MIM Notes 191 August 1 1999 Offering help with art Dear comrades, I received both parcels of newsletters to disseminate. In all honesty I must say that I did not pass them to very many people personally. However, I did leave them in mailboxes, the library, and laundromats. The reason being is that I live in a redneck county where the black population is less than 1%. I moved here eighteen months ago for the job I have. I lost my job in [my old city] for punching out a redneck. He successfully sued the establishment I was working for. Don't get me wrong though I'm not afraid because I have no problem with busting a cap in one of their ass. Still I have my family to be concerned about not just physically but emotionally and financially as well. When the balloon goes up I'm throwing down. I thought you'd like to see what the scandalist SOB's are doing with Malcolm X's personal belongings [newspaper clipping enclosed]. That's capitalism for you. Also I scooped this up at work on Colonel Ollie North. Instead of soliciting other white racists he should use some of that cocaine money he made with Bush Senior, Ronnie and Uncle Colin. I am a very good artist and perhaps I could do some drawings for the newsletter on a regular basis. I'll send you some samples and see what you think. The Panther newspaper out of Berkeley printed a few years ago but I haven't been able to make contact with them since. Stay in touch and let me know what the deal is. Fight the Powers! -A friend in Nevada May 1999 MIM responds: We definitely need more help from artists, particularly those willing to submit art on a regular basis to MIM Notes. The easiest thing to start out is to do art on the general themes we use the most: u.s. imperialist aggression, militarism, prisons, and the people resisting. If you see something in the news that merits art, go with that, we don't have to have a story written to run good art. Defining fascism Dear Comrades, I would like to address the question of whether a non- imperialist country can have a fascist government. Italy, the prototype of the fascist state, was in 1922 an imperialist power, albeit a minor one (with Libya as its only major colony). Germany had once been an imperialist power but was stripped of its colonies and imperialist status by the Versailles Treaty (1919). Spain, with a few remaining colonies (Morocco, Spanish Sahara, Canaries), was also a minor imperialist power. Japan was becoming a major imperialist power with its colonial occupation of Korea and its war against China. The dominant imperialist powers, the USA, Britain and France, however, retained bourgeois democracy. An established major imperialist power does not generally institute fascism within its own borders because it is not necessary to do so. When large quantities of profits flow in from the third world, the labor aristocracy can be controlled within the framework of bourgeois democracy, and the openly terrorist dictatorship characteristic of fascism is unnecessary (the major exception is the oppression of the internal colonies of the USA which do not share this privilege). Dmitrov defined fascism as the openly terrorist dictatorship by the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie. The most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie are those with imperialist aspirations, and this was clearly characteristic of the regimes of Germany and Italy. Mussolini wanted to make the Mediterranean an Italian lake, and Hitler wanted to regain Germany's African colonies and expand into the Soviet Union. But does this apply to third world regimes we normally characterize as fascist. We have examples of Chile under Pinochet, Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Sheik, southern Korea under Sygmun Rhee, El Salvador under Duarte, Haiti under Duvalier and Indonesia under Suhuarto. None of these countries were seriously expansionist. On the contrary, they were quite anti- nationalist. The regimes did not resist foreign exploitation of their countries but encouraged it. They were and are comprador regimes. In the third world, the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie are the compradors, because they promote not only the exploitation of the worker and peasant by the bourgeoisie and the landowners but also promote the exploitation of their entire country by the imperialist powers. Where third world fascists make use of nationalism at all it is only to oppose other third world peoples. Third world leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, Peron, Nasser and others who oppose imperialism have often been labeled fascists by liberals and phony Marxists. They cannot be fascists, because they do not represent the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie. They represent the relatively progressive elements of the third world bourgeoisie and petit- bourgeoisie who want to resist imperialism. Their regimes are often openly terrorist, but the terror is not generally directed against the workers and the peasants but against the compradors who want to turn their countries over to the imperialists. As such these regimes are our allies in the struggle against imperialism, not our enemies, and it is wrong to label leaders like Milosevic as fascists. -a reader, June 1999 MIM responds: Overall we agree with this letter writer's explanation of fascism. But we do not go so far as to say that leaders such as Milosevic and Hussein are our allies in the struggle against imperialism. We agree that they should not be labeled fascists, and we may ally with them in opposing imperialist attacks on their countries, we should not confuse that for an anti-imperialist alliance. We can't forget that these same leaders have in the past been happy to work as compradors for the imperialists. It was, afterall, u.s. money and weapons that built up Saddam Hussein in the first place. Similarly, Milosevic does not seem to have opposed selling out Yugoslavia to Soviet state capitalism in the past, and to Russian capitalism in the present or future. The allies against imperialism that this reader describes are the national bourgeoisie, those parts of the bourgeoisie fettered by imperialism who are willing to go up against the imperialists in order to achieve greater capitalist freedom. This segment of the bourgeoisie can be a temporary ally of the anti- imperialist United Front led by the proletariat.