The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) - Legal History: Fascism & Identity

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP...

This is a page from the NCIDP "A Brief History of Identity" collection. These pages are intended to provide a context for understanding the development of legal principles regarding identity information as it continues to bear upon modern legal governance of identity information. This is an extract of a history of this subject highlighting those aspects that enhance understanding of why the laws of today are such as they are, and how they came to be that way. These pages are intended to cast important perspective upon relevant law, but are not intended as a comprehensive sociological study of these subjects.

Throughout most of history, by custom and tradition, an ordinary individual's declared name was the extent of identity information used to describe a person. There were no Social Security Numbers, Drivers' Licenses, Passports, voter registries, deed polls, credit reports....

Any individual could [and can] adopt any identity they chose at will, and their word of it was [and is] the fact of it. (Jonson v. Greaves (KB, 1765); Christianson v. King County (S Ct., 1915); et al.). The idea that an individual might be stuck with a fixed identity at any time in life was never conceived of, and was [and is] abject violence. (Keeble v. Hickeringill (QB, 1707)). That it might be dictated to an individual at any time was unimaginable, and is unconstitutional in the U.S. (Entick v. Carrington and Three Other King's Messengers (KB, 1765); Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey (S Ct., 1992); Lawrence v. Texas (S Ct., 2003); et al.).

Time and again, history has shown that the slightest routinized solicitations of government to identify individuals is born of, or leads to, the selective oppression of individuals. The privacy right of anonymity is the first and most profound defense of personal safety and common liberty.

* Fascism *

Fascism is the industrialists' version of feudalism.

Under feudalism, serfs are controlled by the aristocracy's possession of, and control over, land and all that is upon that land and arises from it.

Under fascism, possession of, and control over, the identities of the common masses serves this same purpose and function.

Feudal lords had little concern for possessing and tracking the identities of their serfs. So long as the fields were harvested, the lords obtained 'their' crops, and returned the smallest allocation possible back to those serfs, the specific identities of those serfs were of no consequence, and indeed, their lesser status neared that of no longer being human – a line that many such feudal lords and kings throughout history crossed in their own minds and deeds.

Although, under feudalism, the concept of documenting the births of common (serf) male children arose, it was then a purely historical document, not a documentation of identity, intended to provide feudal lords with nothing more than a head count and household identification for male children – so that those male children could be sought for conscription, those household doors could be knocked upon, years later. [See more History of Birth Certificates & Identity].

Fascism, however, grows to depend upon its direct power and control over the individual identities of the common masses. Exercise of direct control over individual identities becomes the principle means of "controlling" the populations of fascist societies. Thus, under fascism, for example, the mandate of passports for crossing national borders in either direction, or other demands for "papers" of any kind for even travel within a nation, is implemented and eventually normalized.

The antithesis of fascism, indeed, the arch-nemesis of fascism, is a truly free and democratic society, and a thoroughly polygopolistic, encapsulated economy. This is a significant part of the necessity that fascism finds in possessing and controlling the identities of individuals – the ultimate method of controlling, limiting, freedom itself.

Fascism is, in large part, often ascribed to Benito Mussolini, who has also often been known as the father of fascism. But many of the general and founding principles at the core of fascism long predated Mussolini's life, and the roots of fascist ideals stretch back at least to the dawning of the industrial revolution. Mussolini, in fact, is reputed to have held great personal distaste for the direct marginalizations of eugenicist philosophies, and apparently did not himself recognize its utility, indeed necessity, to fascism. Two of Mussolini's students, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, however, both recognized this all too well.

Fascism's basic construct, it's ideal of subverting and replacing the aristocratic elite with the industrialist elite, was a significant contributing factor in the wave of revolutions, including the American Revolution, against aristocracies and colonialism. Time and again in industrializing societies, as the share of overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from rising industrial output began to eclipse the land-based (agricultural, natural resources), aristocratic share of overall GDP, aristocracies were destabilized and nation-states devolved into revolutions and wars. The American Revolution was an early example of this, but by the time of Mussolini and World War II, this shifting instability was still in progress – and WWII is recognized, in part, as a war against fascism, although fought largely blind to the actual underpinnings of fascist ideals. Consequently, the anti-fascist victor nations rapidly took on those same core fascist ideals under various monikers and rationalizations: in the U.S., for example, "McCarthyism", followed later by Mussolini's very own economic manuscript, relabeled "Trickle-Down Economics" [borrowed by Mussolini in large part by the even earlier "Horse-and-Barrel Economics"].

The structural composition of fascism is oligopolism: a very few huge business entities ruling the economy, thereby effectively governing the entire socioeconomic system, and, the fascists hope, blurring or even obliterating the divide between the oligops and government itself. Progression of that oligopolism toward monopolism marks the march of a fascist socioeconomic system toward a communist one, where the entire socioeconomic system is ruled monopolistically, and the divide between business and government has virtually or entirely ceased to exist. (We saw this point arise in the U.S., the point of crossing from fascism into communism, in the economic collapse at the end of the latter Bush Presidency, when the U.S. government bought big financial businesses that were failing; although the government sold them back into private hands, the brief step into communism was a desperate effort to preserve the fascist oligopoly that was collapsing).

This is an industrialized imitation of the feudal system. A very few aristocrats held title, both title to land and aristocratic title, the two terms being exactly one-and-the-same under feudalism, and thereby governed the entire socioeconomic system. The more narrowly title was held, the more tightly aggregated wealth/land was within an aristocratic realm, the more tyrannical it was.

Instead of land/title and feudal dependency forced upon serfs, fascists rely on narrowly holding and constraining individuals based upon identities, controlling where and when labor pools and intellectual resources can be, can go, or can do – creating "barriers to entry", and marginalizing large groups of individuals based upon identities, to prevent true competitions from arising and polygopolism from thriving. The efforts to industrialize agricultural production during the colonial period through the use of captive slavery was, for example, one early push toward fascism, away from reliance upon the control of land itself, upon which serfs otherwise free to move on were dependent, and toward direct forcible control over people, individuals, and more directly enforced servitude – on the basis of identity. Thus, where the right to earn a living is removed, and replaced with the privilege to work only by grant of permission (or, legal term, "license) of the king/aristocracy in the aristocratic system... well, it becomes more of the same, perhaps even more directly, in a fascist system.

Only the nature of the means of survival changes between a feudal system and a fascist system; decreasing reliance upon direct access to agricultural resources shifts toward increasing reliance upon monetary gain for indirect access to agricultural and other resources necessary to survival. So, instead of a grant of "license" (technical legal term for a grant of permission from the king) to raise a crop in a garden, and possibly a separate "license" to retain or consume any part of that crop, a fascist system withholds grants of license to work in a factory or business, or even independently provide any skilled labor or services, or even to conduct one's own personal affairs in any regard.

In both cases of this, whether aristocratic or fascist licensing systems, the burden is forced onto private individuals to prove themselves "worthy" of such licenses – totally and utterly the opposite of a system of freedom and liberty, where a person is "innocent until proven guilty", and thus inherently and universally deemed "worthy" of and for any and all things, and rights, until proven otherwise "before a court of law". A democratic system of liberty patently prohibits placing such powers of "license" into the hands of any executive branch authority, the king's authority, and ensures that only the judicial branch be empowered to adjudicate any individual's freedom, and only then in the face of a charge of some grave allegation of specific wrong of actual harm, and warranting prosecution by the executive before the judiciary.

This freedom, this protection of individual liberty and the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", this protection against requiring "permissions" of the executive and the transferring the burden of proof, of proving "worthiness", is one of the most critical front-line defenses against fascist oligopolistic tyranny, and is reviled universally by fascist ideologues. Indeed, a fascist system intends a far more extensive, intrusive, confining system of executive "permissions" than any feudal aristocracy ever conceived, and relentlessly seeks to eliminate the most essential concept of freedom and personal liberty known as "innocent until proven guilty", to transfer as much power over individuals to the executive branch, under any rationalization that can be conceived.

In order to execute this arrogation of freedom, fascists then depend upon the identifiability of individuals: those who continue to exercise their right to remain anonymous cannot be constrained as broadly and thoroughly as those who capitulate their freedom and identify themselves and their personal activities to the king/executive. And when fascists succeed in winning such capitulations from the majority of the population, then those who do exercise their right to remain anonymous begin to become more identifiable anyway by virtue of the process of elimination and the small size of the pool of anonymous individuals left. At such a point, freedom, personal liberty, the "right to be let alone," has effectively ceased to exist within such a society.

IMPORTANTLY, U.S. law still largely forbids most of these fascist principles, particularly in the fascist trade in individual identities, and most such practices that do exist in the U.S. do so only as a matter of law enforcement failures, failures of the U.S. justice system. [Specific examples can be found throughout the website of The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP)]. English Common Law, at the root of the legal system of many nations, is also hostile to fascism – and fascist ideologues constantly seek to obfuscate the weight of common law in those common law nations. And wherever fascism has progressed to a level of power to undermine such legal systems and law enforcement, to overtly subvert democratic principles, that nation has been at the brink of terrible pogroms, war, chaos, collapse.

Fascism, the principles of fascism, have worn many guises and rationalizations since the dawning of the industrial revolution. Most of us have been fooled, at least at one time or another, by some of those disguises and into some of those rationalizations. Whether we bought into the rhetoric of what a great idea it was for "mandatory" insurance for our cars or health, ordering a tax upon every little individual that directly subsidizes the big insurance industry behemoths; whether we bought into the idea that the free-market principle of "a good product for a fair price" should be replaced by the fascist ideal of "whatever price the market will bear"; whether we were tricked into the "benefits" of any multitude of "use tax" based taxation; or whether we just were fooled into any idea that the executive should possess any part of any person's identity apart from undertaking criminal proceedings against an individual; whatever ideal of fascism it was, a great many of us have been seduced and suckered into buying into the value of them. Most of us failed to recognize the progression toward deepening fascism that we were witnessing, and even participating in.

The current trendy guise for fascism: "socialism".

"Socialist" fascism, for example, most recently brought a "universal" health care system to the U.S. that is identity based, rather than anonymous and private. This becomes just another excuse for government and big business to get into the intimate, private business of individuals. Indeed, getting into people's health information is about as intimate as getting into their bedrooms, if not moreso.

Thus, instead of a survivor of domestic violence being able to easily go to any hospital anonymously without difficulty, those individuals will continue to experience invasive, life-threatening demands for personally identifiable information. These measures, these demands for identifiability and "papers" of various kinds, loosely derived from the early, but optional and very limited historical use of passports, have marked the rise of fascism and tyranny, from the most tyrannical regimes of late 19^th Century and early 20^th Century Europe leading into World War I and World War II, to post-war Stalinism and every other oppressive regime since. It is a hallmark of tyranny.

A free nation, a nation of a free people, must do its duty for its people, ensure its population is as vibrant and healthy and safe in their existences as possible. But, if it is going to implement, FOR its people, anything like universal health care, or any other "universal" services, it must do so with an identity-blind model and method, and without turning it into an individuated "use tax" based system, for that people to remain free.

Fascism, unfortunately, cannot stand before this, before such things, and fascism clashes mightily with such efforts, and can be the sabotage of it, if a free people are not vigilant about fascism. But, fascism is the most under-recognized, under-discussed sociopolitical, socioeconomic model and set of ideals operating in our modern, industrialized world today. This blindness only serves to further obfuscate fascist principles as they insinuate themselves into a society. As a result, many nations and their peoples today are under the thumbs of fascist ideologies. Perhaps the Nazi-Stalinists, and their heirs, have already won the war against the freedoms of those peoples.