OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #213, JANUARY 22, 2025.

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #213, JANUARY 22, 2025.   Compiled by Dick Bennett

 Bertram Gross.  Friendly Fascism:

NCTE George Orwell Award.

[I am recovering from covid, feeling much better today.  I had roughly prepared WWW 213 before the virus struck.]

Gross’ analysis of US fascism is over 40 years old but is truer today than then.

 

Bertram Gross.  Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America.  M. Evans & Co., 1980.  South End P (paper), 1980.

Gross cites George Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1948, several times while elucidating the politics of oligarchies..  

In a section entitled “Triplespeak” (p. 204) he begins with the contradiction-and deception- riddled context of the Cold War:
       “The myths of the cold war gave us the imagery of a free world that included many tyrannical regimes on one side and the ‘worldwide communist conspiracy’ to describe the other. . . .George Orwell envisioned a future society in which the oligarchs would use linguistic debasement as a conscious method of control.  Hence the Party Leaders imposed doublethink on the population and set up a long-range program for developing newspeak.  Gross, observing the expansion of these fascist features, speculates that were Orwell living today he would have coined the term “triplespeak,” “an essential element in the tightening of oligarchic control at the highest levels. . . .The more lies are told, the more important it becomes for the liars to justify themselves by deep moral commitments to high-sounding objectives that mask the pursuit of money and power” (205). 

     “Thus, in 1975 and 1976, while the long right arm of the American presidency was supporting bloody dictatorships in Chile, Brazil, Indochina, and Iran (to mention but a few), Daniel P. Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, wrapped himself in the flag of liberty and human rights [and] set a high standard of creative myth-making” (205).

      “Domestic myths are the daily bread of the restructured Radical Right and the old-style and new-style conservatives.  Many of the ideologies discussed in the last section of this chapter serve not only as cover-ups for concentrated oligarchic power.  They provide code words for the more unspoken, mundane myths that define unemployable people as lazy or unemployable, women, blacks, and Hispanics as congenitally inferior….Presidential candidates invariably propagate the myth that [white] Americans are superior. . . .(206).  

     Analysis of the economics of friendly fascism is provided in chapter 8.  One section is entitled “More Money Moving Upward.”   A chief feature of US capitalism is recurrent recessions.  Two patent medicines are prescribed by the oligarchs.  “The first is more Big Welfare for Big Business….The second…is more spending on death machines and war forces” (213).

     “In George Orwell’s 1984 Winston Smith and his fellow bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth labored diligently to rewrite past history.  Under [the information complex of] friendly fascism” officials “create current history through highly selective and slanted reporting of current events. . . . The primary blackout [of censorship] would be on any frontal scrutiny of the faceless oligarchs themselves and their exploitative intercourse with the rest of the world. . . .At present, information on corporate corruption at the higher levels is played down in both the mass and the elite media.  Under friendly fascism, while the same activities would take place on a larger scale, they would be protected by double cover—on the one hand, their legalization by a more acquiescent and cooperative state, and, on the other hand, the suppression of news on any such operations that have not yet been legalized.

     The whole process would be facilitated by the integration of the media into the broader structure of big business. . . .” (262).

 

The NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language (the Orwell Award for short) is an award given since 1975 by the Public Language Award Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English.  It is awarded annually to "writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse."^[1]
Orwell Award Winners
1970s:  1975: David Wise for The Politics of Lying; 1976: Hugh Rank for the "Intensify/Downplay" schema for analyzing persuasion and propaganda.

Sometimes people ask: What can I do against the descending planet-scale catastrophes?  My reply is: for starters help create a large number of readers of Orwell’s 1984! true grit.

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