Is there a difference? Fascism vs. The National Security State.

Why is America turning Fascist? Because highly influential reactionaries have the enormous resources of the super-rich and the Main Stream Media at their disposal. Thus, it's very revealing to talk to people at a free community meal; many of them are as poor as it gets in America. Yet out of ignorance or spite -maybe a bit of both - they spend a disproportionate amount time and energy attacking people they
consider just beneath, or perhaps slightly ABOVE, their own level of misery. It's so much more common in the wider society to demonize the powerless than to confront the mega-crimes of the billionaire class, and this is reflected in the "rhetoric" propagated by all classes. Such attacks are SO widespread among the poor and wretched themselves! The brainwashing has been incredibly successful; historically speaking, why wouldn't it be, with the all-powerful tools of newspapers, television, right-wing talk radio and now the toxic, tea-bag-grade bloggers? The persistent, often insidious but always omnipresent ultra-conservative messages transmitted through "education," conditioning, even downright brainwashing, do not fall on deaf ears!

I have firsthand experience of the victim-blaming so common in American society. I refer to the scapegoating that occurs every single day; it's practiced by the rich; by all strata of the shrinking "Middle Class;" and indeed, among the poor and downtrodden. This is going to take a while to expound, as there is so much victim-blaming to address. Just take the usual conflicts within the low-income population: I often hear and witness the poor attacking each other verbally and physically, particularly at the free meals I attend. Whether it's "inter-racial" conflict between say, Blacks and Whites or between Whites and Mexicans, this is so pathetically common. Of course, there is probably even more "intra-racial" strife among the lower socio-economic demographic, conflict between Whites vs. Whites, Blacks vs. Blacks, etc. In any case, it often begins like this: Someone "looks at somebody the wrong way." Or sombody mocks someone else for speaking a "foreign language;" soon enough, the insults, threats and often enough fists start flying. It's so much more convenient, you see, to blame ones economic, social-status obsessed, or just plain ethnically bigoted preoccupations on the nearest target of opportunity. Like Caesar said, "Divide and Conquer." And the ruling elite has successfully divided and pitted against itself the "unwashed masses" for millenia.