WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
By Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift
WASHINGTON – Communist China has become Fascist China, and it did so without fanfare or even official notice, which is why the world’s democracies still cling to the old title. But this is not a matter of semantics; it is a matter for serious concern.
Communism is based upon limited membership one-party rule and an extreme form of socialism that disavows private ownership of property and the capitalist profit motive. Fascism is based upon limited membership one-party rule and a form of command control capitalism, which simply means individuals and companies are free to seek profits provided they obey the government’s directives. In reality friends of the government often receive favored treatment, which is why there is such a concentration of wealth among high-ranking Chinese government officials.
Both communism and fascism are the antithesis of the values contained in the U.S. Constitution’s first 10 Amendments, the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. It is the absence of these rights that effectively provide the leader of the party, who is also the leader of the nation, with extraordinary police-state powers. It is through these powers that communist and fascist leaders become entrenched and dictatorial, often giving them absolute control over party and country alike.
What then is China? Clearly it is no longer a communist nation. Rather, it resembles the fascist nations of the 1930s in Italy, Germany, and Spain. Each of those nation’s leaders at the time had a virulent hatred of communism, and the Spanish Civil War was primarily fought between fascists and communists. And while Spain was devouring itself, Germany and Italy were thriving to such a degree through the use of deficit spending that they avoided the Great Depression that was engulfing the world’s democracies. That deficit spending not only created wealth, it enabled those fascist dictators to build up their armed forces to a threatening level.
Over the last decade, China rid itself of the unworkable economic dictates of communism that had caused the Soviet Union’s communist government to implode and instead embraced the fascist totalitarian form of capitalism that has catapulted the country into the second largest economy in the world. And like its predecessors of the 1930s, an inordinate portion of that money is going into armaments, which is why Fascist China poses a much greater threat to world peace than Communist China ever could.
© 2014 U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
Distributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
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