MUSSOLINI ON THE HUDSON
The Giuliani Regime and
NeoFascism in New York
By A. Kronstadt

    What do you call a city in which the police department has a
special operation to repair the locks of people whose apartments
have been invaded, erroneously, by drug-raiding cops? What do you
call a city where a virulently right wing social regime is
imposed upon people in the guise of public safety, where dance
halls are closed down and cops arrest everyone on petty excuses
in order to shake them down for something more serious--a
philosophy touted as a great breakthrough in law enforcement?   
What do you call a city which now has too many police, and whose
mayor dreams of eradicating crime altogether? In order to take
the step into this brave new world, we must all be regimented in
all sorts of petty new ways; the policeman will now have the
right to stop us on the street because, in his opinion, we have
walked across the street in the wrong way. This is not a normal
system any more, people, this is not just a return to
"traditional values," but a futuristic authoritarian system that
is being imposed upon us in New York City. Fascism may be a bad
word for it, but it is the equivalent of fascism, in this new
time and place.

    Rudolf Giuliani and his supporters among large a swath of the
New York City middle class refer to their ideology by the code
phrase "quality of life." These fascists do not resemble the
fascists of old Europe any more than the 1930s resemble the
1990s, but the basic elements of Giuliani's power over New York
are the same as those of historical fascism.

    Fascism, like Communism, amounts to a series of social
experiments imposed upon the populace by an over-armed government
and a howling mob of true believers. Fascists are led by leaders
who are psychotic control freaks demanding undivided attention at
all times, who are determined to mold people into their own
preconceived image. They are supported by an insecure public who
have been frightened into an emergency mentality where "crime"
and "disorder" have become so desperate that desperate measures
are required. 

    Fascism germinates during times of troubles and is first
instigated by cliques of resentful ideologues that spring
primarily from the insecure middle class. In Germany the fascists
recruited German shopkeepers and professionals who resented
competition from Jews and "others." In Italy, these same
cockroach capitalists formed Black Shirt battalions who
terrorized political dissidents and brought Benito Mussolini to
power. In our neighborhood--the Lower East Side--they include the
quality of life creeps such as Kate Walters and the Save Avenue A
Association, who, now that they have eliminated street peddlers,
have moved on to closing down bars and clubs. In particular, they
include former City Councilman Antonio Pagan and the clique of
land speculators who crystallized around him in the turbulent
late 1980s. They include the well-dressed ladies who flock to 9th
precinct community council meetings to denounce sleeping homeless
people and young men and women who hang out on their corners. The
"Jews and others" have been replaced by homeless people as well
as youth, particularly groups of Black and Latino youth, but also
nonconforming white kids, like punks and squatters.

    Like the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts who are their
historical predescessors, the right wing busibodies of New York
City are not the majority--they are a vocal minority who have an
abnormal taste for order and personal power. Such people
naturally suck up to the strong male authority figure. Their
problem stems from insecurity which may be both real in the
economic sense and subjective in the psychological sense. They
include frustrated small business and co-op apartment owners as
well as old, prejudiced people who are just plain gossips. You
all know who you are. You are Giuliani's true believers. You are
his disciples.

    Former Councilmember Antonio Pagan was a kind of predescessor
to Giuliani--a kind of evil John the Baptist who carried forward
the message of Rudy the Antichrist. He and his scheming power
hungry colleagues imposed a Giuliani-like regime upon us, right
here in the Lower East Side--three and a half years before
Giuliani took office. 

    In those days, Pagan's political machine formed its own Harper
Valley PTA composed of neurotic, power-seeking busibodies like
Elizabeth Acevedo and Susan Vaughn. They included neighborhood
anti-peddler/anti-homeless "activists" like Kate Walters,
Community Board 3 members and landlords like Kristyna Piorkowska
and Howard Hemsley, bureaucrats like Martha Danziger and larval
right-wing pundits like Steven Vincent. Pagan's sponsors in the
Democratic Party were right wingers in Ed Koch's Village Reform
Democrats, including Liz Schollenberger and Tim James, architects
of the crackdown that has turned Washington Square Park into a
graveyard. Pagan received money from rich, cynical Democratic
manipulators like Wilbert Tatum, the publisher of the Amsterdam
News and a property owner on East 3rd Street, and reached into
the heart of the real estate community through cronies who were
big players in the land business including Sam Turvey and the
garden destroyer Donald Capoccia. All of these people
crystallized around Pagan himself, a land speculator in the guise
of a benefactor of the poor, who gleefully administered trickle-
down projects under Reagan and Bush. His organization acquired
blocks of property from the City's Department of Housing
Preservation and Development, renovated them, and rented out with
the intention of privatizing them some day. Pagan acquired a
political following the old fashioned way, by dispensing
patronage. Taking advantage of a the political nihilism of his
day, he squeaked into office on a campaign of resentment against
the poor, the young, and the culture of the streets.

    The issue that these they Pagandroids crystallized around was
given the then-unfamiliar name of "quality of life." When Pagan
and his minions brought in legions of cops to close down Tompkins
Square Park, sack the homeless encampments, and make everyone
subject to arrest on some petty pretext--it was in the name of
"quality-of-life"--a political buzz word that didn't exist in
anyone's vocabulary even ten years ago. It is still not part of
the vocubulary of Joe Average, but has been used, with a secret
meaning, by councilmember Pagan and Mayor Giuliani as well as the
busybody "neighborhood activists" who brought these men into
office. Just as "Final" and "Solution" mean something special
when pronounced together as a phrase, "quality" "of" and "life"
don't have the same meanings here as they do in the normal
vernacular of New York City. There is a secret handshake here,
the wink of an eye invisible to the "other." 

    "Quality of Life" is a slogan that originated among
conservative ideologues in places like the Manhattan Institute,
where Rudolph Giuliani got his training in ideological newspeak.
"Quality of Life" is the middle class ideology that decent people
shouldn't live with "bums" and that poor people's culture and
behavior should be run out of the centers of cities, which will
consequently become expensive real estate. If you want a dose of
this new urban doctrine, read the right-wing rantings of
ideologues like William Tucker in the New York Press; he's a true
believer (and also a ghost writer for Newt Gingrich). So is
Michael Tomasky, formerly of the Village Voice, who now writes
for New York Magazine. The quality of lifers have a liberal
counterpart in the writings of psychiatrist guru Dr. Amitai
Etzioni, a long-time fellow traveler in the camp of Hillary
Clinton, who has advocated "reclaiming our public spaces," once
again in the name of "quality of life." Dr. Etzioni's middle
class cult of "communitarians" advocate the same things as the
Manhattan Institute conservatives, although, as liberals, believe
that the people arrested by the cops should be put in mental
hospitals instead of jails. This right wing trend, like the
fascism of old, has its pseudo-leftist "politically correct" side
too. Pagan is Puerto Rican and gay and there are sour-pussed
lesbian feminists among the quality of life creep "community
actists".

    This new breed of poltical ideologue is not conservative in
the West of the Hudson sense of the word. They include lesbians,
faggots, and smart, rich men of color who aspire to be white.
They includes mommies and daddies who quote Hillary Clinton.
However, this political current is not liberal in anyone's sense
of the word. It is a middle-class revolt--or more accurately--a
reaction--against the culture of the poor. These ideologues have
a reforming zeal, they are going to put a broom in everyone's
hand and make them sweep the sidewalks like the Jews of Austria.
They want to take the vagrants, who are all mental cases anyway,
off to nice, safe mental hospitals where they will be given the
proper drugs by responsible men in white coats. Like St.
Augustine they want to build a City on the Hill where
righteousness is everyone's business. They want to get rid of not
only of what is bad for their quality of life but they want to
rid the world of all life that has, in their opinion, a bad
quality.

    These "neos" as I will call them because their ideology is an
unkosher mixture of neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and
neofascism, are now the concious vanguard of New York City
thinking. Their ideology represents what most of the bankers,
real estate, and insurance industry bigshots look to for their
theoretical orientation, to whatever extent they need theory. The
liberals too, turn out to be "neos," partisans of the one-party
Clinton/Giuliani demopublican state in which there is a fusion of
cold-hearted ideologies in the name of greed. Under Clinton the
greed of the cattle-roasting Texas oil baron has become one with
the even greedier greed of the family-evicting Manhattan real-
estate yuppie--who awakens to Vivaldi and wants to send us all to
psychiatrists. The yuppie has a wife who loves Hillary Clinton
and thinks we need to bomb Iraq for the sake of the children.
They are all "neos," united in the opinion that the government
shouldn't spend anything on anybody. They are united that there
should be millions of cops everywhere and lots of prison cells.
They are united that what is good for business is good for the
U.S.A. They are united that colleges should be privately owned
and cost a lot of money. And they are united about quality of
life and gentrification, because, after all, why should the
cities be wasted on scoundrels who don't have any money. 

    They are even united on the really ridiculous details like
school uniforms, touted by both Bill Clinton and the Giuliani
Board of Education. This business about making kids wear uniforms
is not a return to "traditional values." It is an evil futuristic
plot in which the government shall be allowed to determine your
children's individualities. Did you have to wear a silly plaid
skirt to public school, in New York of all places? Never, not
even forty years ago. Nobody even discussed letting the
government dress the kids until those damned Neo Fascists came to
power, whom, like the Catholic Church feel the need to control
everything because they are insecure, sexually repressed, power-
hungry bastards. The Catholic Church has as much to do with
fascism in New York City as it has had in Spain, Chile,
Argentina, and other Catholic countries that have undergone
periods of extreme authoritarian rule. Rudy Giuliani attacked
Ruth Messinger for having failed to attend Catholic Church on
Columbus day, an anti-Jewish slap that would never have been
tolerated in the days when Jews were less yuppified. The Catholic
Church is finally getting its maximum program implemented--no
more porno parlors in Times Square and even the public school
kids have to wear Catholic school uniforms. It is the Catholic
school hall monitor mentality that is reflected in Giuliani's
pedestrian-control plans, increased marijuana and beer arrests,
and prostitute cleanups--where the johns, too, are arrested to
appease the Hillary Clinton feminists. 

    Look at what we face in the New York of 1998. A mayor who
puts up video cameras to watch us on the streets. A mayor who
wants to arrest us for crossing in the middle of the block. These
are not a return to "conservative" traditional values but a
futuristic, unprecedented attempt to micromanage our behavior--
fascist social experiments in the purest sense of the word. Just
as in the case of the school uniforms, we ask long-time New
Yorkers whether they ever remember a time when people got stopped
by cops for jaywalking? The government is even plotting fiendish
social experiments against our critters. The City Department of
Animal Control is now requiring the implantation of microchips in
dogs as a condition for obtaining a dog license. No microchip to
identify your confiscated dog at the pound and off he goes to the
gas chamber. 

    This is consistent with the demolition of the legal apartment
building at 172 Stanton in which several of the tenants' pets
were buried alive in the rubble along with their valuable
possessions and heirlooms after Giuliani rode up in his limo and
gave the order. This killing of animals typifies the mean-
spirited, objective rationalism of the neo-fascist government--
this deadly authoritarian micromanagement that applies any means
to accomplish its ends.         

    The authorities are empowered to disperse unruly crowds using
pepper gas--demonstrations disrupt traffic, and to hell with
freedom of assembly. Sure, you have a constitutional right to
sell books on the street, but the cops will kick your ass for
blocking the sidewalk. Sure, you have the right to make a poster,
but the cops will run you in if you put it up on the wall. These
are all attempts to suppress the indigenous culture of New York,
and turn the whole city into generic, expensive real estate. 

    This is, after all, a major stated goal of the "quality of
lifers"--to regenerate the core of the inner city by driving out
the bums, including the visible elements of the underground
economy, the street people, and proletarian forms of
entertainment like the theaters and peep shows of Times Square.
This ideology dovetails, not coincidentally, with the control-
junky, Catholic school hall monitor mentality of the city
fathers, who are trying to put new meaning into the old saying
that you can't fight City Hall.

    The only good thing about fascism is that it feels so good
when it goes away. It doesn't last forever, because a new
generation of people comes along and sweeps it into the trash can
of history. Countries that have experienced fascism, like Italy
and Spain, often see a great resurgence of enlightenment after
seeing what it is like to live under the iron heel. 

    For now, refuse to speak the Newspeak. Disobey the bastards
every chance you get. Jaywalking is no longer just a way of
getting across the street; it's a statement. One day, perhaps in
just a few years, we in New York will break open the champagne
and say "Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead!"