The secret to seeing clearly, as anyone who's operated binoculars knows, is not only which end you look through and where you point the thing, but how well you adjust the focus, too.
The same process is helpful when asking questions, sorting information, and attempting to do any meaningful pigeonholing. It's also helpful to not stuff dragons and griffins into slots better sized for sparrows or starlings. But, it can be exhilarating to try.
Take a wide-angled view of fascists, for example: They have a long history in America and abroad -- Germany and Italy, of course. But, the fascists of today are not like those our fathers and grandfathers fought here and abroad.
In the 1930s, there was a near coup d'etat in Washington, D.C. that failed during FDR's time -- a wolf pack of fascist bankers and financiers were the basis of that one, just as there were similar (and sometimes the very same) corporate forces maneuvering in Germany and Italy.
A basic feature of fascism: The marriage of corporate control into government's -- along with bully boys and their brown shirts. But that's been changing.
Our question today: How best to sort out and try to make sense of any similarities and differences within and among our fascists and theirs? How can we best try to understand such alien things?
(Here, a slight pause is imposed to fairly let you know, right off the bat, that the content by weight, here, so to speak, is high in questions and low in answers. There is no nutritional information to post, to speak of -- no protein count from big chunks of red meat. If anything, this excursion is bittersweet, based on a recipe of Basic Questions handed down through the ages.)
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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