Amongst the various kinds of political madness on offer, one of the more severe is that which seeks to erode the difference between the democracies of the capitalist world and fascism. One might have thought that the price paid for this obfuscation by the 20th-century left, to say nothing of the peoples of Europe, had been a sufficiently savage one to discourage its repetition today. But here we have John Pilger reproducing the very thing - even though, were he himself to be transferred from the liberal-democratic milieu in which he moves and has his professional and other freedoms to the neighbourhoods of some genuinely fascist country, he would, as a person of the left, find out soon enough the stupidity of his confusion.
As generally with Pilger, the message he purveys is introduced with the assistance of someone supposedly in the know - to give 'verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative'. In this case, it's a former CIA officer who believes that the USA of Barack Obama may already be 'in a fascist mode'. Pilger doesn't baulk at the idea, he builds on it: 'fascism and imperialism are twins' and '[t]he people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism'. Still, the Arab revolt and protests against cuts in the US and Britain have ushered in a new era. 'Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.' I don't know whether Pilger intends that that name is fascism. He doesn't say directly. But his column seems deliberately open to this construal. Whom the gods would destroy, and all that.