Return of the ‘F’ word: Fascism and remembrance

History is teaching us that a return to liberal democratic normality marinated in neoliberalism has passed its best-before date

Robert Hackett / December 2, 2024 / CANADIAN DIMENSION

Portrait of Donald Trump. Illustration by Luca Federici/Flickr.

Every November 11th, when Canada honours its veterans and war dead, I think of my late parents. Dad served in the British Army’s Royal Engineers; Mum kept calm and carried on while London was blitzed. Their generation sacrificed enormously to defeat the aggressive fascist regimes of Germany, Italy and Japan.

But World War II wasn’t just between countries—it was a global struggle for democracy’s very survival.

This year’s commemoration was especially poignant. My partner and I joined a group of friends to watch a somber, poetic Chilean film, Nostalgia for the Light. Women, forlorn but determined, sifting through the sands of the Atacama desert for the bodies of their loved ones, decades after they were “disappeared” following General Augusto Pinochet’s violent 1973 coup against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government. At least 3,000 Chileans were murdered, and tens of thousands more tortured, imprisoned, or exiled.

It didn’t help our mood that the week before Remembrance Day, voters in the United States, supposedly the heartland of the “free world,” re-elected Donald Trump. Even mainstream media, generals and senior politicians had started describing Trump as a “fascist,” alongside the milder label “populist.” The phenomenon that I once studied in graduate school as an ugly blip of history now seems to be hammering on the door of the present.

Is that really the case? Given what is at stake—fascism’s apparent revival around the world, and its threat to liberal democracy—it’s important to understand what it is, and make our own judgement.

From old war films, we might imagine fascism as goose-stepping brutes with inhumanly crisp uniforms. But it’s more complicated than that.

Fascist regimes are dictatorships, but not all dictatorships are fascist. With its bias for emotion over rational thought—think with your blood, not your brain—fascism resists clear definition. It’s like nailing jelly to a wall, wrote historian Ian Kershaw. Undaunted, Robert Paxton, in Anatomy of Fascism, suggests these aspects: obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood. Cults of unity, energy, and purity to compensate for that perceived decline. A mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites. Abandonment of democratic liberties. The use of redemptive and unrestrained violence, with the goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Author and professor Timothy Snyder adds a cult of “the leader.” And don’t overlook a commitment to hierarchy rather than equality, the demonization of racialized and gender minorities, the institutionalized subordination of women, and collusion with big business. Fascists claim to speak for ordinary people against corrupt elites. But companies like Krupp and I.G. Farben fattened themselves in the Nazi regime, which suppressed independent trade unions and workers’ rights, used slave labour, and invested massively in armaments and the machinery of genocide. Despite its rhetoric, fascism is compatible with concentrated corporate power and its intertwining with the state. It seems to find particular favour with segments of the capitalist class that thrive on chaos and disruption—disaster capitalism, in Naomi Klein’s phrase—rather than an established relationship with the administrative state and its industry-friendly regulatory agencies. In that light, Trump’s political romance with high-tech oligarch Elon Musk is revealing.

Historically, what were the consequences of 1930s fascism?

On the foreign policy front, there was reduced co-operation between countries, escalating military tensions, and ultimately genocidal war—not exactly useful precedents for dealing with global crises like poverty and climate disruption.

In fascist regimes’ domestic policies, we saw more spending on prestige projects and the military, less on services and welfare for the public as a whole, as well as the abolition of opposition parties, independent media and the judiciary. The result was less liberty, and more social inequality and repression.

Of course, the contemporary historical context is different from the 1930s. Globalization and neoliberalism—the practices and philosophy of privatization and “free” markets as society’s overriding principles—have increased transnational interdependence, under the dominance of capital. It might seem that neoliberalism’s glorification of individual economic freedom, and fascism’s dependence on coercive state power, are polar opposites. Certainly that’s how neoliberal thinkers, like Friedrich Hayek and economist Milton Friedman, saw it: individualism versus collectivism. Free enterprise versus the jackboot pressed on the human face, in George Orwell’s memorable metaphor.

To the contrary, argue George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison in Invisible Doctrine. Dismantling the social safety net and public services, eroding real democratic choice, allowing the rich to grab what they can, and promoting aggressive self-interest rather than a sense of community, neoliberalism creates social conditions that encourage people to turn to fascistic strongmen.

Moreover, neoliberalism and today’s fascism have enemies in common: socialism, the social welfare state, strong progressive labour unions, collective Indigenous rights, environmental regulation. Despite their libertarian rhetoric, neoliberals need a strong state to repress resistance to their policies of “austerity” and increasing inequality. And despite their cynical appeal to working class sensibilities—whether it’s the Nazis’ use of “socialism” in their party’s name, or a video of Trump shovelling out McDonald’s French fries—fascist regimes readily reach accommodations with big capital. Especially after they have transformed from a mass-based movement into governments controlling the machinery of the state.

At the big picture system level, perhaps neoliberalism and fascism have in common the political function of keeping the wheels of capitalism churning in the face of crises of legitimacy, economy and ecology. Indian political economist Prabhat Patniak suggests that “the neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis. To escape this state of affairs, world public opinion has to be mobilized decisively against neoliberalism… Only then will this breeding ground for neofascism at last be undone.”

Writing while in Mussolini’s prisons, Antonio Gramsci called fascism a “morbid symptom” that appears when the old order is dying but the new is not yet ready to be born.

The Chilean military dictatorship combined fascistic and neoliberal elements. It was not fascist as such; it lacked a mass base or a leadership cult. But like classical fascism, the junta used nationalist rhetoric, military spectacle, and brutal repression, and it enjoyed the support of openly fascist political organizations. It also brought in free market economists—the “Chicago Boys”—to impose radical neoliberal economic policies, several years before Thatcher and Reagan followed suit in Britain and the US.

Public confusion is not surprising. Political literacy is generally not high in Canadian school curricula. Right-wing politicians like Pierre Poilievre absurdly try to equate fascism and socialism, ignoring the former’s functional relationship with capitalism. Neofascists who do not identify as such often call their opponents “Nazis” or “fascists.” They shout about liberty and free speech. But they weaponize these concepts to intimidate their opponents, and to paralyze or undermine institutions—from town councils to courts and parliaments—that at their best support individual rights, society’s diversity, and shared wellbeing.

To be sure, Western democracies have themselves used Nazi-like tactics against colonized people in Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine and elsewhere, including active US support for Pinochet’s coup. History is teaching us that a return to liberal democratic normality marinated in neoliberalism has passed its best-before date. “There has to be a decisive shift toward a robust welfare state with revived public social services, public goods, and high employment,” argues Patniak, “precisely the policies that the hegemony of global finance has thwarted.” Monbiot and Hutchison call for participatory and deliberative democracy, embedded in a new and hopeful political narrative. In their recent election, the French provided a live example of a broad anti-fascist coalition, the New Popular Front, to stave off the threat, for now.

To honour the sacrifices of the World War II generation, and the innocent victims of war, including the mothers of the Atacama, we need to educate ourselves about fascism—what it is, and how to defeat it.

Parts of this article were published in the Powell River Peak, November 4, 2024.

Robert Hackett is a retired professor of communication at Simon Fraser University and co-author of Journalism and Climate Crisis.