Woo hoo! The Binks is baaaaack!

With his usual meaty round-up of reading material, via an excellent selection of links and commentary.

According to WordPress, this is posting # 900 by Teh Binks, big & small. Muwahahahaha!

Hooray!  

And here's a sample of only one of the many interesting offerings in this post, from William Gairdner on micro-fascism in a piece on his blog entitled Getting Used to the F-Word:

These recent forms of Macro-fascism, whether French, Italian, German, or Russian, have  always been collectivist, secular, and militant, striving through the fearsome top-down powers of the State to draw all things into the ambit of a single pattern of national -- or in the case of Communism, international -- Will, or centralized choosing, a Will always expressed by the subjugation and assimilation by force of things spontaneous, private, and natural, to artificial and unnatural public designs. For private religious belief? A secular and wholly materialist belief. For concepts of transcendent natural law? Man-made laws only. For the private family? An array of public programs and services from national daycare, to health care, to subsidized housing, to old-age homes. For private enterprise and free markets? Intensive regulation, ever-higher taxation, and the direction of the forces of production to State ends. For countless voluntary community organizations? Equivalent public organizations. In short, the Nanny State, cradle to grave. The German word that described this transformation of the private and natural into the public and artificial was “gleichschaltung,” which means “to bring everything into line.” Take note of the word “line,” for the variety of methods used to force all things natural, spontaneous, curved, and organic (think of all those charming European village laneways, a map of which looks like a biological or botanical growth) into geometrically rigid lines and grids, conceptual or actual, is truly astonishing. The fanatically linear-minded architect le Corbusier, in gloating upon his fantasies for the perfect Soviet city, could not resist sniffing that “curved lines constitute paralysis, and the winding path is the path of donkeys.”
            On this general theme of regulation, however, our liberal-democratic regimes cannot afford to be smug, for although we have never had to pack machine-guns to enforce our softer, but no less pervasive brand of Statism it remains true that most of the policy specifics common to Macro-fascism are hauntingly recognizable in our own “progressive” regimes. To wit, more than three-quarters of the German and Italian programs (and a lot of the communist ones) are virtually indistinguishable from our own political fare, and this is true for all the Great Society, New Society, or Just Society programs (etc., etc.) of our modern “liberal” States. In short, into no matter which democracy we look, we find ever-increasing Statism, taxation, debt, and regulation; everywhere, the larger national or federal political units continue to absorb and subjugate (bring into line) the smaller states, provinces, regions, and municipalities; and so everywhere, we see more “democracy,” but less freedom.  And what might be the reason?
           Some say that all fascism is a reactionary response to a felt loss of natural community. But the deeper sources are likely rooted in despair over the glaring imperfections of human existence, most notably our anger at the apparent absence of justice on this earth (which is to say, at our perceived abandonment by God).

snip

So it seems that in a pragmatic response to the dark failures of the Macro form, a softer Micro-fascism, also rooted in a much earlier intellectual tradition, has emerged slowly in the second half of the twentieth century, and is now in full bloom as our most pervasive and therefore most invisible political religion. It has produced an historically unprecedented type of polity characterized by a radically individualistic and autonomist ethic that nevertheless, and rather ironically seeks to organize itself as a national inventory of common public orthodoxies expressed, not as a collective triumph of the Will over nature, as in the past, but instead as the triumph of the Will of each and every individual over his or her own individual nature.  

Thanks Binks!