Article: Former Pro-GMO Scientist Speaks Out On The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food

BIG revelation on the GM Foods debate : a former GMO supporter has become whistle-blower and written an article that you SHOULD read if you ever believed the mainstream media drill that GM foods have been "tested to be safe". They didn't tell you tested by whom and how, did they?

http://www.foodrevolution.org/blog/former-pro-gmo-scientist/

Former Pro-GMO Scientist Speaks Out On The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food

By Thierry Vrain

I retired 10 years ago after a long career as a research scientist for Agriculture Canada. When I was on the payroll, I was the designated scientist of my institute to address public groups and reassure them that genetically engineered crops and foods were safe. There is, however, a growing body of scientific research – done mostly in Europe, Russia, and other countries – showing that diets containing engineered corn or soya cause serious health problems in laboratory mice and rats.

I don’t know if I was passionate about it but I was knowledgeable. I defended the side of technological advance, of science and progress.

 

In the last 10 years I have changed my position. I started paying attention to the flow of published studies coming from Europe, some from prestigious labs and published in prestigious scientific journals, that questioned the impact and safety of engineered food.

I refute the claims of the biotechnology companies that their engineered crops yield more, that they require less pesticide applications, that they have no impact on the environment and of course that they are safe to eat.

There are a number of scientific studies that have been done for Monsanto by universities in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Most of these studies are concerned with the field performance of the engineered crops, and of course they find GMOs safe for the environment and therefore safe to eat.

Individuals should be encouraged to make their decisions on food safety based on scientific evidence and personal choice, not on emotion or the personal opinions of others.

We should all take these studies seriously and demand that government agencies replicate them rather than rely on studies paid for by the biotech companies.

The Bt corn and soya plants that are now everywhere in our environment are registered as insecticides. But are these insecticidal plants regulated and have their proteins been tested for safety? Not by the federal departments in charge of food safety, not in Canada and not in the U.S.

There are no long-term feeding studies performed in these countries to demonstrate the claims that engineered corn and soya are safe. All we have are scientific studies out of Europe and Russia, showing that rats fed engineered food die prematurely.

These studies show that proteins produced by engineered plants are different than what they should be. Inserting a gene in a genome using this technology can and does result in damaged proteins. The scientific literature is full of studies showing that engineered corn and soya contain toxic or allergenic proteins.

Genetic engineering is 40 years old. It is based on the naive understanding of the genome based on the One Gene – one protein hypothesis of 70 years ago, that each gene codes for a single protein. The Human Genome project completed in 2002 showed that this hypothesis is wrong.

The whole paradigm of the genetic engineering technology is based on a misunderstanding. Every scientist now learns that any gene can give more than one protein and that inserting a gene anywhere in a plant eventually creates rogue proteins. Some of these proteins are obviously allergenic or toxic.

I have drafted a reply to Paul Horgen’s letter to the Comox Valley Environmental Council. It is my wish that it goes viral as to educate as many people as possible rapidly. Any and all social media is fine by me. This can also be used as a briefing note for the councilors of AVICC or anywhere else. Thank you for your help. [Click here for original source with replies from Dr. Paul Horgen]

— Thierry Vrain, Innisfree Farm

 

I am turning you towards a recent compilation (June 2012) of over 500 government reports and scientific articles published in peer reviewed Journals, some of them with the highest recognition in the world. Like The Lancet in the medical field, or Advances in Food and Nutrition Research, or Biotechnology, or Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, European Journal of Histochemistry, Journal of Proteome Research, etc … This compilation was made by a genetic engineer in London, and an investigative journalist who summarized the gist of the publications for the lay public.

GMO Myths and Truths – an evidence based examination of the claims made for the safety and efficacy of genetically modified crops. A report of 120 pages, it can be downloaded for free from Earth Open Source. “GMO Myths and Truths” disputes the claims of the Biotech industry that GM crops yield better and more nutritious food, that they save on the use of pesticides, have no environmental impact whatsoever and are perfectly safe to eat. Genetic pollution is so prevalent in North and South America where GM crops are grown that the fields of conventional and organic grower are regularly contaminated with engineered pollen and losing certification. The canola and flax export market from Canada to Europe (a few hundreds of millions of dollars) were recently lost because of genetic pollution. Did I mention superweeds, when RoundUp crops pass their genes on to RoundUp Resistant weeds. Apparently over 50% of fields in the USA are now infested and the growers have to go back to use other toxic herbicides such as 2-4 D. Many areas of Ontario and Alberta are also infested. The transgenes are also transferred to soil bacteria. A chinese study published last year shows that an ampicillin resistance transgene was transferred from local engineered crops to soil bacteria, that eventually found their way into the rivers. The transgenes are also transferred to humans. Volunteers who ate engineered soybeans had undigested DNA in their intestine and their bacterial flora was expressing the soybean transgenes in the form of antibiotic resistance. This is genetic pollution to the extreme, particularly when antibiotic resistance is fast becoming a serious global health risk. I can only assume the American Medical Association will soon recognize its poorly informed judgement.

In 2009 the American Academy of Environmental Medicine called for a moratorium of GM foods, safety testing and labeling. Their review of the available literature at the time noted that animals show serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system. Monsanto writes “There is no need to test the safety of GM foods”. So long as the engineered protein is safe, foods from GM crops are substantially equivalent and they cannot pose any health risks.” The US Food and Drug Administration waived all levels of safety testing in 1996 before approving the commercialization of these crops. Nothing more than voluntary research is necessary, and the FDA does not even want to see the results. And there is certainly no need to publish any of it. If you remember 1996, the year that the first crops were commercialized, the research scientists of the US FDA all predicted that transgenic crops would have unpredictable hard to detect side effects, allergens, toxins, nutritional effects, new diseases. That was published in 2004 in Biotechnology if you recall seeing it.

I know well that Canada does not perform long term feeding studies as they do in Europe. The only study I am aware of from Canada is from the Sherbrooke Hospital in 2011, when doctors found that 93% of pregnant women and 82% of the fetuses tested had the protein pesticide in their blood. This is a protein recognized in its many forms as mildly to severely allergenic. There is no information on the role played by rogue proteins created by the process of inserting transgenes in the middle of a genome. But there is a lot of long term feeding studies reporting serious health problems in mice and rats. The results of the first long term feeding studies of lab rats reported last year in Food and Chemical Toxicology show that they developed breast cancer in mid life and showed kidney and liver damage. The current statistic I read is that North Americans are eating 193 lbs of GMO food on average annually. That includes the children I assume, not that I would use that as a scare tactic. But obviously I wrote at length because I think there is cause for alarm and it is my duty to educate the public.

One argument I hear repeatedly is that nobody has been sick or died after a meal (or a trillion meals since 1996) of GM food. Nobody gets ill from smoking a pack of cigarette either. But it sure adds up, and we did not know that in the 1950s before we started our wave of epidemics of cancer. Except this time it is not about a bit of smoke, it’s the whole food system that is of concern. The corporate interest must be subordinated to the public interest, and the policy of substantial equivalence must be scrapped as it is clearly untrue.

Thierry Vrain is a former research scientist for Agriculture Canada. He now promotes awareness of the dangers of genetically modified foods.

Originally published in: Prevent Disease.

Kids are meant to play all the time, not to be taught

I'm watching a talk,
Conference on Alternatives to Compulsory Education - Peter Grey - April 27, 2013
Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7gZw0KJXVQ

Around the 15th minute he presents research by people studying hunter-gatherer groups from around the world. These would be analogous to adivasis in India.
Very interesting observations about the way these disparate groups treat their kids:

• Kids are not directed / told what to do / what not to do / scolded
• If they play with dangerous items like machetes, it's assumed they know what they're doing, and if they get hurt, they'll learn. Parents don't bother.
• There is no concept that kids need to be taught.
• Kids go off to play all the time, as soon as they're fit to leave the parents' side, and by the time they become adults their play naturally morphs into taking responsibilities for the community
• They have never seen kids whining about anything in these groups
• Kids grow up to be self-organizing and self-directed.

About the groups themselves,

• There is no chief of the tribe, no hierarchy. Decisions are made by consensus.
• There is no concept of telling a person what to do. It flows naturally. It is assumed everybody will individually arrive at the right thing to do when given the freedom to make choices. They don't need to explicitly make laws : there are natural laws and they act naturally.
• These are complex, rich cultures with their own music, dance, and they have huge store of knowledge of different species of plants and animals around them. There is an enormous amount that a person in these communities have to learn. And they learn it entirely on their own, without adult supervision.

Before this, observations on mammals:

• All mammals are found to play when young. Unlike other species, mammals have a lot to learn while growing up. Through their play, they learn the skills needed as an adult. So kittens play with their prey : they may catch a mouse, then let it escape, then catch it again... We see puppies and cubs brawl with each other : they're practising hunting.
• This play is essential to the mammals' growth and thriving.
• Humans have the most to learn : not just skills relevant to the human species, but in each social group, the skills and behaviours relevant to that group. So naturally, they need to play the most.

I know there are various rebuttals to this, most of them having to do with treating these cultures as backward and treating ourselves as advanced and better than them. So explain how those cultures managed to preserve the planet beautifully for thousands of years (since the last Ice Age ended), and we managed to absolutely mess it up in just a few generations.

No, you say? There are huge islands of plastic floating in the middle of the Pacific, farthest from any human settlement. There is black soot depositing over Antarctica and accelerating melting of ice caps. Undersea corals across the globe are in a mass die-off due to increasing acidity in oceans. The only spots still preserved are the inaccessible ones or those where we're not allowing civilized people to go. YES, we ARE messing the planet up royally.

Instead of shuffling between past and present and making a stupid brainless contest out of adivasi Vs modern, think how we can combine what we're learning from all quarters, so we can think about how we want the future to be.

The Perfect Teacher Syndrome

This post is my add-on to a wonderful post by my friend Dola, titled Why home educate?

It's an add-on to Dola's post, and a.. well, response to parts of some extensive comments under it.

A lot of talk in education sector today revolves around training and bolstering the "perfect" teachers, and I think they're partly chasing that elusive all-wise "guru" of the Gurukuls past. I've personally seen these efforts lead to some pretty messy consequences, like sending "highly qualified" people in to replace regular teachers in govt schools, thinking they're some silver bullet that'll fix all problems. However glorious our past was, the fact remains that as Indians we messed up royally and got owned. Accept it and analyse it. Could it have been because of our addiction to being dependent on external entities for guidance, our reluctance to follow our own instincts? For all their glory, I don't think there's any Gurukul that took a stand against the inhuman caste system that divided our society and enslaved a large part of it (apart from maybe Buddhist ashrams that were destroyed by the Hindu rulers); In fact I see plenty of evidence that they propagated it. The British deserve a pat on the back for at least exposing us to the idea that all humans should be treated equal, even if they didn't really practice it.

In all this obsession with teachers and gurus, the child's inborn ability to learn and humanity's inherent social nature (ie cross-pollination of ideas, people wanting to care for one another) gets ignored. Every human being, every bird and animal, every rock and river is a teacher. Why outsource something to a single person when it's available in abundance? Darwin, Galileo, Einstein OBSERVED life and the cosmos. Nature was their teacher. They didn't prat on "Yes Guruji, I will do as you say, Guruji" all day long.

IMHO (in my humble opinion), there is no such thing as the perfect husband or wife, the perfect son or daughter, the perfect government or prime minister, the perfect rickshaw driver or mechanic, the perfect reality show contestant or judge, or the perfect Student or Teacher. It's a myth, a mirage and we are fools to run behind it, to seek relentlessly in one person what is available in abundance all around. It's like expecting one heavenly body to have all the qualities of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars and galaxies and black holes and quasars and supernovae all put together and then getting disappointed when it doesn't happen the way were expecting it to. We'll only end up missing out on the true beauty and wonder of the sky this way.

To me, liberating the child from following someone else's orders (no matter how wise) allows the next stage of humanity to flourish. Sorry, but unless the Gods themselves come over and offer themselves up, I would never go back to something like a Gurukul. (and maybe not even then) I believe in learning and free will. I do not believe in perfect teachers.

You should check out Australia's Stolen Generation history to understand where dreaming about Gurukuls and kids going off for all of childhood can take us. Heck, absence of children from various parts of society is already causing so many issues (would the bankers have been so damn reckless betting on futures if there were children sitting in the room? Would you give orders to massacre whole towns if there was a child tugging at your finger?), if all children were to vanish into Gurukuls till adulthood, I shudder to think of the consequences! If the current model of factory schooling is bad as it is, then please people, DO NOT take us into something even worse! Please cure yourself of the Perfect Teacher Syndrome, and embrace the abundance all around you.

Further reading:

• If you want to know my most honest opinions about India's legendary honorary Gurus, please check out Eklavya 2.0
• You should really try reading Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, or John Holt's Learning All the Time, or A.S.Neils, Summerhill, or Daniel Greenberg's Free At Last or John T Gatto's Dumbing Us Down.
• Watch the Summerhill Drama
• Watch the lectures from Conference on Alternatives to Compulsory Education
• Watch The Forbidden Education

the Human aspect of Engineering

Sharing the last part of a newsletter from Round Table India (that writes on many Dalit / backward caste issues in India).
This, and the kind of stuff it concerns, is what was never taught to us through school and engineering college. We were told that we should go join the "core" engineering companies (like Tata Steel, Power, Jindal, Vedanta, Reliance refineries etc) and be part of India's "development".

All our schematic diagrams had these little boxes titled "waste" where all the byproducts of various engineering processes (typically far exceeding the actual products) would go. If anyone asked further, we were told that it is then "disposed". On further questioning, "it is properly disposed". While we had specializations in construction, fabrication, electricity, electronics, communications, logistics etc etc, they never made space for a degree in waste disposal. So they covered the Brahma and Vishnu parts very proudly, but the Mahesh part was left out.

None of our professors ever told us WHERE it is disposed, with what it is mingled, what consequences come off it.

In our efficiency / cost calculation formulas, we never included the costs incurred by the people who lived around the industry, or the cost of forever-lost livelihoods from the acquiring of fertile agricultural land or forests, or the wipeout of ecology at the place. None of these were ever factored into our calculations.

I look at TISS and at IIT in Mumbai. And I wonder why the hell was the human, social angle separated from engineering. Why was our education fragmented.

• Dalit and Adivasi Women Warriors Question Caste and Gender Oppression

  Sujatha Surepally

  (Impressions from the first National Dalit and Adivasi Women's Congress held on February 15-16, 2013, at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai)

  We live in nature! We die in Nature! It's our life, if you occupy our land where should we go and how do we live? Whose land is this?

  The hall is echoing with the furious voice of Dayamani Barla, veteran Adivasi activist from Jharkhand. She is trying to unite people against mining in Jharkhand, around 108 mining companies are waiting to destroy Adivasi life in the name of mining, first they come for coal, next they say power houses, it continues, we are pushed out and out further. How do we live without our land?

  … Read More

• Dalit Information And Education Trust: New Waves in Dalit Discourse

  Sujatha Surepally

  (The Annual meet of D.I.E.T was held on 5th May, 2012, in Hyderabad. We thank Sujatha Surepally for sharing this report on the event)

  Dalit Information and Education Trust's (DIET) Annual meet was held on 5th May, 2012 at Hotel Grand plaza, Nampally, Hyderabad. It was a memorable event. Though it was titled as 'Book Reviews and Felicitations', there was much more to describe, feel proud about at the meet, and to celebrate our own people's contribution to dalit literature, criticism, rediscovering Ambedkar etc. A culmination of different views and perspectives, bundles of experiences, thoughts of different generations, the agonies and strategies of building movements for dignity. It presented a rare opportunity, and indeed was a marvelous day.

  … Read More

videos from Conference on Alternatives to Compulsory Education held on April 27, 2013 at Cambridge, US

A Conference on Alternatives to Compulsory Education was held on April 27, 2013 at Cambridge, US.
Video lectures from the conference have been put online.
http://www.education-conference.org/conference-videos/

They include: Cevin Soling: Why We Need Alternatives , Peter Gray: The Importance of Play, Pat Farenga: Homeschooling and Unschooling, Peter A. Bergson: Open Connections: One Approach to Partnership Education

I've just finished watching Cevin Soling's speech and loved it. He brings out the hidden realities of compulsory schooling and the harm that even the best of teachers are doing to their students. I felt like he was really speaking my mind, reflecting back on my 1-yr experience with Teach For India. These ought to be taken and shown to teachers everywhere.

I'll share these videos and more with fellow attendees at the Learning Societies UnConference at Pune, 14-19 June. If you're coming, do bring a USB drive. We might be able to screen some of them as well.

--
Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Udaipur/Pune, India
Self-designed learner at Swaraj University
http://www.nikhilsheth.tk
http://www.facebook.com/nikjs

Why Obama was put in office

About Barack Obama: This is for all those who talk about people opposing
him because he's black:

How convenient : Put a black man in office, so that any criticism can be
handled and buried by the racism tag. Meanwhile, through him wage more
wars, practice more torture, drill more oil, make more money, use more
drones, assassinate more people without cause or trial, imprison more
people without due process, censor more websites under guise of
copyright protection, tap more phones and emails, ruin more lives, Push
more CO2 in the atmosphere, make no real commitments to solve any
problems but make more grandiose statements, accumulate more wealth and
power...

Doesn't matter who the person is.. black, white, yellow, pink, green...
The real bosses are the ones who funded the election campaign. Who
funded Obama's? Who made sure that the election was seen as an Obama Vs
Romney fight? Who paid the media to completely censor out all the other
candidates, including a WOMAN who was standing from a pro-environment,
anti-Wall St platform? Go find out.

The Poison is the Pot - by Bayo Akomolafe

Forwarding this... Poverty didn't exist before we became totally
dependent on money. There were no poor before the "rich" came about. Try
wrapping that around your head.


We invented the modern ethics of philanthropy and poverty eradication to
escape the need to change a money system that is fueled by the very
existence of poverty and scarcity; we created an industry of 'waste
management' that tempers our anger and numbs us to the fact that we
abide in a cradle-to-grave, use-and-dump global economy - a behemoth
that necessarily generates 'waste' by silently celebrating planned
obsolescence. We institutionalized illiteracy reduction programs and
no-one-left-behind-schemes through our schools - conveniently forgetting
that because of the politics of correctness, the dynamics of conformity
and standardized assessment, our schools effectively create large
populations of people 'left behind'. We legitimized 'environmental
protection' - all the while shielding our ears from the subversive
question echoing in the fringes, tugging at our collective imagination:
why do we inevitably have to live in a world in which the 'environment'
needs protection?

The problem of poverty did not 'exist' until we introduced a monetary
framework that reified scarcity, valorized ownership and celebrated
property accumulation; the problem of waste was invented by the system
that pretends to address it; ignorance wasn't certified until schools
were invented; and, the health of our ecological systems will always be
an issue - so long as we continue to perpetuate a civilization whose
very foundation is the idea that 'nature' is a resource to be exploited
for our fanciful whims.

The poison is not in the pot, ladies and gentlemen - the poison is the
pot. We will not 'solve' the 'problems' we have with the tools that
created them in the first place; we will not change the world by adding
another syllable to a sentence that makes no sense. More schools will
not get rid of ignorance - they created it in the first place, and
actually need more of it to thrive (which is the reason why the most
prestigious universities are known by how many applicants they reject!).
More money will not get rid of poverty - because the dynamics of finance
and the politics of upward mobility demand that money remains scarce -
and therefore accessible only to a select few. Until we change the
holding assumptions and hidden narratives that power our systems and
ways of being, we will always tinker with the broth, experiment with new
ingredients, and stir with contrived spoons in a frantic rush for
culinary apotheosis. Meanwhile the toxic juices in the sooty crevices
and shadows of the pot will secrete into our soupy contraptions our
poison, our illusion, our unending servitude, and a stealthy charm that
will keep us wondering why the chef is broken.

Bayo Akomolafe - 'The Poison is the Pot'

Hygiene? Modernity is dirtier than ever

For years I was told how we should not spit and litter on out roads and public spaces.

APJ Kalam wrote profusely on how we as citizens are responsible for so much dirtiness, and I believed him.

Even the private sector, companies, industrialists, waxed eloquent on the need for better cleanliness, sanitation, hygiene.
Poor people were portrayed as being uncivilized, unhygienic, spitting and pissing anywhere and dirtying the city.

While all this while, all these years while our media has been hammering in how we spit and litter on our roads and how bad it is,
While we were being poked every moment for spitting a few organic compounds onto tarred roads,

Our most hyped, respected, reputed companies, have been spitting and shitting TOXIC CHEMICALS into our countryside : Into the land, into the water, into the air, into the plants and birds and animals, into our food, into all our lives. They make the plastic so they can push their goods to us, and then they just can't be bothered about the return trip. All that plastic trash littering my planet and forming floating islands in the oceans wouldn't be around if it wasn't for these few industrialists, well-educated as they are, who knew fully what the consequences will be, who took a decision so they can increase the length and time their goods can travel and get some percentage more profits.

And in all the rush to tell the people that look, how dirty they are, we were deliberately made to miss out on the fact that the industrialists of this country are, by sheer volume, spitting 1000s of times more toxics onto our motherland than all the citizens put together.

We were told to piss in toilets that take fresh, drinkable water, mix it in with shit, and transport it into the rivers and seas that we once worshiped as our Goddesses. We were told to do our bit, while the authorities that took charge of disposing of our crap, just dumped it wherever convenient while promising to solve the problem one day, with regular monetary boosts from us. We ended up doing our bit, and paying on top, to pollute our environment.
Instead if we were to dispense of our waste in our own backyard (as we have been for thousands of years), merely through digging holes, our crap would have completed the cycle of life and become food for the organisms that produce our food. And we'd be getting "rid" of the "waste" without spending any penny.

With the pretense of getting cleaner, civilization as it stands today, is actually making us dirtier than ever. The motive was never to make us cleaner. It was only to make us outsource our tasks so that a heavy bureaucracy can leech off it. Those sparkling clean streets and places : they're just the screensaver, and we fell for it.

And as for all those who proclaim India as a filthy, dirty country, here's a bouncer for you : We're not dirtier than the richer nations. We're only not as passionate about getting rid of our waste as they are. Their trash is piling up all over Africa, Asia, South America, and even Antarctica! We don't go to such great lengths to hide our ugliness as you do, we don't think it a good idea to destroy other people's lands and lives just to maintain cleanliness in ours. If you make any trash, there is nothing bad in keeping it to yourself. So f**k off.

A clean country isn't one whose streets are clean, but one that doesn't produce anything that pollutes, devastates eco-systems anywhere. Spitting paan on the road doesn't really harm this planet as much as the rivers of toxic effluent thrown out by the company that proclaims 10 lakh children educated under its CSR initiative, whose consumer goods are packaged and delivered to us in nice, shiny, clean containers. That's not being clean; that's just throwing your trash in your neighbor's backyard and then chiding the neighbor for being unhygienic. We'd make much better use of our resources if we focused on restructuring our worlds so that we don't make waste in the first place, rather than cleaning up and then throwing it all elsewhere. If it's dirty, let it be. All the more incentive to move on to a more cyclical way of life.

nobody left

I've heard more generic versions of this, but this seems to be the original:

"When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore I was not
concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic,
and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the union
and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not
concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and
there was nobody left to be concerned."

- Martin Niemoller, 1968, from the US Congressional Record

How I'll rewrite it:
First, they came after the Jews. I was not a Jew, so it didn't bother
me. Then they came after the Sikhs and the Muslims. I wasn't either of
them, so why should I help? Then, they grabbed the homes of the
indigenous, the Adivasi. Now I'm no Adivasi, so why should I care? Then
they attacked the Dalits. I wasn't one so it didn't matter. They cleared
the forests but I don't live there. They attacked the gays, and of
course I didn't care. They made the city really unsafe for women, but
since I'm not a woman, I wasn't concerned. They evicted the roadside
sellers, and I just changed my markets. They hunted down all the
activists, thank God I wasn't one of them. They deported the artists,
and my life just went on normally. And then they came after me. Now I
asked for help, but there was no one left to care about me.

Fascism in India

Got this from a mailer invite to a seminar on Fascism (more info). Good points, can help connect the dots for those who are new to these ideas.

Defining Characteristics of Fascism

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and sexual choices are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by investors , corporates. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often is the one who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.