Ask Iraqis.

Editor,

Strong-arm tactics like the coordinated violent attacks by heavily armed police from New York City to Oakland, CA on peaceful Occupy encampments and demonstrators are certainly reminiscent of attacks by Italian fascists on socialist and communist demonstrations and their leaders in the 1920's.

That the fascists resorted finally to murder, as rightists have and continue to do throughout Latin America since the CIA-instigated coup in Guatemala in 1953, indicates the direction -- given the brutality of police violence to this point in the USA, particularly with 300 million guns held in angry hands from coast to coast -- in which American history seems to be headed.

National Socialists were a small minority in Germany in the early 1930's, but their political strategy, much of their message (exceptionalism, xenophobia, militarism, fear), their demagoguery, and the tactics they used to coopt a nominally democratic government share much in common with right wing extremism in the USA today.

That the systematic murder of millions that Dachau represents seems to be unthinkable in the USA does not mean that Pinochet's disappearance, torture, and murder of political dissenters are unthinkable as well.

The objective of the American right -- the global, corporatist, neoliberal right -- is world domination, cheap labor, limitless riches for the rulers of the world.

There are differences and there are similarities.

Ask Iraqis what they think about Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Re: "Nazis, Lynching and Obamacare" (10/8/2013)