Fascism creeps slowly upon us, and has many faces.  It has been building, rising and falling, since the first white person set foot in our valley.  Today it is slowly on the rise again, and all who love this land should take heed.

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness.”

For the educated American public, it is the gas chambers, the SS, and the war machine that are fascism.  Largely forgotten are the years of creeping oppression, of right-wing scheming and mobilizing, of the drumbeat of lies, of slow intimidation of the public that precede the well-known overt expressions of the fascism practiced by the Nazis or Pinochet.  Also forgotten is the cooperation from liberals, gained by fascist regimes through a long slow process of intimidation and cooption.  Liberals, by their very beliefs, are centrist and request only the most modest of reforms.  When the only way to stop the radical right-wing is by strong, radical action, they invariably stand aside or meekly cooperate, preferring not to jeopardize the small benefits they believe they receive from the system

What liberals do not see, and this is particularly evident in the USA today, is that the slow loss of rights and protections will ultimately destroy the entire system, liberal perks and all.  America is slowly being hollowed out by the fascist right (the neocons in modern terminology).  The neoconservative ideology is iron and unyielding – the corporations, the wealthy, and the powerful must be given a free hand to make America great.  The executive must be all-powerful; dictatorship (a word which is never used, of course – even Hitler and Pinochet denied being dictators) is the only way to restore America to its former shining glory (a mythical past that is all too real to neoconservatives).

And quickly, for readers who are saying, “Ah ha! He’s forgetting Bill Clinton.  He’s forgetting the Democrat victory of 2006!  And he is forgetting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, here to save us from Bush fascism!”  No, I didn’t forget.  All of the above were or are in full cooperation with the American drift to fascism.  NAFTA, Occupation of Iraq, Martial Law Powers to the President, Destruction of Habeas Corpus, the Military Commission Act of 2006, construction of detention facilities here and abroad, and other hallmarks of the emergence of fascism are part of the legacy of these liberals, who were and are fully supported by the corporate rulers of America.  Those with any sign of departure from the corporate line (for example people like John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, or Mike Huckabee in the current Presidential race) are immediately shut out by the corporate controllers of our news.  Part of the danger of fascism is that it, like the devil, can inhabit the most innocuous seeming vehicles.

In the past, as now, it has always been easier for liberals to allow the right-wing to destroy those to the left of them, than take any risks of losing their perks.  What they fail to understand is that they will ultimately lose all their perks and the entire fabric of their nation unless they stand and fight for the rights of the most oppressed among us.

So it is in the Bitterroot.  We have always been the followers, the copiers and imitators of the perceived greatness of national trends.  As our nation begins slowly to destroy its Constitution, and, like Douglas’s creeping nightfall, take away the rights our ancestors fought and died for, so the people of the Bitterroot, loyal to the national Zeitgeist, stand dutifully aside as rights are trampled upon, minorities attacked, and fascist mobs gain power.

The Big Sky Coalition and the crowd of ORV users who disrupted the Forest Service meeting in Darby are the latest contingent of our wing of the fascist mob that is forming in America.  Like all mobs, they have no need of science, facts, or the truth - only slogans and catchphrases.  “They’re locking us out of the forest!”  “They’re burning the forest and causing us to breathe smoke!”  “More logging is the only answer!”

Our Big Sky Coalition, and one of its ideological fellow travelers, the CEG or the “Committee for Effective Government,” the PAC which helped destroy progressivism in Hamilton City government, are the latest expressions of national fascism in the Bitterroot.  But these movements are not the first time fascism tried to get a grip on our valley.  Remember the “Great Log Haul”?  Remember the Militia of Montana?  Thousands of participants, opposition intimidated, media onboard, plenty of money, and governments ready to jump at their whim.  But they faded to oblivion.  What was missing?   Sophisticated liberal leadership was missing.  Leadership which could provide the ideological rationale, the media savvy, the public acceptability, the staying power, and the smooth political program to soothe politicians into adopting their radical and destructive ideas was missing.  In short, slick packaging by professionals is what is needed to sell fascist ideas.  You don’t start with dictatorship and gas chambers; you start with a vaguely plausible, seemingly centrist economic program.

The BSC and the CEG have sophisticated leadership from our liberal ranks:  Sonny LaSalle (“We just want fuel reduction”), Deb Essen (“We just want to stop the fighting”), Kathleen Driscoll (“I just want to represent everyone”), Carlotta Grandstaff (“The past Commissioners weren’t corrupt”), and Tom Robak (“We just want common sense to prevail”).  These men and women are not bad people, nor are they evil.  But they represent the greatest danger we could possibly imagine.  They are the warm, fuzzy, reasonable face for those who care nothing for our environment, our rights, or our lives.  Behind the warm and fuzzy liberal spokespersons for the mob is the greed-driven machine that will savage all that we hold dear.

What makes these local anti-progressive movements so insidious and so dangerous, is that they operate against a national backdrop that is already so far to the right that the local agendas appear much more to the center than they really are.   National fascism provides the cover for local extremism.

Their spokespersons are pillars of our community and would strenuously deny that they are advancing any sort of corporatist agenda or the dogmas of the neoconservative ideology.  It may be that they are taken in by their own rhetoric and do not recognize the Orwellian language, and outright delusionary thinking, that has crept into their dialogue.  Take the latest draft release from Sonny LaSalle:  He implies that his group is “in communication” with Friends of the Bitterroot and the Wild West Institute, and that these groups are being included in their “consensus effort.”  FOB and WWI deny that they are cooperating or that they have even been invited to participate in any kind of meaningful exchange.  They have, in fact, publicly opposed the goals of BSC, but, never mind, nothing like “consensus” to lull the liberal public and the media into the belief that everything is just fine.  Then LaSalle drifts off into Orwellian fantasy with his statement that the BSC must “Think Green” and is effusive that their proposed large-scale logging will generate “bio-fuels” (a well known greenwashing PR initiative from the Bush administration), and “benefit the environment.”

LaSalle accomplishes magic with his language.  By the power of Orwellian newspeak, his organization, born into the world to combat “environmentalists” and bankrolled by the right wing, is now transformed into a group bravely working to benefit the environment.  The power of the Big Lie marches on - tell them you’re working for the good of the environment enough times, and even clear-cutting seems a perfectly logical alternative.  The whole “fuels reduction” notion has been a modern version of “destroying a Vietnamese village to save it,” but it is a ubiquitous tenet, and currently the key selling point, of the whole anti-environmental movement in the West. 

With slick packaging, BSC hopes to make their anti-environmental organization into a benign, centrist, green group.  All the spokespeople have backgrounds suited to their task.  LaSalle himself is an ex-Forest Service manager who was responsible, with no remorse, for the logging of huge tracts of pristine forest.  Robak is a wealthy land-owner who built a home right into the water of the Bitterroot River, rip rapping and ruining one of the best fishing holes in the West.  Whatever his other liberal credentials are, his anti-setback agenda is telling.  Essen is co-owner of a telecommunications business, and for her, all growth is beneficial.  Driscoll is a real estate broker who, for all her hand-wringing and liberal palaver, cannot visualize any other economy than one built on the constant expansion of construction on to new land.  Grandstaff is a journalist and reporter who spent her career making sure fault was found with everyone she wrote about.  Her disdain for those in power masks a desire to be part of the power structure.  None of these people, in spite of their belief in “education,” “women’s rights” or other liberal trappings, can grasp the connection between their promotion of growth and the destruction of our planet and its people.

Their failure to see the big picture dooms any chance these liberals might have to stop the onslaught of destruction that is coming.  There may be those that think we can stop this movement “when is crosses the line,” but history and the words of our greatest leaders, from Thomas Jefferson to William O. Douglas, say otherwise.  It is in the dusk, the time of small loss, when only the most progressive defenders of our lives are targeted that the public must speak.  To delay is fatal, as all those who have suffered the final agonies of fascism would surely testify.

Endless promotion of growth is not benign or even sensible.  Allowing continuous unsustainable exploitation of our lands, our forests, and our resources is a path to environmental destruction.  And it is a path we have followed for some time now.

We now fight the sixth wave of destruction to assault our valley.  After six waves, we should surely be prepared for what is coming and have the tools to parry the blows, but as you will see from the short history that follows, the earlier waves destroyed those who opposed them, and then either rewrote history, or sent it down the Orwellian “memory hole.”

THE FIRST WAVE

The first wave was the trapping boom, a bizarre episode in American history that was driven by expanding European industrialism and the demand for raw pelts, mainly to make hats.   Trappers stripped our valley of the linchpin of its ecosystem, the beaver.  The beaver had been responsible for building the soil and streams of the American West for thousands of years extending far back into the Pleistocene.  Aside from the secretive and profit-driven trappers, no other white people saw the magnificence of the original Bitterroot Valley, the “valley of the red mountains” to the Salish.  The trapping boom was effectively over by 1840, and for the next twenty or so years the valley partially recovered.

THE SECOND WAVE

Then, in the 1860s, came the second wave. The second wave brought settlers by the thousands, encouraged by the railroads and robber barons, legitimized by the homestead laws, and convinced by their culture that they could successfully bring European agriculture to a high mountain valley in North America that had been evolving nearly undisturbed for millions of years.  The second wave was bravely and honorably resisted by Chief Charlo and his band of Salish.  Charlo knew what we must relearn – this valley is in delicate balance and will not survive unlimited resource extraction.  Charlo’s truth went with him as he was forcibly removed by the US Army in 1891.  The Army acted to clear the way for final settlement and distribution of the stolen land to agricultural users.

THE THIRD WAVE

Hard on the heels of the agricultural wave, came the third onslaught.  Marcus Daly fed his industrial machine in Anaconda and Butte with the timber from the Bitterroot.  He built Hamilton as a company town to serve his mill.  When the easy timber was gone from the hills around the river, the boom was over. 

THE FOURTH WAVE

By the early part of the twentieth century, real estate promoters from the East descended on the forlorn Bitterroot Valley and accelerated the homesteading distribution of land with new sales to hapless farmers induced to make a living growing apples.  In this fourth wave of destruction, promoters sold land to immigrants who added temporarily to the population of the valley.  The promoters, who at their peak had even hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design their Bitterroot Shangri Las, got rich.  The Bitterroot Valley, however, was now further despoiled.  This fourth wave of exploitation was perhaps the most cynical, and left many ruined people in its wake, although apple trees were far less damaging to the local environment than core agricultural technologies from Europe such as cattle and sheep raising. 

Agriculture had now thoroughly disrupted the ecological balance in the Bitterroot – weeds were rampant, and native plants and animals, including, astoundingly, the valley’s namesake, the native bitterroot, were in serious decline.  The combination of timber removal and domestic livestock brought a new scourge to the suffering Bitterroot – Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  Cattle and sheep, grazing on the clearcut hills were the perfect host for the disease vector, the spotted fever tick.

During the third and fourth wave of exploitation, the only people to offer any resistance were the Wobblies and the other socialist radicals of the period leading up to World War I.  The IWW organizers were destroyed by police action, prison, or sanctioned violence.  Frank Little, the Wobbly hero, was dragged from his bed in Butte, and lynched from a railroad trestle by establishment goons.  "Big Bill" Haywood was destroyed by relentless police and legal harassment.  Financially ruined and facing prison, he had to flee the country.  Eugene V. Debs spent much time in prison, in spite of his valiant struggle for the working class and receiving 6% of the vote in the 1912 race for President of the US.  The Socialist government of Butte has been forgotten by history and even the records partially destroyed.  Such is the power of monopoly capital.  The Sedition Act of the liberal Wilson administration imprisoned even those who joked about opposing the power structure in America.

The people of the Bitterroot, victims of three booms gone bust, their leaders dead or imprisoned, were now thrown into a depression that would last until WWII.  Surviving by hunting and self-reliance, valley people fared better than most of the country, but some of our environmental losses were huge.  Wild game, the deer, elk, bighorn, and goats that had shared the valley with the Salish, were decimated and, in the case of elk, entirely exterminated from the valley.

THE FIFTH WAVE

As alarm was beginning to spread about the decline of game, and early conservation organizations, such as the Ravalli County Fish and Wildlife Association, were forming, the Bitterroot was hit with the fifth wave of destruction.  The agents this time were the national timber corporations, Champion and others (not yet grown into the transnational leviathans of today), acting through the intermediary of the Forest Service.  The original Forest Service mission, laid down by Gifford Pinchot, was forest protection.  He had envisioned government protection of public forests from the type of destruction brought by Marcus Daly style logging.  Pinchot did not oppose timber harvest, only saying that it must be done so that the forest itself is protected for future generations.  But by the 1940s, the USFS was under influence of the corporations, and had quietly let “forest protection” slip into the background, and put all its resources, manpower and money into building roads and “getting the cut out.”  The rampage went unchecked for more than twenty years, leaving a legacy of tens of thousands of miles of roads, a network so extensive that even the USFS has no accurate account or map of them.  However, the destruction was somewhat out of sight of the general public as the forests which were attacked were high and deep in the wilderness. 

Beginning in the 1960s, a few voices began calling for a stop to the destructive logging practices promoted and allowed by the Forest Service.  These pioneer conservationists, including Doris Milner and Guy Brandborg, found their strongest voice in Arnold Bolle, a University of Montana professor.  Bolle helped write the famous Bolle Report, which called into question the validity of the clear cutting that was the norm in logging.  The report ushered in a whole host of positive reforms in the 1970s, including the National Forest Management Act of 1976.  In Montana came a large number of progressive reforms, not the least of which was a brand new State Constitution guaranteeing everyone the right to “a clean and healthful environment.”   For the first time, the people of the Montana and the Bitterroot were becoming conscious of what had befallen them and were taking action to make changes.

But fascists and their corporate masters never sleep.  Angered by the success of progressives in the 1960s and early 1970s, who had finally ended the Vietnam War, the Nixon Presidency, and locally the exploitation of the Bitterroot Valley, they schemed and plotted.  Right-wing think tanks were set up and lavishly funded (American Heritage Institute and others), and groundwork was laid for an assault by the Dark Side on the awakening people of America.

The corporate strategy that was decided on was simple and devious.  Improving and modernizing on the more Orwellian tactics of the Nazis, the ruling class struck back with a coordinated barrage of propaganda, the reverberations of which are being felt today with the resurgence of the BSC and their ilk.  The central feature of the propaganda was to attack the character of their opponents, and adjust the language to turn good into evil, and evil into good.  Within a short period of years beginning in about 1975, the idealistic youth of the 1960s, who had called for peace, love, harmony and sustainability, were turned into violent, sex-addled, drug users, and environmentalists were turned into idle, rich hypocrites bent on destroying all that was good in America.  Corporations, on the other hand, were turned into gentle protectors of the land, planting trees, and constantly working for better ways to serve the public and the environment.  In the new Orwellian message form the ruling class, there was no environmental problem that was not being worked on by our new friends in industry, and all of them were “about to be solved.”  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.  Ronald Reagan was swept into office, alternative energy programs terminated, and the floodgates of the public treasury turned open to flow into the coffers of the corporate ruling class. 

For reasons unique to the United States, it was also decided to change the meaning of the word “liberal,” which was now to mean unpatriotic, wasteful socialist.  Right wing propaganda had been devised for and successfully tried in Chile, Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere around the world before 1975, and, curiously, the word “liberal” remained attached to those who supported the establishment, and even today, the word “neoliberal” means in Latin America essentially what “neoconservative” means in America.

The resurgent right wing gained and flourished in a massive reconquest of America, culminating in the retaking of Congress by the forces of Newt Gingrich in 1994.  During this astounding period of success, the right wing protofascist movement had rolled back law after law, reaching (perhaps overreaching) to attempts to destroy the reforms from as far back as the 1930s.  Although banking reforms were dismantled, the Social Security system withstood the assault.  And the propaganda had become remarkably more sophisticated, subtle and widespread.  By the early twenty-first century, media had been consolidated under the iron grip of what amounts to a unified, coordinated, privately-owned and managed, government propaganda machine, capable of controlling the outcome of most events.  The media machine sent the US to war in Iraq on a pack of lies, so implausible and outrageous that even much of the public saw through them.  This same machine is currently promoting a group of pre-selected candidates for President, and carefully insuring that whether Clinton, Obama, McCain, Romney, Giuliani, or Thompson get elected, the outcome will be the same for the ruling elite.  They will stay in power, because they have bought all the aforementioned candidates.  

By the late 1990s, the fascists controlled 90% of the AM radio market, and had heavily infiltrated the FM side, even influencing NPR.  Fox News and its vast network blanketed audiences with abashed right wing propaganda.  The rest of television was only a step or so behind.  Even newspapers were falling steadily under monopolistic rule, and little difference between neoconservative and mainstream media propaganda can now be found.

THE SIXTH WAVE

In the Bitterroot, the right wing was ascendant by 1980, and the valley felt the first crushing blows of the sixth assault, the attack of the land developers.  Since the heyday of the apple-boom, land schemes had come a long way.  Developers no longer just sell the land to the unsuspecting customer and allow him to build on it, they control the entire affair, and gain the profit, from every step of the subdivision/building process.  Land development is now a cartel, and has swept from Levittown and California to infect the whole country.  Millions of acres are paved and covered with new buildings.  It is a Golconda of unimagined scale.  And the sine qua non of the development process is control of local government.

When the sixth wave hit, the Bitterroot Valley had some residual protection from progressive legislation passed in the 1970s, but the development cartel went steadily to work to dismantle any protections it could plausibly discredit.  At this point, the legacy of past exploitation, the loss of youth, worked tragically against any progressive forces that arose to resist the development juggernaut.  All the of the past booms were unsustainable, as is true everywhere when corporations come for resources only.  The busts, which are guaranteed to follow the booms, and are, to an extent, partially permanent, leave no possibility for real long-term employment, and little chance for home-grown (and mostly progressive) youth, and even less for returning, and much more politically conscious former residents.  The bulk of the immigrants to the valley are, by and large, the exploiters, the boomers they attract, or the conservative, independently wealthy supporters of corporate domination. The small cadre of liberal professionals who come to take government and other jobs cannot equal the influx from the political right, and most often simply join them. This relentless process meant that not only was the Bitterroot to be raped, but the voters would elect those who would aid, abet, and facilitate the rape.

The sixth wave became a tsunami by the 1990s.  Ravalli County’s population mushroomed from about 12,000 (a number little changed during the prior century) to nearly 40,000.  Roadbuilding was everywhere on the valley floor.  Traffic, pollution, and crime rose steeply.  In spite of the mounting alarm, valley residents seemed powerless to stop the damage.

However, starting in about 2000, progressive forces began to get a little traction.  Progressive ideas, dormant for a century, gained currency.  Even the most apathetic and conservative of valley residents could see something had to be done.  Bitterrooters for Planning, an organization dedicated to stopping damaging development activity, gained membership. 

The election of two progressives to Hamilton City Council in 2003 was the first crack in the fascist front.  The development cartel swarmed to close this dangerous breach in the walls they had erected to protect their government/industry profit machine.  But they had lost some of the expertise formed in the 1970s by the national fascists.  Years in power had made them soft.  Bob Scott and Robert Sutherland, the two progressives on City Council, could not be immediately dislodged.

Before the dangerous breach at City Council could be contained by pro-development forces, progressives scored three more quick and significant victories:  County government was changed from three to five commissioners at four (rather than six) year terms; an Interim Zoning Law stopped major subdivision activity for two years and mandated real zoning protection be enacted; and three new commissioners, two Democrats and one Independent, were elected to the Board of County Commissioners, giving progressives, in theory, a working majority.

The local fascists, after a short period of disarray, fell back on the old, but proven, tactic of finding defectors to undermine the opposition.  At the City Council, their first target, Councilor Nancy Hendrickson, a nominal liberal and Democrat, fell into their hands before they fired any serious ammunition.  The establishment already had the services of new Mayor Randazzo, and she put the final bedazzlement on the weak-minded Hendrickson.  Then came the tougher challenge, namely the new County Commissioners.  The establishment was not able to sway Jim Rokosch, but Commissioners Driscoll and Grandstaff proved easier marks.  Preying on their already liberal leanings, the right wing discovered that Driscoll and Grandstaff had, apparently, sub-conscious aspirations to join the ruling class, and were far more interested in defeating true progressives, than in countering any drift to the political right.   Again the battle was won without a real shot being fired.  Grandstaff and Driscoll joined eagerly into the campaign to eliminate Scott and Sutherland, and once that was done, distanced themselves from the progressive activists who had elected them, and found new friends with close ties to the Dark Side.

But as the fascists never sleep while there is profit to be made, neither do progressives who know the truth.  The spark of resistance has always been alive in the Bitterroot.  Fascist propaganda, and the latest rise of mob action by the BSC and CEG, can do wonders and, for awhile, seem invincible, but the truth is hard to kill.  Eliminating individual progressives is a short term solution, and propaganda to kill progressive ideas works on most of the people most of the time.  But propaganda by its very nature is composed of lies.  Each new person has to be re-inoculated with the propaganda.  Each doubter who points out that the emperor has no clothes, has to be silenced and firmly told what a beautiful suit the emperor is wearing.  Keeping the wool over the eyes of the public is a constant battle for the ruling elite, and history shows that it is a battle that they eventually lose.

So take heart, gentle readers, the future is still ours.  But eternal vigilance must be our mantra.

Those who wrote our Bill of Rights, and gave us the fundamental protections that we, at least in theory, enjoy, knew that the forces of tyranny are always just outside our door, awaiting any sign of weakness to come in.  And when they come in, our ancestors knew, they, like the devil, walk and talk quietly and soothingly, smooth talking the weakest among us, and turning a quick and deadly knife to any who resist.

We cannot say we have not been warned.  

Bob Scott, January 2008