Mussolini's Fascism was indeed the regime of virtue!

An exchange in the alt.politis.commmunism newsgroup, 30 August 2002

The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 30 August 2002
Vol. 6, Number 43 (#686)

NEWS ON CIVIL LIBERTIES IN THE U.S.

07) Controversial Police Database Lists 'Future Criminals:' Names, Addresses Of Potential Suspects Listed
AP 26 Aug 02

WILMINGTON -- Defense lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union are up in arms over a police file of potential criminals in Delaware.

The database contains a list of people who police believe are likely to break the law. It features names, addresses and photographs of potential suspects -- many of whom have clean slates.

Since the system was introduced in Wilmington in June, most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods.

State and federal prosecutors say the tactic is legal. The photos are being taken by two Wilmington police squads created to arrest drug dealers.

Many of the people whose photos have been taken were stopped briefly for loitering and let go.

08) Special court rejects Ashcroft surveillance rules
Nando Times 22 Aug 02

Washington, DC—A special court that oversees sensitive law enforcement surveillance forced Attorney General John Ashcroft to change his guidelines for FBI terrorism searches and wiretaps, according to documents released Thursday.

The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has not publicly disclosed any of its rulings in nearly two decades, rejected some of the Ashcroft guidelines in May as not reasonably designed to safeguard the privacy of Americans.

The Justice Department quickly amended its guidelines and won the court's approval.

The court also disclosed the FBI acknowledged making more than 75 mistakes in applications for espionage and terrorism warrants under the surveillance law, including one instance in which former Director Louis Freeh gave inaccurate information to judges.

How these misrepresentations occurred remains unexplained to the court, the special court said.

The court's May 17 orders, signed by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, were disclosed Thursday to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has raised questions about the Justice Department's use of wiretap laws in espionage and terrorism cases.

The court, now headed by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, said it intended separately to publish the rulings and promised similarly to disclose any future unclassified orders.

Ashcroft's instructions in March, in a memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller and senior Justice officials, made it easier for investigators in espionage and terrorism cases to share information from searches or wiretaps with FBI criminal investigators.

But the surveillance court, which approves requests during secret deliberations, found that Ashcroft's rules could allow misuse of information in criminal cases, where prosecutors must meet higher legal standards to win approval for searches or wiretaps.

These procedures cannot be used by the government to amend the (surveillance) act in ways Congress has not, the court wrote. In its rare public rebuke, it said the Justice Department spent considerable effort arguing its case, but the court is not persuaded.

Ashcroft had argued that, under changes authorized by the USA Patriot Act, the FBI could use the surveillance law to perform searches and wiretaps primarily for a law enforcement purpose, so long as a significant foreign intelligence purpose remains.

The Patriot Act, passed late in 2001, changed the surveillance law to permit its use when collecting information about foreign spies or terrorists is a significant purpose, rather than the purpose, of such an investigation. Critics at the time said they feared government might use the change as a loophole to employ espionage wiretaps in common criminal investigations.

The attorney general seized authority that has not been granted to him by the constitution or the Congress, said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.

In a follow-up order also disclosed Thursday, the court accepted new Justice guidelines amending Ashcroft's instructions. The court also demanded to be told about any criminal investigations of targets under the surveillance act and about discussions between the FBI and prosecutors at Justice.

The first Ashcroft order sort of snugged up against the new line that was being drawn, and that may not have been prudent, said Stewart Baker, an expert on the law and former general counsel at the National Security Agency. You might be able to justify it legally, but I can see why the court would have reacted badly.

Stewart called the surveillance law a pretty heavy-duty weapon.

Critics have worried that the surveillance court is too closely allied with the government, noting that judges have rarely denied a request under the 1978 law. But the newly disclosed court's orders indicated irritation with serious FBI blunders in 2000 and 2001.

The court said the FBI admitted in September 2000 to mistakes in 75 wiretap applications, including then-FBI Director Freeh's erroneous statement to judges that the target of a wiretap request wasn't also under criminal investigation.

The court also noted that in March 2000, information from espionage wiretaps in at least four cases was passed illegally to FBI criminal investigators and U.S. prosecutors in New York. Clearly frustrated, the court said it barred one FBI agent from appearing before it.

The FBI admitted more recently, in March 2001, that it inappropriately shared surveillance information among a squad of agents, the court said.

Under Fascism the educational system of Italy had been entirely remodelled. Before the Fascist Era schools emphasized the making of clerks and 'white collar' workers, with a contempt for manual labor, to that of making mechanics with a pride in craftmanship. Under Mussolini the schools were defined as being spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic and practical. Students were taught that being a farmer or a mechanic was everybit as noble an occupation as being a lawyer, doctor or teacher.

Mussolini had looked upon the cinema with a critical eye and found it a possible sourse of corruption and instituted a more rigid censorship of films than any other country in Europe. And who did the censoring? Mussolini? The Fascist Party? Neither one. Actually it was the Italian mothers of the community. It was merely Fascism once again proving it's knowledge of human nature: the mother is instinctively Puritan. Films with any hint of lewdness were forbidden to all; to children in addition was denied, the sight of films which had a motif of passion or of crime. Romantic films were allowed but the content had to be kept clean and decent.

Pornographic books, newspapers and pictures were banned and anything which obviously sought to attract by lewdness alone. Children were forbidden tobacco products before the age of fifteen. Gambling casinos were also forbidden and the state instituted a lottery system to fulfil a person's desire to gamble while at the same time providing a source of income to the nation for social services. Any bar knowingly serving alcohol to minors had their establishment smashed and a little corporal punishment administered to the offending proprietor and or bartender by a squad of Black Shirts, as crude as it may sound, it kept court costs down and the repetitive rate of offenses low. To top it off, Mussolini's Fascist regime was the first to eliminate organized crime (the mafia) and the immorality it fostered.

Mussolini's Fascism was indeed the regime of virtue!

http://www.falange.org/dvxindex.htm
Paul Kneisel <tallpaul@nyct-nospam-or-fascism.net> wrote in message news:bv20nu4lu9vqt8tote7vilqpdb7oqo0v84@4ax.com...

On Fri, 30 Aug 2002 22:47:51 -0400, Spartacus wrote:

> http://www.falange.org/dvxindex.htm

While this Falangist defense of fascism was meant just to be provocative, I think it is nevertheless instructive.

> Not many people ever realize that Benito Mussolini and his Fascist
> Party were against abortion, birth control, pornography, secret
> societies, unnatural sex and a host of other spiritually
> debilitating maladies that our liberal society now accepts as normal
> life in this materialistic and hedonistic society.

This catalog of social ills duplicates the litany I hear daily from Christian fundamentalists, and I think we have to take seriously the feeling of many people that existing society (what is called the world by Christian fundamentalists) is out of joint and threatens our spiritual health.

There's no question that capitalist society is rotten to the core. However, we miss the point if we get hung up arguing over the specifics. One person to approves of elective abortion and another rejects it, but the point is that in both cases, capitalist society has betrayed our deepest values, and something needs to be done about it.

There seem to be three kinds of reaction to capitalist decay, which thanks to globalization now is engaging everyone:

1. The religious fundamentalist seeks an uplifting association with an imagined supernatural being from which derives social values that were supposedly manifest in some distant past and represent a critique of the absolutely corrupted present. The alienation from modern social norms often result in acting on the basis of that alienattion to engage in anti-social behaviors such as prosytelizing, indifference to social obligations, and legitimated killing.
2. The fascist subsumes private life under the state and flag rather than a supernatural being. The catalyst is usually the exigencies of war or some other national emergency associated with capitalist contradictions. To address this crisis, there is the need to harness all social capacities to the national purpose. In the process, people unable or unwilling to have their private life absorbed into the national project are brutalized. Thus social viability is sacrificed to political order.
3. The socialist relies on the solidarity of the working class to create a force sufficient to constrain capitalism or to transform the world in terms of more positive social values. As in the labor union, the leverage of this method is a function of the solidarity of private interest and so it relies upon and develops people's social existence.

Since all three groups share a distaste for the symptoms of capitalist decay, they may appear to start from the same point, but their methods are entirely different: one is ideational, another political and the third is social. The goals achieved by these different methods are contradictory, for the first two deny sociability, while the third asserts it. That is why the presence of the word socialism in the expression national socialism (nazism) cannot be taken seriously.

The religious right may be wooing the political right at this time, but I don't think they are comfortably in bed together, for one asserts the world in a brutal way and the other wishes to distance itself from it. I suspect the current affinity of the religious right and the fascist elements in the U.S. government as illustrated from the news reports above is more opportunistic than substantial. A real alliance seems impossible without each side having to betray its own principles.

And yet each side can contribute in its own way to bring down capitalism by pointing to its failures. The right, for example, does not at all care the dependence of existing capitalism on imperial expansion and foreign entanglements. However, because religious fundamentalism and fascism undercut social viability, neither offer any alternative to capitalism, and they also tend to be socially destructive. The socialist alternative, because it depends for its strength upon social development, gains in strength as it pursues its goals.

Haines Brown