are on another planet. The name of the Pacific province is "Amerika" so many said "We are like you, Americans". We spent two nights in Khabarovsk. All of the guides of course, worked for the government and you were given liberal doses of communist theory and how the system was "supposed" to work. If you asked any questions about anything that appeared negative relating to the system they were very cleverly dodged...kind of like people on internet forums. Traveling by train you found that most of the RR workers you dealt with spoke very good English and many spoke Japanese and Chinese as well. A political "commissar" rode with us and he was supposed to sell you on socialism but that stopped after about two days and it became a question ans answer more about customs and culture than politics. you got the distinct impression that the Russians didn't care much about politics.

A map of the journey:

http://www.transsib.ru/Map/transsib-passenger-eng.gif

It was at that time about a 9 or 10 day journey from the Pacific to Moscow with stops along the way. I never noticed any real matrial poverty but I definitely felt a poverty of the soul and a sense of tragedy among the Russian people. It was as if Dostoevsky had come alive. Once we arrived in Moscow you really saw the bare bones of the Soviet system. There were few consumer goods available. I went to the famous Gumm department store and there was v very limited selection of consumer good and quite expensive. You had to stand in line three times to complete any purchase. Of course as a tourist you got around that. The shops especially for food stuffs had more empty shelves that anything and lines were long. I thought almost everyone was in the military because it was still cold and the people were wearing old army surplus overcoats. We stayed at the old Metropole Hotel. The hotel itself was the embodiment of Russian depression. It was if maxim Gorky himself ran the hotel. Crime in moscow was rampant and you were warned not to go into Lenin Park after dark or you would be beaten and robbed of even the cloths on you back. The steps to the hotel were always jammed with blackmarketeer, pickpockets and students. Now i saw not only the depression of the Russian people but the poverty as well. At night the streets were empty by 8 PM. The trips to other towns and to the communes was really not so different because you could see everything was staged pretty much. The people still managed to live and no matter how bad things are the human spirit is very resilient.

There are a hundred anecdotes i could describe but this is already very long, However here is one I think you will find interesting. We were traveling with a Japanese girl whose father was a big wig in the Japanese Communist Party and her brother was studying in the university in Moscow. I went one evening with him to meet with his fellow students. We were all in a room some 9 or 10 people. For the first five minutes, which seemed like hours, no one said a word. So i asked my friend in Japanese if these people were so anti.American that they refused to speak to me. He said "Oh, I forgot to tell them you are an American. They think you're a Russian and all these people are from other republics." Well when they found out i wasn't Russian but American a torrent of comments and questions came from all of them and we talked well into the night. At that time the Russians were as hated within their own realm as are were the Americans in the West or perhaps more so.

End of part 1

The Shadow · Mon Jul 16, 2007 2:27 am

After leaving the Soviet Union you could take one of three routs, south through Checoslovakia, west to Germany and France or north to Helsinki. I went west. On entering Poland you felt as if you had had a great weight lifted off of your back. We stopped in Warsaw and while the country was enveloped in poverty there was still a positive feeling in the country. The people were more open and the streets seemed a little more full of people. In spite of 23 years of communist dictatorship there was still a very "Catholic" feeling about the people and they were not as detached from their traditional roots as I found the Russians and the Ukrainians. East Germany , however was another story. More than 20 years after the war was over the cities still looked bombed out and the infrastructure was just barely working There were still bomb craters that went unfilled. The Soviets were still punishing the Germans for the war. We arrived in East Berlin at night and at the border crossing you could see the enormous difference, West Berlin was lit up while the East seem to be in a perpetual "brown out". A funny thing happened on the way to West Berlin. The East German border guards came on the train and had you sign some immigration forms. I took out my pen and the East German border guard noticed that it was a Japanese pen. He wanted the pen and said he'd give me three East German pens in exchange. So I swapped the pen. The funny thing was the next day when we crossed the West German border none of the pens would write and that's the God's honest truth.

A few days later we arrived in Madrid, the capitol of Franco's Fascist Spain. But is was a world away from the communist system and the economy while not that of France or Italy was far better than the communist nations. The streets were full of people, the bars and restaurants and nightclubs were doing fantastic business and it looked like paradise after six weeks plus in the communists world that Lenin and Stalin had bequeathed to the Eastern countries. There were consumer goods and affordable prices and food abounded. The markets were full of produce and the best thing was that there was NO CRIME on the streets. No robberies, no muggings almost nothing and absolutely none of the violent crime of Moscow and the USSR. The peseta was fairly strong (70 pesetas to the dollar), salaries were higher than the communist countries and prices were lower. I could get Time, Newsweek and the International Herald Tribune at any major news stand. I didn't have to rely on the national press for information about the US or the UK etc. All in all, it looked like a virtual paradise. But soon you began to see how insidious this extreme right wing militarist government was in relation to the press. If any foreign news magazine or newspaper contained anything negative in reference to Spain or it's leaders it was confiscated and destroyed. It was also confiscated if any positive mention of socialist oriented news. As far as the local media was concerned the board of censors took care of that. Even song lyrics had to face the censors. The possession, sale, importation or exchange of any communist literature was severely punished by imprisonment or worse. Such things as "The Communist Maifest" or "Das Kapital" would land you in the police station and you got either a fine or a prison sentence...or worse in some cases. But it wasn't just leftist literature that was censored, any strongly liberal writing also came under scrutiny. It was next to impossible to find a copy of something like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" or other such literature that might express opposition to the established order. Franco had a much better way of riding himself of communists and socialist. immediately after the civil war the execution of all Left wingers began in earnest. It is said that General Franco signed the execution orders of the communists, socialists and other liberals with his morning coffee. When the monumental project of the "Valle de los Caidos" (The valley of the fallen) was begun to honor the Nationalist's war dead Franco and the military used the slave labor of captured communists, liberals and socialist to excavate and construct the enormous memorial just outside of Madrid which is crowed by a 500 foot tall stone cross. It is said that the monument is built on the bones of the captured communists from the Spanish Civil War. Many were executed during the construction and after the completion of the monument.

The economy of Spain during the Franco era was based on the corporatism of Mussolini's Italy with the industry in the private hands of the leading families of Spain. The only industries controlled by the government were those directly related to national security like the railroads which in most countries are government owned, the national Airline Iberia )but the private company Spantax had a good share of the market,),and the petroleum industry until private companies began to explore oil on their own with the blessings of the Fascist government. 98% of industry and business was in the hands of the private sector which is the reason why Spain recovered from it's own civil war faster than the communist nations. So from that point of view one would chose Fascism over communism since the classless society is non-existent and advancement is based on personal effort and ambition as in most capitalistic societies. Even the arms industry was in the hands of several big families and remains so today.

Franco maintained good relations with the US government even though it was not publicized in either country. During his period of influence the US established several bases in Spain during the 1050's for which they paid the Franquistas a handsome sum of money. The US also establish the Chrysler corporation in Spain, the first foreign owned automobile company. They then made and sold all the military vehicles for the Spanish military. During the middle 60's the US also began to contract Spanish private ship building firms to make supertankers this help to bring back Spanish laborers who had gone to work in the shipyards of France, Norway and the UK. The Americans did not want it publicized that they were consorting with a know right wing extremist government and Franco did not like the social ideas that the US was implementing. They remained united silently with regrad to the war in Viet Nam and the US suppot of Chiang Kai Sheik in Nationalist China. Spain at that time was very supportive of any ant-communist actions. Both the US and the Spanish were united in their battle against world communism until the dissolution of the Franco government in 1976.

The structure of the fascist government under Franco was decidedly different (as was foreign policy) that that of Italy or Germany. In Spain the military was on top and the political arm of the government, the Falange was secondary and was very limited in power. It was what you could call a dual government. All laws proposed by the Falange had to pass the military government before they could even be considered. Different from the other mid 20th Century dictatorships Spain was run by a military government in which the highest ranking members were real generals who had war time experience in command positions rather than civilians who gave themselves false military rank. Franco also differed from them in that he believe foreign intervention was a detriment to the nation and by 1972 he had divested Spain of her last remaining colonies. Spains neighbor Portugal failed under the fascist rule of Salazar to do this and it ultimately cost them progress in the later half of the 20th century. Franco's model of a fascist military regime was successfully duplicated by some South American nations like the governments of Juan Peròn in Argentina and that of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

End of part 2.

The Shadow · Tue Jul 17, 2007 6:01 pm

I am bumping this thread because I think it is important to pay attention to how this ideology is seeping into the cracks in democratic industrialized nation. Two point.

Most people when they hear the word "fascism" that of Nazi Germany. That was the worse example and the most "corrupted" form of fascism that has ever existed. This lead to the phrase;

"Nazism is fascism but fascism is not always Nazism."

The most innocuous term would be "corporatism" which in truth is what fascism really is, Mussolini himself said it. The Germans gave fascism a bad name and Mussolini went right along with it. When fascism comes to your country (whichever one it is), it will come draped in the national colors and carrying the book of Scriptures to whatever religion is the majority one in that nation.

Here is one example i see here;

Sugar is the most economic and expedient way to make ethanol. The Brazilians (biggest ethanol producers) discovered this some time back and have switch from corn to sugar. In the US we are aware of this bit the government has declared corn the substance with which we will make ethanol. This is at the behest of the largest producer of corn in the us ADM. So in effect you have a corporation dictating terms to a government. This is the beginning. We have unwittingly gone along with this and today big corporations and their lobbies are effectively gaining a creeping control over government. Look at the results of the 2006 elections. The people spoke and have not been listened to. If it does not benefit the corporate world it probably will not be even considered let alone enacted into law. This is the beginning. Unfortunately it has been taking place for about three decades now and will be difficult to reverse the trend.

Also remember that in 2 of the fascist nations fascism came to power through the electoral process. The people wanted it. And that was at a time when the ideology was in its infancy and the side effects could easily be seen. The "corporatist" have been hard at work for the past 60 years, distancing themselves from the old forms of fascism and streamlining the new product.