VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: What do Iranian and Saudi religious police, Australian censors, Chinese Internet firewalls, British surveillance cameras and American data mining and "Homeland Security" have in common? They reflect the emergence of a new Fascism.

The old Fascism of Mussolini and his followers Hitler and Franco was the product of the Great War and the Great Depression:  The results of the suicide of old Europe in the bloodbath of World War I and the destruction of so much national wealth in the trenches ... to deal with the challenge of national bankruptcies, massive economic and social disorder, business and social elites chose authoritarianism.

The economic and political consequences of the Iraq War have caused the collapse of the Pax Americana and the economic ruin of the Republic which stood in the center of this world order, in turn the successor to the European powers destroyed after 1945. 

The symptoms of this are all about us. Complicating the mess is the ecological devastation now becoming so apparent worldwide. Likewise the fact that we have reached peak oil production, and are sliding downhill on the Hubbert curve. If the various governments remain the property of monied elites some new world war is certain.

• These guys do not like to hear they cannot do just as they wish ... or that they cannot make the kind of money they feel they deserve.

For certain the cost of all this change is already costly and as time goes on will be more expensive yet.  For them the solution has hitherto always been war abroad, repression in the homeland.

Why should we expect differently here and now?

No place shows more sharply the problem than the struggle in Iran and no place shows better how people are learning to deal with it ... Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube and all the other mechanisms of the Internet are inflicting grievous damage on a state founded by Fascistic religious despots (financially corrupt too!) armed with secret police, brutal and thuggish auxiliaries, cruel prison torturers and all the other disgusting powers of the modern pervert-state.

Whatever happens, that theocratic state has lost all legitimacy.

Real governments, those unencumbered with an elitist agenda and a sycophantic and corrupt bureaucracy should now begin to see the Internet and all its tools not as some sort of adversary but as the most powerful ally of social justice and democracy that it really is ... and that suggestion is aimed exactly at our friends in Cuba, whose leaders have made mistakes for sure, but none more terrible than leaving the Internet there the property of an handful of reactionaries and Miami-based exiles.

• The millions of supporters of the Revolution have an honorable and proud story to tell the world and should be free to do so whenever they will.  But the vacuum created by their absence allows a few to pretend to speak for their nation.

But I digress ... the fact is that corrupt power has long understood how to buy the print and broadcast media ... the freedom and lack of censorship on the Internet is for corruption a fatal problem. For those wishing to<