CHAPTER ONE
Some Issues in the Intellectual History of Fascism
FOR ABOUT three-quarters of a century, almost all academic discussion
concerning Mussolini’s Fascism 1 has tended to imagine the movement it
animated, and the regime it informed, as entirely lacking a reasoned rationale. It early became commonplace to attribute to Fascism a unique irrationality, accompanied by a ready recourse to violence. Fascism, it has
been argued, was full of emotion, but entirely empty of cognitive content.
Fascists were, and are, understood to have renounced all rational discourse, in order to “glorify the non-rational.” Their ideology, movement,
revolution, and behavior were made distinctive by the appeal to two, and
only two, “absolutes”: “violence and war.”2
Before the advent of the Second World War, some analysts had gone so
far as to insist that “fascism” was the product of “orgasm anxiety,” a sexual dysfunction that found release only in “mystic intoxication,” homicidal
hostility, and the complete suppression of rational thought.3 Marxists and
fellow travelers argued that since Fascism was “the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest
the growing contradictions of its whole development,” it could not support
itself with a sustained rationale. Its conceptions were “empty and hollow,”
finding expression in “deceitful terminology” consciously designed to conceal the “realities of class-rule and class-exploitation.”4
For many, “Fascism [was] essentially a political weapon adopted by the
ruling class . . . that takes root in the minds of millions . . . [appealing] to
certain uncritical and infantile impulses which, in a people debarred from
a rational, healthy existence . . . tend to dominate their mental lives.”
Fascism, in general, constituted a “flight from reason,” advancing “the
claims of mysticism and intuition in opposition . . . to reason . . . and
glorifying the irrational.”5
While there were some serious treatments of Fascist thought that made
their appearance between the two world wars,6 all objectivity dissolved
in the alembic of the Second. By the time of the Second World War, Fascism had simply merged into Hitler’s National Socialism—and discussants spoke of “nazi-fascism” as though the two were indissolubly one.7
Generic fascism was the enemy of “Western ideals,” of the “Enlightenment tradition,” as well as of the sociopolitical and philosophical aspirations of the French Revolution. It was the unregenerate agent of evil,
driven by an irrational mysticism, and committed to mayhem and gross
inhumanity. By the end of the 1990s, there were those who could insist
that “fascism shuffles together every myth and lie that the rotten history
of capitalism has ever produced like a pack of greasy cards and then deals
them out.” As with Angelo Tasca, such a notion is advanced in support
of a contention that the only use Fascism, like Mussolini, had “of ideas
was to dispense with ideas.”8
FOOTNOTES
1 When the term “fascism” is employed in lowercase, it refers to a presumptive, inclusive,
generic fascism. When the term is capitalized, it refers to the movement, revolution, and
regime associated with Benito Mussolini.
2 Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. x,
13, 14, 17.
3 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933; reprint, New York: Orgone
Institute, 1946), pp. 110–11.
4 R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (1934; reprint, San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1974), pp. 198–99.
5 R. Osborn, The Psychology of Reaction (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), pp. 5,
238, 239. 6 The best of these included that of Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1928).
7 See, for example, Eduardo Haro Tecglen, Fascismo: Genesis y desarrollo (Madrid: CVS
Ediciones, 1975).
8 Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 27–28.
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Saturday, December 21, 2019
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Fascism Was a Violent Counterrevolution
A century since the March on Rome, it is important to remember the horrors of Benito Mussolini’s regime. Fascism was morally repugnant — but also a movement based on violent counterrevolution.
Benito Mussolini reviews blackshirt militia in Rome in 1936.
The Absent Oppressed
Scurati has in numerous interviews maintained that “the novel generates a precise and firm historical, moral and civil judgement condemning fascism. And it does so precisely because it does not start from an ideological prejudice.” The whole question this poses is the definition of anti-fascism that results from the novelist’s “third-party” but not “neutral” exposition. What does Scurati want to tell us about anti-fascism in the past and, perhaps more importantly for him, about its adaptation to new times?
The question brings us back to the political role of the “historical” novel. In the mid-1930s, György Lukács devoted some illuminating pages to the anti-fascist novel, a literature that, he said, marked the “break between the writer and the life of the people.” He wrote that “It is above all prejudice that lives in the people, in the masses, the principle of irrationality, of what is purely instinctive, against reason. With such a conception of the people, humanism destroys its best anti-fascist weapons.” The Hungarian philosopher then called for the “unmasking of fascism’s hostility” toward the oppressed in order to “protect the creative forces of the people” because “the great ideas and actions that humanity has produced so far originated in popular life.”
After reading M.’s three volumes, there are no doubts as to its moral condemnation of fascism — despite the limitations and neglected elements highlighted above. But for Scurati, the anti-fascist battle is essentially a struggle between reason and brutal and barbaric irrationality: “Today we are at a crossroads: we must choose between culture, democracy and progress, or throw ourselves into the arms of despotism, blindness and obedience.”
By reducing the anti-fascist battle, this struggle for eternity (as Carlo Rosselli called it), to a struggle between progress and reaction, between democracy (but which one?) and despotism, Scurati leaves no concrete space for the creative force of the oppressed. Clearly, anti-plebeian class prejudices color Scurati’s fresco: the landless peasants are described as “idiotic grey oxen”; the “crowd” is seen as “docile, primitive”; the people seem to be guided by their instincts, their stomachs, their “humors,” of which Mussolini is said to have a “formidable intelligence”; a people at best absent, at worst consenting out of laziness. “Yes, the majority of Italians,” Scurati writes, to account for the atmosphere following the assassination of socialist leader Matteotti, “horrified by the crime, would like the fall of the regime to reclaim their ghost-infested homes. But, then, around dinnertime, the demands of life prevail. Morality is not one of them. The country is opaque, its sense of justice is sluggish, blurred.”
In this fresco, the anti-fascists from below appear almost exclusively in their role as victims, killed, beaten, humiliated, like the “two poor people” condemned for insulting the Duce, who are presented as “meek and harmless animals.” The antifascist émigré circles in Nice in which Gino Lucetti — who tried to kill Mussolini — developed are presented as: “a court of miracles of poor emigrants, communists, anarchists, revolutionaries, outcasts, the beaten, the expelled, men who cheated hunger in front of the tables of lowly taverns, among inverts, thieves and whores, in a laudable and, at the same time, sublime mixture of drunkenness, vain hopes of redemption, desperate idealisms and chronic, ferocious, destitution.”
Even more significant in this regard is the fact that anti-fascism disappears in the third volume, with Scurati deciding to leave aside the most important moment of the anti-fascist struggle abroad. The 1930s proved to be a decisive test for antifascism. Ten years of the “academy of exile” in Paris had made only one alternative possible: death or “redemption.” Scurati deals with the end of the parable, the republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War, summed up as an “internecine war between republicans and Francoists.” Again, the anti-fascists are those immediately executed on Mussolini’s orders but not those who fought with weapons in hand, “today in Spain and tomorrow in Italy”; those who called for a preemptive war and an anti-fascist revolution; those who needed Spain more than Spain needed them, as Emilio Lussu wrote.How can one understand fascism without considering its profoundly counterrevolutionary dimension?
Everything is as if the oppressed could not play any active role in the fight against a movement and a regime built precisely in opposition to their struggles. Scurati ignores the oppressed, perhaps as a function of this double fear: the people who are afraid, but also the fears spurred by this “formless, stupid and apathetic mass.” Yet how is it possible to contemplate the anti-fascist struggle while ignoring the subaltern, and vice versa, how can one understand fascism without considering its profoundly counterrevolutionary dimension? Because fascism did indeed wage war against the subaltern.
Under Scurati’s pen, the emancipatory struggles of the biennio rosso (the “two Red Years” of strikes and occupations in 1919 and 1920) appear as “revolutionary delusions” that ruined Italy through a “fury of strikes,” suggesting that the “revolutionary” outrages of the labor movement somehow set off the powder keg. Scurati has Mussolini say that “[Communists] did not start this civil war but they will finish it. It is a question of making violence ever more intelligent, of inventing surgical violence.”
Hope guided the steps of those who took part in the strike waves in the immediate interwar period, demanding not only wage increases, shorter working hours, and an end to food shortages, but also to change the fate of the world, to break the chains. Everything seemed possible when in Russia, the first socialist revolution finally seemed to open new vistas. Scurati does not speak of this enthusiasm but dwells at length on the “millions of Italians [who] had stopped hoping for change and began to feel threatened by it. The chanting of the squares choked into a chorus. A shout that no longer begged the future to finally redeem the present, but implored it to remain uncreated. Not a prayer but an exorcism.”
At times Scurati even equates (pre)revolutionary violence and counterrevolution; his ahistorical and abstractly ethical critique of violence allows him to confuse the opposing camps: “Demonstrations, devastation, fires are everywhere. On all sides. The escalation culminated on a tram in Rome where, on September 12, policeman Giovanni Corvi murdered fascist trade unionist Armando Casalini with three revolver shots while the child’s eyes were still open.” Leading Communist Nicola Bombacci serves this purpose perfectly. The man the author describes as “the man from Moscow,” Lenin’s “Italian confidant” (it is unclear on what basis), who was later to become one of Mussolini’s ardent supporters, serves as a link between the two violent sides of the same “European civil war” — about which, however, Scurati says nothing.
For counterrevolution was not only organized in Italy but everywhere after the Russian October Revolution. Anti-communism not only targeted the newborn Soviet state, on which all manner of fantasies were focused, but was also expressed in hostility toward the dominated and an elitist conception of democracy, the result of what Peter Gay would call the culture of hatred. The European democracies that emerged from World War I supported reactionary solutions to deal with a communism, which was seen as the much greater danger.The author’s ahistorical and abstractly ethical critique of violence allows him to confuse the opposing camps.
As for the anti-fascist parties, in M. all that can be discerned is the “blindness” of their leaders: “The factional hatreds, the slavery to formulas, the ideological blindness, the language that turns time and again to formal issues, to pure logic, the eternal wheel of personal rivalries, the deafness to the din of the world, to the promises of the dawn.” The twenty-first century Scurati forgets to portray anti-fascism from the inside, day by day, as a concrete movement anchored in its time, with its mistakes but also its strengths. This severely hems in the complexity of the situation, even at a particularly intense phase of the political struggle.
Certainly, the anti-fascist opposition proved incapable of adapting its struggle to the new political configuration. This was an inadequacy linked at worst to a radical misunderstanding, and at best to a narrow conception of fascism as a phenomenon. Italian socialism undoubtedly proved disastrously inadequate faced with the post–World War I situation in Italy. But dismissing the foundation of the Communist Party in 1921 — the result of serious reflection, careful elaboration and intense political and social action — as a “demented split” or reducing the history of the Italian workers’ movement on the eve of Mussolini’s rise to “factional hatreds” hardly allows one to go beyond value judgements, of little use for a refoundation or consolidation of anti-fascism.
The blindness denounced by Scurati does not help us understand what should have been done, or rather, what should be done (the famous unveiling of the present) in such a situation. Unless we consider that only the sacrifice of a few individual heroes (Matteotti is the only totally positive figure in history) can redeem all Italy.
Under Scurati’s pen, the subalterns turn from bearers of emancipation into willing “victims” or sacrificial heroes. From this perspective, despite its declared objective, M. cannot be a basis for refounding anti-fascism. Its “victimizing” reading of the opposition of those times cannot serve the collective remembrance and redemption of the victims of past struggles. By ignoring the properly revolutionary dimension of antifascism (and the counterrevolutionary dimension of fascism), M. cannot fulfil the revolutionary critique of the present, which is the only one capable of confronting the new fascism. M. strives to chase after the world that was, without understanding the world that really is.
Stefanie Prezioso is associate professor at Lausanne University and author of numerous works on European anti-fascism.
A century since the March on Rome, it is important to remember the horrors of Benito Mussolini’s regime. Fascism was morally repugnant — but also a movement based on violent counterrevolution.
Benito Mussolini reviews blackshirt militia in Rome in 1936.
(Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
BY STEFANIE PREZIOSO
10.29.2022
Jacobin
A century since the March on Rome, the “return” of Italy’s fascist past has never seemed closer. This month, the Senate elected as its new president Ignazio La Russa, cofounder of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, just weeks after he declared that “we are all heirs of the Duce.”
In such a context, bringing out a novel about Benito Mussolini — as Antonio Scurati has with his M. trilogy — is a huge responsibility. More than any historical writing, Scurati’s work has become a bestseller, translated into several languages. The responsibility is even greater because Scurati seeks to “bring fascism down to earth, giving real knowledge of it as only literature knows how, when it delves into the details of material life.” M. is thus a “documentary novel”; it deliberately plays on the blurred boundary between history and fiction, on the “intertwining” of the two genres in an era which, Scurati tells us, invites “cooperation between the rigor of historical scholarship and the art of fictional storytelling.”
Does historical writing not imitate fiction, when it fills in the blanks with intelligent narrative, with imagination, with sympathy? Does grasping the past “as it really was” not demand the historian’s ability to immerse himself in other worlds, to make them his own and pass them on to others? Professional historians often prove incapable of speaking to a wider audience, and clumsy when trying to use literary art, which is even more needed with biography or collective biography. From this point of view, Scurati’s three M. books are a masterpiece.
Scurati constructs a cutting, gripping narrative drawing on firsthand sources. He is not afraid to confront the enduring myth of Italiani brava gente (Italians, the good people) — a myth which diminishes Italians’ responsibility for war crimes in World War II. Particularly noteworthy is his description of fascism’s genocidal policy in Libya, to which the second volume dedicates many pages and which still remains an overlooked part of Italian history.
Scurati wanted to “give voice to the thoughts of those who, through their actions, contributed to writing that history.” To do this, he claims that it was necessary to operate without “ideological prejudices.” This is a significant statement in a country where, for decades, historiographical revisionism has found its strength precisely in the claim to produce a “de-ideologized” and “serene” history “without prejudices,” far removed from the “great political passions” of the short twentieth century. Scurati is no exception: he claims that the “anti-fascist prejudice” blocks the ability to analyze fascism, producing a “form of blindness.”
This implies that we ought to overlook the hundreds of studies produced in the heat of the anti-fascist struggle — still today essential to approaching the phenomenon — such as Angelo Tasca’s Rise of Italian Fascism, published on the eve of World War II, from which Scurati nevertheless draws extensively. This is all the more surprising in that the author of M., who describes himself as “democratic, libertarian and progressive,” sees his novel as his “greatest contribution to the re-foundation of anti-fascism,” an anti-fascism that can stand up to new times.
Culturally Produced Ignorance
Awritten work is, like everything else, part of the era in which it was born, the sociohistorical context in which it developed and left its mark. What interest would a work of art have in being stripped out of the world in which it was conceived? Did the French historian Marc Bloch, shot by the Nazis in 1944, not argue that it is impossible to understand the past without looking at the present? The release of Scurati’s work coincides with the centenary of fascism’s arrival in power — a past that seems not to want to pass, in a country where the memory of Mussolini still looms like a threatening shadow, a “ghost.”
The novel also comes out at a time when the return of fascism is on everyone’s lips. The publication of the first volume had coincided with Lega leader Matteo Salvini’s rise to high office (at the time he was Interior Minister), with aggressive policies and open links with neofascist groups, alarming national and international public opinion. The third and last volume — M. Gli ultimi giorni dell’Europa — came out a few days before the election victory, this September 25, of Giorgia’Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia; a party in whose arteries fascism still circulates and whose logo proudly displays the tricolore flame, representing the still-living spirit of fascism. The noxious atmosphere in which the book appeared was evidenced by the intimidating September 25 article by Alessandro Sallusti, editor of the newspaper Libero, entitled “the prince of the haters,” in reference to the author.
In this context, talking about the “return of fascism” in Italy may seem absurd, as the historian Emilio Gentile said, since fascism never seems to have disappeared. Among other things, Scurati openly takes on the role of revealing the present by evoking certain “surprising and chilling analogies with the modern-day.”
The past as illuminated by the present is part of any literary-creative process of a historical nature — one attentive, as G. W. F. Hegel wrote, to “historical truth” and at the same time “to the customs and intellectual culture of its time.” Scurati insists that “no person, event, speech or sentence narrated in the book is arbitrarily invented,” paying special attention to sources, in the manner of a historian. This is only strengthened by the impression of realism that comes from the inclusion of extracts from archival documents at the end of each chapter. Yet their often-truncated exposition cannot go beyond an illusion of the materiality of the past.
Scurati’s novel, he says, “complements, perhaps, the analytical work of historical research with the synthetic force of narrative” and does not attempt to replace it. From this point of view, M. plays the role of a narrative synthesis of the analyses produced by historians. However — and this will be even more the case when the film based on his novel is released — what Scurati calls the fictual (a mixture of fictional and factual) elaborates a new form of historical thought that breaks away from scholarly history, largely unknown to most people. This new historical thought is called upon to replace it.This is a country where it is still possible to hear that ‘Mussolini did good things, too’; a country where ignorance of the past is commonplace.
It is difficult to ignore the cultural, social, and political environment in which this work emerged. This is a country where it is still possible to hear that “Mussolini did good things, too”; a country where ignorance of the past is commonplace, either because its population is not aware of it or because it does not want to know. An ignorance in the strongest sense, tinged with indifference, has been culturally produced since World War II through the mainstream press and especially television, an extraordinary vehicle of identity and memory. Italy is a country in which, over the last thirty years of the cultural hegemony of the plural right, anti-fascism has been portrayed as sinister, due to its supposedly anti-democratic character and the alleged cruelty of communist violence.
This is not at all a matter of pointing out all the novel’s errors from the impregnable ivory tower of “professional” historians, and reserving the production of historical knowledge to the latter. It is, rather, a matter of questioning M.’s interpretation in the present, of interrogating the relationship between the forms of narrative production that his author favors and the self-consciousness of Italian society. “The future of the past” is at stake, not only its present.
BY STEFANIE PREZIOSO
10.29.2022
Jacobin
A century since the March on Rome, the “return” of Italy’s fascist past has never seemed closer. This month, the Senate elected as its new president Ignazio La Russa, cofounder of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, just weeks after he declared that “we are all heirs of the Duce.”
In such a context, bringing out a novel about Benito Mussolini — as Antonio Scurati has with his M. trilogy — is a huge responsibility. More than any historical writing, Scurati’s work has become a bestseller, translated into several languages. The responsibility is even greater because Scurati seeks to “bring fascism down to earth, giving real knowledge of it as only literature knows how, when it delves into the details of material life.” M. is thus a “documentary novel”; it deliberately plays on the blurred boundary between history and fiction, on the “intertwining” of the two genres in an era which, Scurati tells us, invites “cooperation between the rigor of historical scholarship and the art of fictional storytelling.”
Does historical writing not imitate fiction, when it fills in the blanks with intelligent narrative, with imagination, with sympathy? Does grasping the past “as it really was” not demand the historian’s ability to immerse himself in other worlds, to make them his own and pass them on to others? Professional historians often prove incapable of speaking to a wider audience, and clumsy when trying to use literary art, which is even more needed with biography or collective biography. From this point of view, Scurati’s three M. books are a masterpiece.
Scurati constructs a cutting, gripping narrative drawing on firsthand sources. He is not afraid to confront the enduring myth of Italiani brava gente (Italians, the good people) — a myth which diminishes Italians’ responsibility for war crimes in World War II. Particularly noteworthy is his description of fascism’s genocidal policy in Libya, to which the second volume dedicates many pages and which still remains an overlooked part of Italian history.
Scurati wanted to “give voice to the thoughts of those who, through their actions, contributed to writing that history.” To do this, he claims that it was necessary to operate without “ideological prejudices.” This is a significant statement in a country where, for decades, historiographical revisionism has found its strength precisely in the claim to produce a “de-ideologized” and “serene” history “without prejudices,” far removed from the “great political passions” of the short twentieth century. Scurati is no exception: he claims that the “anti-fascist prejudice” blocks the ability to analyze fascism, producing a “form of blindness.”
This implies that we ought to overlook the hundreds of studies produced in the heat of the anti-fascist struggle — still today essential to approaching the phenomenon — such as Angelo Tasca’s Rise of Italian Fascism, published on the eve of World War II, from which Scurati nevertheless draws extensively. This is all the more surprising in that the author of M., who describes himself as “democratic, libertarian and progressive,” sees his novel as his “greatest contribution to the re-foundation of anti-fascism,” an anti-fascism that can stand up to new times.
Culturally Produced Ignorance
Awritten work is, like everything else, part of the era in which it was born, the sociohistorical context in which it developed and left its mark. What interest would a work of art have in being stripped out of the world in which it was conceived? Did the French historian Marc Bloch, shot by the Nazis in 1944, not argue that it is impossible to understand the past without looking at the present? The release of Scurati’s work coincides with the centenary of fascism’s arrival in power — a past that seems not to want to pass, in a country where the memory of Mussolini still looms like a threatening shadow, a “ghost.”
The novel also comes out at a time when the return of fascism is on everyone’s lips. The publication of the first volume had coincided with Lega leader Matteo Salvini’s rise to high office (at the time he was Interior Minister), with aggressive policies and open links with neofascist groups, alarming national and international public opinion. The third and last volume — M. Gli ultimi giorni dell’Europa — came out a few days before the election victory, this September 25, of Giorgia’Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia; a party in whose arteries fascism still circulates and whose logo proudly displays the tricolore flame, representing the still-living spirit of fascism. The noxious atmosphere in which the book appeared was evidenced by the intimidating September 25 article by Alessandro Sallusti, editor of the newspaper Libero, entitled “the prince of the haters,” in reference to the author.
In this context, talking about the “return of fascism” in Italy may seem absurd, as the historian Emilio Gentile said, since fascism never seems to have disappeared. Among other things, Scurati openly takes on the role of revealing the present by evoking certain “surprising and chilling analogies with the modern-day.”
The past as illuminated by the present is part of any literary-creative process of a historical nature — one attentive, as G. W. F. Hegel wrote, to “historical truth” and at the same time “to the customs and intellectual culture of its time.” Scurati insists that “no person, event, speech or sentence narrated in the book is arbitrarily invented,” paying special attention to sources, in the manner of a historian. This is only strengthened by the impression of realism that comes from the inclusion of extracts from archival documents at the end of each chapter. Yet their often-truncated exposition cannot go beyond an illusion of the materiality of the past.
Scurati’s novel, he says, “complements, perhaps, the analytical work of historical research with the synthetic force of narrative” and does not attempt to replace it. From this point of view, M. plays the role of a narrative synthesis of the analyses produced by historians. However — and this will be even more the case when the film based on his novel is released — what Scurati calls the fictual (a mixture of fictional and factual) elaborates a new form of historical thought that breaks away from scholarly history, largely unknown to most people. This new historical thought is called upon to replace it.This is a country where it is still possible to hear that ‘Mussolini did good things, too’; a country where ignorance of the past is commonplace.
It is difficult to ignore the cultural, social, and political environment in which this work emerged. This is a country where it is still possible to hear that “Mussolini did good things, too”; a country where ignorance of the past is commonplace, either because its population is not aware of it or because it does not want to know. An ignorance in the strongest sense, tinged with indifference, has been culturally produced since World War II through the mainstream press and especially television, an extraordinary vehicle of identity and memory. Italy is a country in which, over the last thirty years of the cultural hegemony of the plural right, anti-fascism has been portrayed as sinister, due to its supposedly anti-democratic character and the alleged cruelty of communist violence.
This is not at all a matter of pointing out all the novel’s errors from the impregnable ivory tower of “professional” historians, and reserving the production of historical knowledge to the latter. It is, rather, a matter of questioning M.’s interpretation in the present, of interrogating the relationship between the forms of narrative production that his author favors and the self-consciousness of Italian society. “The future of the past” is at stake, not only its present.
Fascism “From the Inside”
In the first volume, entitled M. Son of the Century, Antonio Scurati decides to relate the rise of fascism from Mussolini’s own perspective. This narrative choice has raised many questions and criticisms — some of them unjustified — of “closeness” to his “character” or of a latent “rehabilitation” of Mussolini. Scurati’s aim, by adopting the fascist leader’s viewpoint, is to tell this story from the inside. In doing so, Scurati draws on the historians Renzo de Felice, George L. Mosse, Zeev Sternhell, and Emilio Gentile, who defended the need for an analysis of fascism “from the inside,” taking its language and myths seriously.
Scurati argues that the fact that he belongs to a generation “born just after the end of all this and just before the beginning of all the rest” allows him to “re-appropriate the explosive twentieth-century narrative material, on the basis of [his own] non-belonging to it.” Born in 1969, he would thus be one incarnation of what he calls the “literature of inexperience,” as represented in this “post-historical novel.” The author would thus finally be freed from any ideological dogmatism with respect to the generation that preceded him, free to find the truth or at least to elaborate a truth: “The equidistance (certainly not the equivalence) of the post-historical author,” he writes, “with respect to the point of view of victims and executioners, therefore his free choice in narrative focus, directly descends from the transcendental of inexperience.”
Scurati’s approach to the literature of inexperience seems characteristic of what Eric Hobsbawm had called “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations,” effectively freeing the younger generation from the categorical imperative of remembering the vanquished, i.e. taking their defeats on board in order to transform them into a “revolutionary” force in the present. The admittedly important distinction that the author makes between “equidistance” and “equivalence” cannot, however, alone resolve the question of his relationship with his characters, the reader to whom he addresses himself, and what his text “postulates” to them.
The reader of M., exposed without mediation to Mussolini’s tale in volume one, is led to experience fascism’s rise from within the belly of the beast. The undeniable strength of Scurati’s writing lies in the description “from below” of the years following World War I; a particularly intense period that must be analyzed hour by hour, region by region, city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood in the attempt to “get to grips with” fascism through its “developments.” The narrative is undoubtedly effective. Using the aesthetics of “horror,” Scurati elicits repentance, not responsibility. He succeeds in captivating a wide readership by immersing them in the everyday life of fascism. However, the narrative of fascism’s rise to power leaves little room for the perspective needed to understand a complex and vivid phenomenon in the collective memory of Italy, Europe, and the world.What is fascism? The answer, according to Scurati, is to be found in its moral and psychological character.
Its everyday developments, seen through the necessarily myopic prism of a “fascination with catastrophe,” attach the definition of fascism to the contingent and ephemeral plane of circumstance and to the reciprocal effects of violence and fear. What is fascism? The answer, according to Scurati, is to be found in its moral and psychological character, which cannot be separated from the “moods” of the slums. Fascists are constantly attached to their plebeian social origins — Roberto Farinacci, “son of the railwayman,” and Mussolini, “son of the blacksmith,” stubbornly repeated, as if these indications were the best way to grasp the phenomenon. The plebeian nature of the “fascists” reinforces the idea of a “revolutionary” fascism: “the revolution will not be made by the communists, it will be made by the owners of two rooms and a kitchen in a suburban apartment block.” A point of view from the inside that is never questioned in Scurati’s three volumes.
From a Crocean perspective, fascism is also seen as a degenerative moral disease. The second volume, which opens with a Mussolini bent in two by the pain of blood and shit, is the most typical example. The image of the virus appears many times, a virus that “infects thousands of postal employees ready to set fire to the labor halls.” The terror that this people armed with sticks inspires is therefore not only related to the violence it produces, but to what it represents in terms of physical and psychic pathology located in the depths of society, in its underbelly, in its basest instincts.
The fear of the “crowd” that “instinctively advances” is coupled with the image of a Benito Mussolini presented as a “superman generated from the belly of the people and not from a privileged caste.” A Mussolini who “despises and fears his own squadrists [an attitude] which is largely reciprocated.” A Mussolini who portrays his troops as “enriched beggars, stormtroopers turned officials” and Italians as “cowards and weaklings.” A Mussolini who hesitates to turn back (“but by now the circle of hatred is tightening on all sides. Perhaps, if he could, he would turn back. But it is too late.” A Mussolini who “is protected from the demeaning spectacle of human misery by a strange kind of hypermetropia: he does not see his peer, his neighbor, the little people, or, if he does see them, they appear blurred, indistinct, insignificant.” A Mussolini who supposedly regretted the death of a man like Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist MP murdered by Blackshirts 1924.
A man alone in the face of the madness he set in motion: “he should tell of a head of state, idolized by the crowds, who slips day after day into the unenviable fate of the most radical distrust of anyone and into the even more chilling condemnation of having to cultivate an ever greater, absolute, abnormal trust in himself.” A man whose stature has shrunk as much as the distance between his index finger and thumb (hence the stylized lowercase m in the title of volume three) in approaching Hitler and who is “afraid.” The same fear that “twenty years earlier, when deftly orchestrated, had hoisted him to power” was turning against him, driving him to violence and to “throw the Italian people into the carnage of a new world conflict.”
In the third volume, which covers the period from the Racial Laws of 1938 to Italy’s entry into World War II, Scurati’s point of view becomes increasingly clear. He presents a Mussolini in “ecstasy,” fascinated by fear, the “most powerful of political passions,” instilled in him by a “bloodthirsty” Hitler, the “Nazi demon” and his court made up of a “plebeian, upstart, ill-mannered rabble” — yet a Mussolini at the same time a succubus; an aging, fattened, restless leader anxious for the “fate” of “his” people. Scurati here leans toward that reading that makes excuses for Italian fascism, caught up in the orbit of Nazi Germany, an old cliché that casts the alliance with Hitler as accidental, a “fatal error” made on the grounds that it is “better” that Hitler be “with us than against us.”
Meanwhile the racial laws are presented as a “diplomatic instrument,” a pledge given to this alliance, a “reassurance” of the steadfastness of a lasting agreement. This revisionist reading is reinforced by the fact that Scurati’s reconstruction of the course of fascism leaves aside six years (from 1932 to 1938), thus missing out the colonization of Ethiopia — an important transition between colonial racism and the antisemitism at home conceived as an instrument for the “regeneration” of Italians.In the narrative of fascism’s rise to power, as in that of the consolidation of its regime, Scurati gives little space to the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that provided its basis.
The basic criticism of fascism thus appears abstractly moral because almost only violence and fear dominate. In the narrative of fascism’s rise to power, as in that of the consolidation of its regime, Scurati gives little space to the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that provided its basis, its political program and ideology, and the regime it established. Historian Giulia Albanese is right to point out that “the pages on the march on Rome show that the event was reversible.” Scurati rightly suggests that fascism was a possible but hardly automatic outcome of contemporary social conflict, and that therefore the convergence between the ruling class and the counterrevolution — essential for fascism’s arrival in power — could not be taken as inevitable.
Yet the object of the author’s attention is not, in the words of the historian Charles S. Maier, “crisis capitalism armed with a truncheon,” but rather, and only at times, the inadequacy of the traditional ruling class, “people from a museum,” composed of an “Italian bourgeoisie that is the spiritual enemy of fascism” in the face of the new situation that opened up in March 1919. The description of the king as a “prisoner of war” and of liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti’s “partial, laborious, contradictory attempt to transform an ancient and archaic country into a modern democracy” seem to exonerate the liberal state, at least in part.
In the first volume, entitled M. Son of the Century, Antonio Scurati decides to relate the rise of fascism from Mussolini’s own perspective. This narrative choice has raised many questions and criticisms — some of them unjustified — of “closeness” to his “character” or of a latent “rehabilitation” of Mussolini. Scurati’s aim, by adopting the fascist leader’s viewpoint, is to tell this story from the inside. In doing so, Scurati draws on the historians Renzo de Felice, George L. Mosse, Zeev Sternhell, and Emilio Gentile, who defended the need for an analysis of fascism “from the inside,” taking its language and myths seriously.
Scurati argues that the fact that he belongs to a generation “born just after the end of all this and just before the beginning of all the rest” allows him to “re-appropriate the explosive twentieth-century narrative material, on the basis of [his own] non-belonging to it.” Born in 1969, he would thus be one incarnation of what he calls the “literature of inexperience,” as represented in this “post-historical novel.” The author would thus finally be freed from any ideological dogmatism with respect to the generation that preceded him, free to find the truth or at least to elaborate a truth: “The equidistance (certainly not the equivalence) of the post-historical author,” he writes, “with respect to the point of view of victims and executioners, therefore his free choice in narrative focus, directly descends from the transcendental of inexperience.”
Scurati’s approach to the literature of inexperience seems characteristic of what Eric Hobsbawm had called “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations,” effectively freeing the younger generation from the categorical imperative of remembering the vanquished, i.e. taking their defeats on board in order to transform them into a “revolutionary” force in the present. The admittedly important distinction that the author makes between “equidistance” and “equivalence” cannot, however, alone resolve the question of his relationship with his characters, the reader to whom he addresses himself, and what his text “postulates” to them.
The reader of M., exposed without mediation to Mussolini’s tale in volume one, is led to experience fascism’s rise from within the belly of the beast. The undeniable strength of Scurati’s writing lies in the description “from below” of the years following World War I; a particularly intense period that must be analyzed hour by hour, region by region, city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood in the attempt to “get to grips with” fascism through its “developments.” The narrative is undoubtedly effective. Using the aesthetics of “horror,” Scurati elicits repentance, not responsibility. He succeeds in captivating a wide readership by immersing them in the everyday life of fascism. However, the narrative of fascism’s rise to power leaves little room for the perspective needed to understand a complex and vivid phenomenon in the collective memory of Italy, Europe, and the world.What is fascism? The answer, according to Scurati, is to be found in its moral and psychological character.
Its everyday developments, seen through the necessarily myopic prism of a “fascination with catastrophe,” attach the definition of fascism to the contingent and ephemeral plane of circumstance and to the reciprocal effects of violence and fear. What is fascism? The answer, according to Scurati, is to be found in its moral and psychological character, which cannot be separated from the “moods” of the slums. Fascists are constantly attached to their plebeian social origins — Roberto Farinacci, “son of the railwayman,” and Mussolini, “son of the blacksmith,” stubbornly repeated, as if these indications were the best way to grasp the phenomenon. The plebeian nature of the “fascists” reinforces the idea of a “revolutionary” fascism: “the revolution will not be made by the communists, it will be made by the owners of two rooms and a kitchen in a suburban apartment block.” A point of view from the inside that is never questioned in Scurati’s three volumes.
From a Crocean perspective, fascism is also seen as a degenerative moral disease. The second volume, which opens with a Mussolini bent in two by the pain of blood and shit, is the most typical example. The image of the virus appears many times, a virus that “infects thousands of postal employees ready to set fire to the labor halls.” The terror that this people armed with sticks inspires is therefore not only related to the violence it produces, but to what it represents in terms of physical and psychic pathology located in the depths of society, in its underbelly, in its basest instincts.
The fear of the “crowd” that “instinctively advances” is coupled with the image of a Benito Mussolini presented as a “superman generated from the belly of the people and not from a privileged caste.” A Mussolini who “despises and fears his own squadrists [an attitude] which is largely reciprocated.” A Mussolini who portrays his troops as “enriched beggars, stormtroopers turned officials” and Italians as “cowards and weaklings.” A Mussolini who hesitates to turn back (“but by now the circle of hatred is tightening on all sides. Perhaps, if he could, he would turn back. But it is too late.” A Mussolini who “is protected from the demeaning spectacle of human misery by a strange kind of hypermetropia: he does not see his peer, his neighbor, the little people, or, if he does see them, they appear blurred, indistinct, insignificant.” A Mussolini who supposedly regretted the death of a man like Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist MP murdered by Blackshirts 1924.
A man alone in the face of the madness he set in motion: “he should tell of a head of state, idolized by the crowds, who slips day after day into the unenviable fate of the most radical distrust of anyone and into the even more chilling condemnation of having to cultivate an ever greater, absolute, abnormal trust in himself.” A man whose stature has shrunk as much as the distance between his index finger and thumb (hence the stylized lowercase m in the title of volume three) in approaching Hitler and who is “afraid.” The same fear that “twenty years earlier, when deftly orchestrated, had hoisted him to power” was turning against him, driving him to violence and to “throw the Italian people into the carnage of a new world conflict.”
In the third volume, which covers the period from the Racial Laws of 1938 to Italy’s entry into World War II, Scurati’s point of view becomes increasingly clear. He presents a Mussolini in “ecstasy,” fascinated by fear, the “most powerful of political passions,” instilled in him by a “bloodthirsty” Hitler, the “Nazi demon” and his court made up of a “plebeian, upstart, ill-mannered rabble” — yet a Mussolini at the same time a succubus; an aging, fattened, restless leader anxious for the “fate” of “his” people. Scurati here leans toward that reading that makes excuses for Italian fascism, caught up in the orbit of Nazi Germany, an old cliché that casts the alliance with Hitler as accidental, a “fatal error” made on the grounds that it is “better” that Hitler be “with us than against us.”
Meanwhile the racial laws are presented as a “diplomatic instrument,” a pledge given to this alliance, a “reassurance” of the steadfastness of a lasting agreement. This revisionist reading is reinforced by the fact that Scurati’s reconstruction of the course of fascism leaves aside six years (from 1932 to 1938), thus missing out the colonization of Ethiopia — an important transition between colonial racism and the antisemitism at home conceived as an instrument for the “regeneration” of Italians.In the narrative of fascism’s rise to power, as in that of the consolidation of its regime, Scurati gives little space to the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that provided its basis.
The basic criticism of fascism thus appears abstractly moral because almost only violence and fear dominate. In the narrative of fascism’s rise to power, as in that of the consolidation of its regime, Scurati gives little space to the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that provided its basis, its political program and ideology, and the regime it established. Historian Giulia Albanese is right to point out that “the pages on the march on Rome show that the event was reversible.” Scurati rightly suggests that fascism was a possible but hardly automatic outcome of contemporary social conflict, and that therefore the convergence between the ruling class and the counterrevolution — essential for fascism’s arrival in power — could not be taken as inevitable.
Yet the object of the author’s attention is not, in the words of the historian Charles S. Maier, “crisis capitalism armed with a truncheon,” but rather, and only at times, the inadequacy of the traditional ruling class, “people from a museum,” composed of an “Italian bourgeoisie that is the spiritual enemy of fascism” in the face of the new situation that opened up in March 1919. The description of the king as a “prisoner of war” and of liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti’s “partial, laborious, contradictory attempt to transform an ancient and archaic country into a modern democracy” seem to exonerate the liberal state, at least in part.
The Absent Oppressed
Scurati has in numerous interviews maintained that “the novel generates a precise and firm historical, moral and civil judgement condemning fascism. And it does so precisely because it does not start from an ideological prejudice.” The whole question this poses is the definition of anti-fascism that results from the novelist’s “third-party” but not “neutral” exposition. What does Scurati want to tell us about anti-fascism in the past and, perhaps more importantly for him, about its adaptation to new times?
The question brings us back to the political role of the “historical” novel. In the mid-1930s, György Lukács devoted some illuminating pages to the anti-fascist novel, a literature that, he said, marked the “break between the writer and the life of the people.” He wrote that “It is above all prejudice that lives in the people, in the masses, the principle of irrationality, of what is purely instinctive, against reason. With such a conception of the people, humanism destroys its best anti-fascist weapons.” The Hungarian philosopher then called for the “unmasking of fascism’s hostility” toward the oppressed in order to “protect the creative forces of the people” because “the great ideas and actions that humanity has produced so far originated in popular life.”
After reading M.’s three volumes, there are no doubts as to its moral condemnation of fascism — despite the limitations and neglected elements highlighted above. But for Scurati, the anti-fascist battle is essentially a struggle between reason and brutal and barbaric irrationality: “Today we are at a crossroads: we must choose between culture, democracy and progress, or throw ourselves into the arms of despotism, blindness and obedience.”
By reducing the anti-fascist battle, this struggle for eternity (as Carlo Rosselli called it), to a struggle between progress and reaction, between democracy (but which one?) and despotism, Scurati leaves no concrete space for the creative force of the oppressed. Clearly, anti-plebeian class prejudices color Scurati’s fresco: the landless peasants are described as “idiotic grey oxen”; the “crowd” is seen as “docile, primitive”; the people seem to be guided by their instincts, their stomachs, their “humors,” of which Mussolini is said to have a “formidable intelligence”; a people at best absent, at worst consenting out of laziness. “Yes, the majority of Italians,” Scurati writes, to account for the atmosphere following the assassination of socialist leader Matteotti, “horrified by the crime, would like the fall of the regime to reclaim their ghost-infested homes. But, then, around dinnertime, the demands of life prevail. Morality is not one of them. The country is opaque, its sense of justice is sluggish, blurred.”
In this fresco, the anti-fascists from below appear almost exclusively in their role as victims, killed, beaten, humiliated, like the “two poor people” condemned for insulting the Duce, who are presented as “meek and harmless animals.” The antifascist émigré circles in Nice in which Gino Lucetti — who tried to kill Mussolini — developed are presented as: “a court of miracles of poor emigrants, communists, anarchists, revolutionaries, outcasts, the beaten, the expelled, men who cheated hunger in front of the tables of lowly taverns, among inverts, thieves and whores, in a laudable and, at the same time, sublime mixture of drunkenness, vain hopes of redemption, desperate idealisms and chronic, ferocious, destitution.”
Even more significant in this regard is the fact that anti-fascism disappears in the third volume, with Scurati deciding to leave aside the most important moment of the anti-fascist struggle abroad. The 1930s proved to be a decisive test for antifascism. Ten years of the “academy of exile” in Paris had made only one alternative possible: death or “redemption.” Scurati deals with the end of the parable, the republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War, summed up as an “internecine war between republicans and Francoists.” Again, the anti-fascists are those immediately executed on Mussolini’s orders but not those who fought with weapons in hand, “today in Spain and tomorrow in Italy”; those who called for a preemptive war and an anti-fascist revolution; those who needed Spain more than Spain needed them, as Emilio Lussu wrote.How can one understand fascism without considering its profoundly counterrevolutionary dimension?
Everything is as if the oppressed could not play any active role in the fight against a movement and a regime built precisely in opposition to their struggles. Scurati ignores the oppressed, perhaps as a function of this double fear: the people who are afraid, but also the fears spurred by this “formless, stupid and apathetic mass.” Yet how is it possible to contemplate the anti-fascist struggle while ignoring the subaltern, and vice versa, how can one understand fascism without considering its profoundly counterrevolutionary dimension? Because fascism did indeed wage war against the subaltern.
Under Scurati’s pen, the emancipatory struggles of the biennio rosso (the “two Red Years” of strikes and occupations in 1919 and 1920) appear as “revolutionary delusions” that ruined Italy through a “fury of strikes,” suggesting that the “revolutionary” outrages of the labor movement somehow set off the powder keg. Scurati has Mussolini say that “[Communists] did not start this civil war but they will finish it. It is a question of making violence ever more intelligent, of inventing surgical violence.”
Hope guided the steps of those who took part in the strike waves in the immediate interwar period, demanding not only wage increases, shorter working hours, and an end to food shortages, but also to change the fate of the world, to break the chains. Everything seemed possible when in Russia, the first socialist revolution finally seemed to open new vistas. Scurati does not speak of this enthusiasm but dwells at length on the “millions of Italians [who] had stopped hoping for change and began to feel threatened by it. The chanting of the squares choked into a chorus. A shout that no longer begged the future to finally redeem the present, but implored it to remain uncreated. Not a prayer but an exorcism.”
At times Scurati even equates (pre)revolutionary violence and counterrevolution; his ahistorical and abstractly ethical critique of violence allows him to confuse the opposing camps: “Demonstrations, devastation, fires are everywhere. On all sides. The escalation culminated on a tram in Rome where, on September 12, policeman Giovanni Corvi murdered fascist trade unionist Armando Casalini with three revolver shots while the child’s eyes were still open.” Leading Communist Nicola Bombacci serves this purpose perfectly. The man the author describes as “the man from Moscow,” Lenin’s “Italian confidant” (it is unclear on what basis), who was later to become one of Mussolini’s ardent supporters, serves as a link between the two violent sides of the same “European civil war” — about which, however, Scurati says nothing.
For counterrevolution was not only organized in Italy but everywhere after the Russian October Revolution. Anti-communism not only targeted the newborn Soviet state, on which all manner of fantasies were focused, but was also expressed in hostility toward the dominated and an elitist conception of democracy, the result of what Peter Gay would call the culture of hatred. The European democracies that emerged from World War I supported reactionary solutions to deal with a communism, which was seen as the much greater danger.The author’s ahistorical and abstractly ethical critique of violence allows him to confuse the opposing camps.
As for the anti-fascist parties, in M. all that can be discerned is the “blindness” of their leaders: “The factional hatreds, the slavery to formulas, the ideological blindness, the language that turns time and again to formal issues, to pure logic, the eternal wheel of personal rivalries, the deafness to the din of the world, to the promises of the dawn.” The twenty-first century Scurati forgets to portray anti-fascism from the inside, day by day, as a concrete movement anchored in its time, with its mistakes but also its strengths. This severely hems in the complexity of the situation, even at a particularly intense phase of the political struggle.
Certainly, the anti-fascist opposition proved incapable of adapting its struggle to the new political configuration. This was an inadequacy linked at worst to a radical misunderstanding, and at best to a narrow conception of fascism as a phenomenon. Italian socialism undoubtedly proved disastrously inadequate faced with the post–World War I situation in Italy. But dismissing the foundation of the Communist Party in 1921 — the result of serious reflection, careful elaboration and intense political and social action — as a “demented split” or reducing the history of the Italian workers’ movement on the eve of Mussolini’s rise to “factional hatreds” hardly allows one to go beyond value judgements, of little use for a refoundation or consolidation of anti-fascism.
The blindness denounced by Scurati does not help us understand what should have been done, or rather, what should be done (the famous unveiling of the present) in such a situation. Unless we consider that only the sacrifice of a few individual heroes (Matteotti is the only totally positive figure in history) can redeem all Italy.
Under Scurati’s pen, the subalterns turn from bearers of emancipation into willing “victims” or sacrificial heroes. From this perspective, despite its declared objective, M. cannot be a basis for refounding anti-fascism. Its “victimizing” reading of the opposition of those times cannot serve the collective remembrance and redemption of the victims of past struggles. By ignoring the properly revolutionary dimension of antifascism (and the counterrevolutionary dimension of fascism), M. cannot fulfil the revolutionary critique of the present, which is the only one capable of confronting the new fascism. M. strives to chase after the world that was, without understanding the world that really is.
Stefanie Prezioso is associate professor at Lausanne University and author of numerous works on European anti-fascism.
Saturday, December 23, 2023
Fascism Watch
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca writes: "Conditions are right for fascism, we have all the ingredients for fascism, but fascism is not pre-determined—we can still stop it."
Published: December 21, 2023
By Dr. Jennifer Mercieca
We are a nation on “fascism watch.” Donald Trump has a history of refusing to follow the rule of law, he incited an insurrection against the peaceful transferal of power, he claims to want to be a “dictator” if he wins power, and he has released plans to install people into government who are loyal to him instead of the Constitution. These are all signs that he plans an autocratic takeover of the United States.
When Meteorologists predict catastrophic weather events like hurricanes and tornados they distinguish between a “watch” and “warning.” A “watch” means that we should be on the lookout for dangerous weather (conditions are possibly dangerous); a warning means the dangerous weather is actually happening in the next few minutes.
We are a nation on “fascism watch,” but it isn’t a “fascism warning.” Conditions are right for fascism, we have all the ingredients for fascism, but fascism is not pre-determined—we can still stop it.
This is an important distinction. Wannabe fascists like Donald Trump seize power by telling the nation that democracy is weak, and fascism is pre-determined or fated. Fascists want us to give up in advance; they want us to believe that 2024 is a fascism warning, not a fascism watch. It’s a fascism watch, not a warning.
Meteorologists teach people the warning signs so they know when a tornado is heading toward them: the sky may turn dark or green, it might hail, there may be a loud roar like a freight train, and/or there might be a funnel cloud. If you see any of those signs you should seek shelter immediately because a dangerous tornado is likely to be nearby.
We’re on “fascism watch,” so what should we watch for? What are the warning signs that a democratic government like ours is backsliding into fascism?
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) studies democratic backsliding around the world. They define it as “a change in a combination of competitive electoral procedures, civil and political liberties, and accountability.” When elections are no longer free and fair, when civil and political liberties are denied to all, and when political leaders are no longer accountable to the rule of law, democracy has turned into autocracy.
In 2016, democratic erosion scholar Jeff Colgan created a useful 10 point list of signs of emerging authoritarianism. Here is his original list with a little bit of added explanation:
1. Media intimidation and restrictions (autocrats intimidate the media, so that they won’t try to hold the autocrat accountable to the rule of law).
2. Identification of crises or political paralysis to justify emergency measures (autocrats take advantage of crisis or make up crises in order to seize the opportunity as a “state of exception” to use dictatorial powers. Sometimes they use “nothing has been done” as a similar excuse).
3. Attacks on minorities; scapegoating foreigners (autocrats try to activate Right-Wing Authoritarians with fear appeals about “impure” foreigners, using “disgust” words like “vermin” and treating people as “hate-objects” to create a climate of nationalistic “us” versus “them).
4. Closing spaces for civil society (autocrats seek to close off “third spaces” or spaces where people gather together and form bridging social capital. Bridging social capital builds trust among people and autocracy thrives on distrust).
5. Rhetorical rejection of current political system; discourse shift (autocrats denigrate American values like democracy and the rule or law or begin to change the meanings of the key terms of national values).
6. Expanding the size of courts or other bodies to stack it with partisan judges/officials (creating a set of loyalist judicial officials who will follow the autocrat’s will rather than the Constitution or the rule of law).
7. Modifying rules to impose or eliminate term limits on officials, especially election officials (autocrats prevent free and fair elections by gaming the electoral process with gerrymandering, changing voter qualifications, changing election laws, contesting election results, installing loyalists as election officials, intimidating non-compliant election officials)
8. Weakening the legislature/intimidating legislators (autocrats seek to prevent the checks and balances of the system from holding them accountable to the rule of law or the Constitution by weakening legislative power, installing compliant loyalists in the legislature, and purging non-compliant people from the legislature).
9. Silencing political opposition (autocrats use communication as a weapon with threats of force or intimidation, public shaming, overwhelming the public sphere with lies or distractions, controlling the networks of public communication).
10. Significant increase of internal security forces (using paramilitary organizations, gangs, militia, or police for the autocrat’s purposes rather than the common good).
Autocrats around the world have done these things as they’ve taken over governments. You might think the signs of democratic backsliding would be very obvious, but government scholar Lee Morgenbesser explains that if you’re looking for American democracy to end with a big bang, like a violent coup, then you’re looking for the wrong signs.
Today’s autocratic takeovers are more subtle and less obviously violent. Today wannabe autocrats like Trump use strategies that are “designed to mimic the presence of horizontal and vertical accountability, but also prevent the actual practice of it. The most sophisticated form of autocratic rule now encourages laws to be bent, not broken; institutions to be managed, not made meaningless; political opponents to be circumscribed, not eliminated; citizens to be disempowered, not indoctrinated; economic gains to be distributed, not concentrated; and foreign engagement to be self-reinforcing, not self-defeating.”
The 2024 presidential election will be between two political figures as much as it is between democracy and autocracy—between a government that follows the democratic principle of the “rule of law” (in which “the law is supreme,” which means it binds and protects everyone equally) and one that follows the autocratic “rule by law” strategy (the law is used as a weapon to reward friends, punish enemies, and consolidate power). Conditions are right for fascism; be on alert for the warning signs.
Meteorologists teach people the warning signs so they know when a tornado is heading toward them: the sky may turn dark or green, it might hail, there may be a loud roar like a freight train, and/or there might be a funnel cloud. If you see any of those signs you should seek shelter immediately because a dangerous tornado is likely to be nearby.
We’re on “fascism watch,” so what should we watch for? What are the warning signs that a democratic government like ours is backsliding into fascism?
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) studies democratic backsliding around the world. They define it as “a change in a combination of competitive electoral procedures, civil and political liberties, and accountability.” When elections are no longer free and fair, when civil and political liberties are denied to all, and when political leaders are no longer accountable to the rule of law, democracy has turned into autocracy.
In 2016, democratic erosion scholar Jeff Colgan created a useful 10 point list of signs of emerging authoritarianism. Here is his original list with a little bit of added explanation:
1. Media intimidation and restrictions (autocrats intimidate the media, so that they won’t try to hold the autocrat accountable to the rule of law).
2. Identification of crises or political paralysis to justify emergency measures (autocrats take advantage of crisis or make up crises in order to seize the opportunity as a “state of exception” to use dictatorial powers. Sometimes they use “nothing has been done” as a similar excuse).
3. Attacks on minorities; scapegoating foreigners (autocrats try to activate Right-Wing Authoritarians with fear appeals about “impure” foreigners, using “disgust” words like “vermin” and treating people as “hate-objects” to create a climate of nationalistic “us” versus “them).
4. Closing spaces for civil society (autocrats seek to close off “third spaces” or spaces where people gather together and form bridging social capital. Bridging social capital builds trust among people and autocracy thrives on distrust).
5. Rhetorical rejection of current political system; discourse shift (autocrats denigrate American values like democracy and the rule or law or begin to change the meanings of the key terms of national values).
6. Expanding the size of courts or other bodies to stack it with partisan judges/officials (creating a set of loyalist judicial officials who will follow the autocrat’s will rather than the Constitution or the rule of law).
7. Modifying rules to impose or eliminate term limits on officials, especially election officials (autocrats prevent free and fair elections by gaming the electoral process with gerrymandering, changing voter qualifications, changing election laws, contesting election results, installing loyalists as election officials, intimidating non-compliant election officials)
8. Weakening the legislature/intimidating legislators (autocrats seek to prevent the checks and balances of the system from holding them accountable to the rule of law or the Constitution by weakening legislative power, installing compliant loyalists in the legislature, and purging non-compliant people from the legislature).
9. Silencing political opposition (autocrats use communication as a weapon with threats of force or intimidation, public shaming, overwhelming the public sphere with lies or distractions, controlling the networks of public communication).
10. Significant increase of internal security forces (using paramilitary organizations, gangs, militia, or police for the autocrat’s purposes rather than the common good).
Autocrats around the world have done these things as they’ve taken over governments. You might think the signs of democratic backsliding would be very obvious, but government scholar Lee Morgenbesser explains that if you’re looking for American democracy to end with a big bang, like a violent coup, then you’re looking for the wrong signs.
Today’s autocratic takeovers are more subtle and less obviously violent. Today wannabe autocrats like Trump use strategies that are “designed to mimic the presence of horizontal and vertical accountability, but also prevent the actual practice of it. The most sophisticated form of autocratic rule now encourages laws to be bent, not broken; institutions to be managed, not made meaningless; political opponents to be circumscribed, not eliminated; citizens to be disempowered, not indoctrinated; economic gains to be distributed, not concentrated; and foreign engagement to be self-reinforcing, not self-defeating.”
The 2024 presidential election will be between two political figures as much as it is between democracy and autocracy—between a government that follows the democratic principle of the “rule of law” (in which “the law is supreme,” which means it binds and protects everyone equally) and one that follows the autocratic “rule by law” strategy (the law is used as a weapon to reward friends, punish enemies, and consolidate power). Conditions are right for fascism; be on alert for the warning signs.
Hitler 'didn't say it the way I said it': Trump defends Nazi-style rhetoric
YEAH HE SAID IT IN GERMAN
Brad Reed
Brad Reed
RAW STORY
December 22, 2023
Adolph Hitler, Donald Trump (Hitler via archives/Trump via AFP)
Former President Donald Trump on Friday defended his use of Nazi-style rhetoric to describe immigrants by claiming that he had no idea his words directly echoed those of Adolf Hitler.
In his autobiographical manifesto "Mein Kampf," Hitler posited that in the past great cultures died out due to "blood poisoning," and he said that Jews in Europe were primarily responsible for such "poisoning" in Germany.
"A racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew," argued Hitler, who today is known as one of the worst mass murderers in human history. "... And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals."
DON'T MISS: Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition includes bigots, advocate of killing Obama
Trump in recent speeches has similarly claimed that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of America.
In an interview with right-wing talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt, however, Trump claimed ignorance of Hitler's words, while also saying that he didn't mean to give his own remarks about "blood poisoning" the same sinister connotations that Hitler did.
"I know nothing about Hitler," said Trump, as transcribed by Politico reporter Sam Stein. "I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, it's a very different kind of statement."
Watch the video below or at this link.
December 22, 2023
Adolph Hitler, Donald Trump (Hitler via archives/Trump via AFP)
Former President Donald Trump on Friday defended his use of Nazi-style rhetoric to describe immigrants by claiming that he had no idea his words directly echoed those of Adolf Hitler.
In his autobiographical manifesto "Mein Kampf," Hitler posited that in the past great cultures died out due to "blood poisoning," and he said that Jews in Europe were primarily responsible for such "poisoning" in Germany.
"A racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew," argued Hitler, who today is known as one of the worst mass murderers in human history. "... And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals."
DON'T MISS: Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition includes bigots, advocate of killing Obama
Trump in recent speeches has similarly claimed that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of America.
In an interview with right-wing talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt, however, Trump claimed ignorance of Hitler's words, while also saying that he didn't mean to give his own remarks about "blood poisoning" the same sinister connotations that Hitler did.
"I know nothing about Hitler," said Trump, as transcribed by Politico reporter Sam Stein. "I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, it's a very different kind of statement."
Watch the video below or at this link.
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Trump's unique brand of American fascism is still haunting us
Independent Media Institute
September 14, 2021
WILKES-BARRE, PA - AUGUST 2, 2018:
September 14, 2021
WILKES-BARRE, PA - AUGUST 2, 2018:
Donald Trump, President of the United States pauses in concentration while delivering a speech at a campaign rally held at the Mohegan Sun Arena.
Donald Trump was no ordinary conservative American president. Far from it.
But how should we describe his presidency and the Make America Great Again political movement he spawned? Is it sufficient to refer to Trump and his MAGA supporters as anti-democratic or authoritarian, as many in the liberal mainstream press have written for the past five years?
I don't think so.
I believe that is a wholly inadequate and ultimately self-defeating response. We cannot afford to label Trump as just another demagogue or to refer to the MAGA movement as just another rightwing populist upsurge if we hope to preserve American democracy.
It's past time to call Trump and his movement what they are: fascist.
Trump was the first American fascist president. And he remains a fascist to this day.
I was among the first opinion writers to expose the unique dangers Trump posed to democracy and the rule of law. I was among the first to refer to him explicitly as a fascist. I was also among the first commentators to report on the views of leading mental health-experts who described Trump as a malignant narcissist.
Report Advertisement
I sounded these warnings in opinion columns, beginning in 2015, published by such outlets as Truthdig, The Progressive Magazine, AlterNet, Raw Story, Salon, The National Memo, Bill Moyers.com, and many others.
What is Fascism?
Any rational discussion has to begin with a definition, and when it comes to fascism, there are many to examine.
Although it is an emotionally loaded and often misused term, fascism is as real today as a political and cultural force, a set of core beliefs and a mode of governance as it was when Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and declared himself dictator six years later.
As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, fascism "is a historic phase of capitalism … the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism." Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht's description.
Another instructive definition is the one proffered by political scientist Robert Paxton in his classic study " The Anatomy of Fascism" (Harvard University Press, 2004):
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism.
A cult of traditionalism.
A rejection of modernism (cultural, rather than technological).
A cult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
A framing of disagreement or opposition as treasonous.
A fear of difference. … Fascism is racist by definition.
An appeal to a frustrated middle class—either due to economic or political pressures from both above and below.
An obsession with the plots and machinations of the movement's identified enemies.
A requirement that said enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
A rejection of pacifism. Life is permanent warfare.
Contempt for weakness.
A cult of heroism.
Hypermasculinity.
A selective populism, relying on chauvinist definitions of "the people" that it claims to speak for.
A heavy usage of Newspeak—impoverished vocabulary, elementary syntax and a resistance to complex and critical reasoning.
Nor is fascism a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22, 2020 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Trump in 2016.
Churchwell's article is aptly titled, "American Fascism: It Has Happened Here." In it, she offers a working definition of fascism, noting that fascist movements, both past and present in America and abroad, are united by "conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared." These include:
"[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain 'bloodlines' over others."
Trump's Unique Brand of American Fascism
Looking back on the anti-immigrant rhetoric and scapegoating Trump used in the 2016 presidential campaign, we can see these features at work. We can also see them in his desperate efforts to retain power after losing the 2020 presidential election, in the January 6 insurrection and in his continued adherence to the "big lie" of the stolen election. These are only some of the most obvious signposts of a new American form of fascism.
The good news is that more and more influential voices have come to realize and recognize Trump as a fascist.
In a January 2021 Newsweek article, Professor Paxton wrote:
"I resisted for a long time applying the fascist label to Donald J. Trump. He did indeed display some telltale signs. In 2016, a newsreel clip of Trump's plane taxiing up to a hangar where cheering supporters awaited reminded me eerily of Adolf Hitler's electoral campaign in Germany in July 1932, the first airborne campaign in history, where the arrival of the Führer's plane electrified the crowd. Once the rally began, with Hitler and Mussolini, Trump mastered the art of back-and-forth exchanges with his enraptured listeners. There was the threat of physical violence ("lock her up!"), sometimes leading to the forceful ejection of hecklers. The Proud Boys stood in convincingly for Hitler's Storm Troopers and Mussolini's squadristi. The MAGA hats even provided a bit of uniform. The America First" message and the leader's arrogant swagger fit the fascist model….
"Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary."
In a July 2021 article in The Atlantic, David Frum, a longtime Republican and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, put it this way:
"Trump's no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It's time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose."
Psychologist Mary Trump, the disgraced ex-president's niece, unabashedly uses the fascist label to describe her uncle, referring him as such in a September 2021 interview with Business Insider:
"He is a fascist. But he probably doesn't know what fascist means.
"He thinks he deserves all the power in the world just because of who he is. In his mind, he's always at the center of the universe and thinks he should be deferred to even though he's ignorant, the weakest, and the least intellectually curious person I've ever met."
It's time for more of us to recognize, denounce and reject Trump and his most ardent and violent MAGA acolytes for what they: a fascist plague that threatens everything we hold near and dear.
Donald Trump was no ordinary conservative American president. Far from it.
But how should we describe his presidency and the Make America Great Again political movement he spawned? Is it sufficient to refer to Trump and his MAGA supporters as anti-democratic or authoritarian, as many in the liberal mainstream press have written for the past five years?
I don't think so.
I believe that is a wholly inadequate and ultimately self-defeating response. We cannot afford to label Trump as just another demagogue or to refer to the MAGA movement as just another rightwing populist upsurge if we hope to preserve American democracy.
It's past time to call Trump and his movement what they are: fascist.
Trump was the first American fascist president. And he remains a fascist to this day.
I was among the first opinion writers to expose the unique dangers Trump posed to democracy and the rule of law. I was among the first to refer to him explicitly as a fascist. I was also among the first commentators to report on the views of leading mental health-experts who described Trump as a malignant narcissist.
Report Advertisement
I sounded these warnings in opinion columns, beginning in 2015, published by such outlets as Truthdig, The Progressive Magazine, AlterNet, Raw Story, Salon, The National Memo, Bill Moyers.com, and many others.
What is Fascism?
Any rational discussion has to begin with a definition, and when it comes to fascism, there are many to examine.
Although it is an emotionally loaded and often misused term, fascism is as real today as a political and cultural force, a set of core beliefs and a mode of governance as it was when Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and declared himself dictator six years later.
As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, fascism "is a historic phase of capitalism … the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism." Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht's description.
Another instructive definition is the one proffered by political scientist Robert Paxton in his classic study " The Anatomy of Fascism" (Harvard University Press, 2004):
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism.
A cult of traditionalism.
A rejection of modernism (cultural, rather than technological).
A cult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
A framing of disagreement or opposition as treasonous.
A fear of difference. … Fascism is racist by definition.
An appeal to a frustrated middle class—either due to economic or political pressures from both above and below.
An obsession with the plots and machinations of the movement's identified enemies.
A requirement that said enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
A rejection of pacifism. Life is permanent warfare.
Contempt for weakness.
A cult of heroism.
Hypermasculinity.
A selective populism, relying on chauvinist definitions of "the people" that it claims to speak for.
A heavy usage of Newspeak—impoverished vocabulary, elementary syntax and a resistance to complex and critical reasoning.
Nor is fascism a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22, 2020 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Trump in 2016.
Churchwell's article is aptly titled, "American Fascism: It Has Happened Here." In it, she offers a working definition of fascism, noting that fascist movements, both past and present in America and abroad, are united by "conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared." These include:
"[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain 'bloodlines' over others."
Trump's Unique Brand of American Fascism
Looking back on the anti-immigrant rhetoric and scapegoating Trump used in the 2016 presidential campaign, we can see these features at work. We can also see them in his desperate efforts to retain power after losing the 2020 presidential election, in the January 6 insurrection and in his continued adherence to the "big lie" of the stolen election. These are only some of the most obvious signposts of a new American form of fascism.
The good news is that more and more influential voices have come to realize and recognize Trump as a fascist.
In a January 2021 Newsweek article, Professor Paxton wrote:
"I resisted for a long time applying the fascist label to Donald J. Trump. He did indeed display some telltale signs. In 2016, a newsreel clip of Trump's plane taxiing up to a hangar where cheering supporters awaited reminded me eerily of Adolf Hitler's electoral campaign in Germany in July 1932, the first airborne campaign in history, where the arrival of the Führer's plane electrified the crowd. Once the rally began, with Hitler and Mussolini, Trump mastered the art of back-and-forth exchanges with his enraptured listeners. There was the threat of physical violence ("lock her up!"), sometimes leading to the forceful ejection of hecklers. The Proud Boys stood in convincingly for Hitler's Storm Troopers and Mussolini's squadristi. The MAGA hats even provided a bit of uniform. The America First" message and the leader's arrogant swagger fit the fascist model….
"Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary."
In a July 2021 article in The Atlantic, David Frum, a longtime Republican and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, put it this way:
"Trump's no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It's time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose."
Psychologist Mary Trump, the disgraced ex-president's niece, unabashedly uses the fascist label to describe her uncle, referring him as such in a September 2021 interview with Business Insider:
"He is a fascist. But he probably doesn't know what fascist means.
"He thinks he deserves all the power in the world just because of who he is. In his mind, he's always at the center of the universe and thinks he should be deferred to even though he's ignorant, the weakest, and the least intellectually curious person I've ever met."
It's time for more of us to recognize, denounce and reject Trump and his most ardent and violent MAGA acolytes for what they: a fascist plague that threatens everything we hold near and dear.
Saturday, August 27, 2022
STALINISM RESSURECTS SOCIAL FASCISM TROPE
Russia’s Claims of Western Fascism Are Straight Out of Its Soviet Past
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared the West to Nazis in a recent speech.
Andrew Fink
Aug 26,2022
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at the International Anti-Fascist Congress.
As the defense minister, Shoigu knows that Russian forces were already involved in Ukraine in 2014. The “rebellion” there was not spontaneous resistance against Ukrainian “Nazism” but a Russian operation to crush the Maidan Revolution. Some deception in the cause of defeating the great deception of Western fascism is no great vice, he may reason.
The rest of the speech was given over to complaints about supposed Ukrainian atrocities, accusations about the Azov battalion (a favorite subject among Russian propagandists) and complaints about the “falsification of history,” etc. The overt nods to Soviet ideology in the first parts of the speech were not the only times this happened in this Soviet-style conference. A little later on the same day the vice-speaker of the Russian parliament, Irina Yarovaya, directly accused the United States of being an entity that finances Nazism and said that the transformation of Ukraine into a Nazi state was a project of Washington. Another Russian member of parliament, Sergey Mironov (a leader of the Kremlin-controlled “opposition” party “A Just Russia”), opined that we are witnessing “the prospect of a return to one of the darkest periods in human history” and that the war in Ukraine “is not a military conflict between two countries, two fraternal peoples. This is a confrontation between Russian civilization and world totalitarianism”—with the “totalitarian” side being the West.
Ideologies can be very sticky, and propaganda stickier still if it is ubiquitous enough for long enough. Russians were told for decades and decades that there was a conspiracy of Western bankers against them, that all democracies in the world were under the control of the CIA or some other Western intelligence agencies, that America was the country of hypocrisy and well-concealed oppression, and that any country trying to escape from Moscow's orbit or disturb the Kremlin’s grip was part of some sinister Western project. The leaders of Russia still believe this; even if they are no longer socialists, they are still Soviet at heart.
Russia’s Claims of Western Fascism Are Straight Out of Its Soviet Past
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared the West to Nazis in a recent speech.
Andrew Fink
Aug 26,2022
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at the International Anti-Fascist Congress.
(Photo by Contributor/Getty Images.)
The Kremlin is careful to project different images of Russia to the different foreign audiences it hopes to influence.
For the Western right, in particular the nationalists and populists who are more sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, it paints an image of a traditionalist state where Christianity has been reborn, where men can be men, and where the insanities of the woke European and American “establishment” are totally rejected. Meanwhile, the Western left is on the receiving end of messaging that shows Russia as a victim, a peaceful country reacting defensively after getting pushed around by the American empire.
Last week, catering to an internal audience, the Kremlin sought to put on a different face, at the “International Anti-Fascist Congress” held during an annual military exhibition. The messaging was closer to the version fed to the Western left on some points of substance, but in style it is a chip off the old Soviet bloc. Based on the available materials from the congress, it was a kind of official re-statement of the current ideology of the Kremlin, or at least of the Russian Defense Ministry, and the emphasis was on the Nazism of the West. The ideology that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is broadcasting, or the remnants of an ideology, shows the continuity between the Soviets’ idea of their enemies and the enemies that Shoigu says he is fighting today.
Shoigu opened the Congress with a very Soviet speech, taking on the slippery task of defining fascism in the first minutes: “The staunch anti-fascist Georgi Dimitrov called fascism bestial chauvinism, medieval barbarism, and unbridled aggression against other peoples and countries.”
The Kremlin is careful to project different images of Russia to the different foreign audiences it hopes to influence.
For the Western right, in particular the nationalists and populists who are more sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, it paints an image of a traditionalist state where Christianity has been reborn, where men can be men, and where the insanities of the woke European and American “establishment” are totally rejected. Meanwhile, the Western left is on the receiving end of messaging that shows Russia as a victim, a peaceful country reacting defensively after getting pushed around by the American empire.
Last week, catering to an internal audience, the Kremlin sought to put on a different face, at the “International Anti-Fascist Congress” held during an annual military exhibition. The messaging was closer to the version fed to the Western left on some points of substance, but in style it is a chip off the old Soviet bloc. Based on the available materials from the congress, it was a kind of official re-statement of the current ideology of the Kremlin, or at least of the Russian Defense Ministry, and the emphasis was on the Nazism of the West. The ideology that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is broadcasting, or the remnants of an ideology, shows the continuity between the Soviets’ idea of their enemies and the enemies that Shoigu says he is fighting today.
Shoigu opened the Congress with a very Soviet speech, taking on the slippery task of defining fascism in the first minutes: “The staunch anti-fascist Georgi Dimitrov called fascism bestial chauvinism, medieval barbarism, and unbridled aggression against other peoples and countries.”
THE ORIGIN OF CALLING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY SOCIAL FASCISM
A word about Dimitrov. This “staunch anti-fascist” was the head of Communist International from 1935-1943, one of Stalin’s stable of activists who went on to be the first Communist dictator of Bulgaria. The quote Shoigu chose is just a small part of a longer disquisition from 1935, near the height of Stalinism, titled “The Class Character of Fascism.” Dimitrov’s quote there is part of his description of German fascism, the “most reactionary variety of fascism … the shock troops of the international counter-revolution … the instigator of a crusade against the Soviet Union, the great fatherland of the working people of the whole world.” According to Dimitrov, “Fascism is the power of finance capital itself.” He wrote that fascism could take different forms in different countries—sometimes in the form of social democracy and sometimes in the form of dictatorship—but that in every case fascism is a method of the “domination of the bourgeoisie.” In other words, fascist Germany in 1935 was similar to the United States of 1935 or the U.K. or France of 1935; it is just that in the supposedly “free” countries finance capital had better camouflage or had not yet come to the state of crisis where dictatorship was necessary.
A word about Dimitrov. This “staunch anti-fascist” was the head of Communist International from 1935-1943, one of Stalin’s stable of activists who went on to be the first Communist dictator of Bulgaria. The quote Shoigu chose is just a small part of a longer disquisition from 1935, near the height of Stalinism, titled “The Class Character of Fascism.” Dimitrov’s quote there is part of his description of German fascism, the “most reactionary variety of fascism … the shock troops of the international counter-revolution … the instigator of a crusade against the Soviet Union, the great fatherland of the working people of the whole world.” According to Dimitrov, “Fascism is the power of finance capital itself.” He wrote that fascism could take different forms in different countries—sometimes in the form of social democracy and sometimes in the form of dictatorship—but that in every case fascism is a method of the “domination of the bourgeoisie.” In other words, fascist Germany in 1935 was similar to the United States of 1935 or the U.K. or France of 1935; it is just that in the supposedly “free” countries finance capital had better camouflage or had not yet come to the state of crisis where dictatorship was necessary.
STALINISM, ITSELF LEFT WING NATIONAL SOCIALISM, WAS CORRECT ABOUT RIGHT WING NATIONAL SOCIALISM
In this text Dimitrov mocks the idea that this is some smoothly-running conspiracy, that some banker committee just decide to have a dictatorship one day, but he did believe that, at core, the levers of power under fascism were held by the same type of people who held power in the so-called democracies. Other ideologues and propagandists were not so circumspect, and directly accused Western bankers of hatching fascism as a plot against the revolution. In a 1940 book for the education of Communist cadres, Stalin described the rise of Hitler as part of a conscious plan by the “German bourgeoisie” to “suppress the working class.”
In this text Dimitrov mocks the idea that this is some smoothly-running conspiracy, that some banker committee just decide to have a dictatorship one day, but he did believe that, at core, the levers of power under fascism were held by the same type of people who held power in the so-called democracies. Other ideologues and propagandists were not so circumspect, and directly accused Western bankers of hatching fascism as a plot against the revolution. In a 1940 book for the education of Communist cadres, Stalin described the rise of Hitler as part of a conscious plan by the “German bourgeoisie” to “suppress the working class.”
A well-known Soviet cartoon from the 1930s depicted Hitler in the cradle, rocked by the French and British capitalists along with “Russian Magnates” and presided over by the guardian angel of “Wall Street” with wings of “military industry stocks”.
Shoigu probably never read Dimitrov’s work, but he was a Communist, and likely got plenty of indoctrination about the true nature of fascism and bourgeois democracy. If you pressed him, he would probably not display an ounce of cognitive dissonance in quoting a hard-core Stalinist to define fascism. In his speech at the International Anti-Fascist conference he makes a point of blaming Western capitalism for the rise of Hitler:
“The coming to power of National Socialism was due to their financing by international capital. It is quite obvious that the financial and economic cooperation between the Anglo-American and Nazi business circles was one of the main factors that led to the Second World War, which cost mankind unprecedented human casualties.”
In this view, Anglo-American capitalists are always scheming to destroy Moscow’s project.
Shoigu probably never read Dimitrov’s work, but he was a Communist, and likely got plenty of indoctrination about the true nature of fascism and bourgeois democracy. If you pressed him, he would probably not display an ounce of cognitive dissonance in quoting a hard-core Stalinist to define fascism. In his speech at the International Anti-Fascist conference he makes a point of blaming Western capitalism for the rise of Hitler:
“The coming to power of National Socialism was due to their financing by international capital. It is quite obvious that the financial and economic cooperation between the Anglo-American and Nazi business circles was one of the main factors that led to the Second World War, which cost mankind unprecedented human casualties.”
In this view, Anglo-American capitalists are always scheming to destroy Moscow’s project.
The project may no longer be socialist, but the Western-backed Nazi threat remains. Shoigu then breaks into the traditional lament of Russian imperialists who want to destroy Eastern Europe: His opponents are all Nazis. Memorials to Nazi collaborators are going up in Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. He adds that the recent proposal to ban Russians from travel to Europe is also “another vivid manifestation of Nazi policy.” The main fight these days is, of course, the fight against Ukraine, and just as Western big capital created the rise of Hitler, Shoigu implies, so it is now generating a Ukrainian “Nazism.” Ukraine began oppressing its Russian minority, Shoigu narrates, and then NATO began to “develop Ukrainian territory.” This “created unacceptable threats to Russia’s security.”
As the defense minister, Shoigu knows that Russian forces were already involved in Ukraine in 2014. The “rebellion” there was not spontaneous resistance against Ukrainian “Nazism” but a Russian operation to crush the Maidan Revolution. Some deception in the cause of defeating the great deception of Western fascism is no great vice, he may reason.
The rest of the speech was given over to complaints about supposed Ukrainian atrocities, accusations about the Azov battalion (a favorite subject among Russian propagandists) and complaints about the “falsification of history,” etc. The overt nods to Soviet ideology in the first parts of the speech were not the only times this happened in this Soviet-style conference. A little later on the same day the vice-speaker of the Russian parliament, Irina Yarovaya, directly accused the United States of being an entity that finances Nazism and said that the transformation of Ukraine into a Nazi state was a project of Washington. Another Russian member of parliament, Sergey Mironov (a leader of the Kremlin-controlled “opposition” party “A Just Russia”), opined that we are witnessing “the prospect of a return to one of the darkest periods in human history” and that the war in Ukraine “is not a military conflict between two countries, two fraternal peoples. This is a confrontation between Russian civilization and world totalitarianism”—with the “totalitarian” side being the West.
Ideologies can be very sticky, and propaganda stickier still if it is ubiquitous enough for long enough. Russians were told for decades and decades that there was a conspiracy of Western bankers against them, that all democracies in the world were under the control of the CIA or some other Western intelligence agencies, that America was the country of hypocrisy and well-concealed oppression, and that any country trying to escape from Moscow's orbit or disturb the Kremlin’s grip was part of some sinister Western project. The leaders of Russia still believe this; even if they are no longer socialists, they are still Soviet at heart.
Sunday, December 20, 2020
WHEN FACISM COMES TO AMERIKA
It has been said that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
Becker1999 from Grove City, OH
It has been said that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
This well-known line has been attributed to a number of people — most often to novelist Sinclair Lewis, but also to socialist leader Eugene V. Debs and even to populist Louisiana senator Huey Long — but none of them wrote or said it in precisely the way it has come down to us. It appears to be an aphoristic stone nicely polished by being handled by a lot of people.
To have it reflect our current situation, we need to roughen it up.
When Donald J. Trump was running for president in 2016, Lewis's novel "It Can't Happen Here," written quickly in 1935 as authoritarian leaders were rising in Europe, started to sell out. In it, populist demagogue "Buzz" Windrip, a Democrat (i.e., a pre-Civil Rights Act Democrat, who would be a Republican today), wins the presidency. As Beverly Gage describes it in a 2017 essay for the New York Times, Windrip — who was based on both Long and the anti-Semitic radio priest Father Coughlin — is not exactly Trump, but he's right "there" in a number of respects:
Trump, a man who received five deferments from military service, seems to think the Stars and Stripes is a great-looking lady he can molest. ("I don't even wait!") I suspect he is less handsy with the gal he clearly respects more, the good old Stars and Bars.
Oh, I forgot the tear gas and rubber bullets. So, we append further:
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters.
OK, that's getting too long. But now, naturally, I'm remembering the time fascism was hiding in his bunker (no, not in 1945 Berlin — the more recent time, in Washington). No harm in trying it out, right?
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters — and then scurrying away to hide in a bunker.
But it just becomes less elegant, more ungainly — and so less memorable. There is so much one could add, beyond hiding in that bunker — incessantly watching "Fox & Friends," tweeting instead of working, lying like breathing — that the mind refuses to latch on to anything. There is no substance, just chaos.
Speaking of chaos, Trump and his gang of enablers have always reminded me of the year I spent in a fraternity. Somewhat to my surprise, I was elected pledge class president, and after a tumultuous year I tried my best to get a dozen young men through the seriously stupid, often dangerous and generally unhinged hazing of Hell Week, so they could, at last, become active members.
I don't care whether they were ever actually in a fraternity or not, but people like Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan and their boisterous, under-thinking ilk — really, nearly all of the Republicans in Congress — are precisely like a bunch of entitled and semi-educated frat boys who are simply used to getting their way. They insist on it, as toddlers will do. Donald Trump is the president of this house, which has to be Delta Iota Kappa, yes, the proud DIK House. To parrot a favorite Trumpian phrase, as everyone knows, those DIKs should have long ago been kicked off campus and had their charter revoked.
OK, now I have to get the frat-boy concept in. It naturally rides with the golf cart, and it expresses so much—about white privilege, about entitlement, about binge drinking and barfing and "boofing" and generally being obstreperous and having one's way with "the babes" — one way or another. (Ask Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh if you need explanation of any of that.)
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart with various frat-boy buddies, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters — and then scurrying away to hide in a bunker.
Oh, and crying about being a victim and about people not liking him. Well, the phrase is already unwieldy enough and even I've grown weary of it.
I know some of you would quibble with my calling this fascism. You might call this neo-fascism or proto-fascism. But I'm too exhausted at this point to look those up. Call it über-fascism or Kentucky Fried fascism or Adderall fascism, or whatever else you'd like.
Of course none of this is funny. Well, maybe it's mordantly humorous, the way you might laugh involuntarily as unmarked militarized police started shooting rubber bullets your way during a peaceful protest in the United States of America.
Though thwarted to date, the Republican assault on the votes of more than 81 million citizens continues. Eighteen 18 Republican state attorneys general, 126 Republican members of Congress, and a bunch of dead-silent Republican senators have proven themselves more than happy to go along with it. So much for their fervent belief in states' rights, and that thing called the Constitution.
And, yes, for the past number of years all journalists writing op-eds about the dangers of putting the grandson of a man named Drumpf in charge of anything are a bunch of Sinclair Lewis' Doremus Jessups, trying desperately to fight a tyrant with a mere pen. One does what one must.
It's an extended Hell Week in America, at least until this guy is out of office. So you better bone up on that Greek alphabet and be ready to "drop trou" (ask Brett about that one, too). Listen up, plebes, they want you to come out on the other end as active members of something bigly, something terrific — something that's definitely not a democracy.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
We're slipping further into fascism as Trump indulges all his worst ... ›
Trumpism is sliding into fascism — but some progressives are in ... ›
How Donald Trump has constructed a legal infrastructure of fascism ... ›
It has been said that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
Becker1999 from Grove City, OH
December 20, 2020
It has been said that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
This well-known line has been attributed to a number of people — most often to novelist Sinclair Lewis, but also to socialist leader Eugene V. Debs and even to populist Louisiana senator Huey Long — but none of them wrote or said it in precisely the way it has come down to us. It appears to be an aphoristic stone nicely polished by being handled by a lot of people.
To have it reflect our current situation, we need to roughen it up.
When Donald J. Trump was running for president in 2016, Lewis's novel "It Can't Happen Here," written quickly in 1935 as authoritarian leaders were rising in Europe, started to sell out. In it, populist demagogue "Buzz" Windrip, a Democrat (i.e., a pre-Civil Rights Act Democrat, who would be a Republican today), wins the presidency. As Beverly Gage describes it in a 2017 essay for the New York Times, Windrip — who was based on both Long and the anti-Semitic radio priest Father Coughlin — is not exactly Trump, but he's right "there" in a number of respects:
Trump, a man who received five deferments from military service, seems to think the Stars and Stripes is a great-looking lady he can molest. ("I don't even wait!") I suspect he is less handsy with the gal he clearly respects more, the good old Stars and Bars.
Oh, I forgot the tear gas and rubber bullets. So, we append further:
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters.
OK, that's getting too long. But now, naturally, I'm remembering the time fascism was hiding in his bunker (no, not in 1945 Berlin — the more recent time, in Washington). No harm in trying it out, right?
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters — and then scurrying away to hide in a bunker.
But it just becomes less elegant, more ungainly — and so less memorable. There is so much one could add, beyond hiding in that bunker — incessantly watching "Fox & Friends," tweeting instead of working, lying like breathing — that the mind refuses to latch on to anything. There is no substance, just chaos.
Speaking of chaos, Trump and his gang of enablers have always reminded me of the year I spent in a fraternity. Somewhat to my surprise, I was elected pledge class president, and after a tumultuous year I tried my best to get a dozen young men through the seriously stupid, often dangerous and generally unhinged hazing of Hell Week, so they could, at last, become active members.
I don't care whether they were ever actually in a fraternity or not, but people like Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan and their boisterous, under-thinking ilk — really, nearly all of the Republicans in Congress — are precisely like a bunch of entitled and semi-educated frat boys who are simply used to getting their way. They insist on it, as toddlers will do. Donald Trump is the president of this house, which has to be Delta Iota Kappa, yes, the proud DIK House. To parrot a favorite Trumpian phrase, as everyone knows, those DIKs should have long ago been kicked off campus and had their charter revoked.
OK, now I have to get the frat-boy concept in. It naturally rides with the golf cart, and it expresses so much—about white privilege, about entitlement, about binge drinking and barfing and "boofing" and generally being obstreperous and having one's way with "the babes" — one way or another. (Ask Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh if you need explanation of any of that.)
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart with various frat-boy buddies, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters — and then scurrying away to hide in a bunker.
Oh, and crying about being a victim and about people not liking him. Well, the phrase is already unwieldy enough and even I've grown weary of it.
I know some of you would quibble with my calling this fascism. You might call this neo-fascism or proto-fascism. But I'm too exhausted at this point to look those up. Call it über-fascism or Kentucky Fried fascism or Adderall fascism, or whatever else you'd like.
Of course none of this is funny. Well, maybe it's mordantly humorous, the way you might laugh involuntarily as unmarked militarized police started shooting rubber bullets your way during a peaceful protest in the United States of America.
Though thwarted to date, the Republican assault on the votes of more than 81 million citizens continues. Eighteen 18 Republican state attorneys general, 126 Republican members of Congress, and a bunch of dead-silent Republican senators have proven themselves more than happy to go along with it. So much for their fervent belief in states' rights, and that thing called the Constitution.
And, yes, for the past number of years all journalists writing op-eds about the dangers of putting the grandson of a man named Drumpf in charge of anything are a bunch of Sinclair Lewis' Doremus Jessups, trying desperately to fight a tyrant with a mere pen. One does what one must.
It's an extended Hell Week in America, at least until this guy is out of office. So you better bone up on that Greek alphabet and be ready to "drop trou" (ask Brett about that one, too). Listen up, plebes, they want you to come out on the other end as active members of something bigly, something terrific — something that's definitely not a democracy.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
We're slipping further into fascism as Trump indulges all his worst ... ›
Trumpism is sliding into fascism — but some progressives are in ... ›
How Donald Trump has constructed a legal infrastructure of fascism ... ›
Thursday, September 15, 2022
California governor signs controversial law creating healthcare courts for homeless
LIBERAL FASCISM
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the CARE Act into law outside of a San Jose, Calif., mental health treatment center on Wednesday. Photo courtesy of Office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom/Release
Sept. 15 (UPI) -- California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a controversial law to establish so-called CARE courts that can order some people suffering from mental health issues and substance use disorders to submit to mental health treatment.
The Democratic governor signed the Community Assistance Recovery and Empowerment Act during a press conference at a San Jose, Calif., mental health treatment center on Wednesday, calling the law a "paradigm shift" and a "a new path forward" for thousands of homeless Californians suffering from mental health issues.
"This problem is solvable. We know that. We don't have to fall prey to the cynicism and all the negativity that it's just too big and too hard," he said. "It's hard and it's big, but we can meet this moment and we can create many, many moments in the future to do justice to those who need us who are suffering and struggling."
The CARE Act will permit families, clinicians, first responders and other authorized adults to petition a civil court to create a so-called CARE plan for a specific individual experiencing severe mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychotic disorders.
The court can order an individual to comply with the program for up to a year with the option to extend it another 12 months, and provides behavioral healthcare, medication, housing and other services. Those who do not comply with the court-ordered treatment plan may be referred to conservatorship.
Newsom introduced the plan in March and was overwhelmingly passed by the state legislator late last month and amid state efforts to combat issues concerning its unhoused population.
According to statistics from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, as of January 2020, 161,548 people experienced homelessness in the state on any given night, representing 28% of the nation's homeless population.
It also found that California experienced the largest increase in homelessness from the year before and more than half of all unsheltered people in the country were in The Golden State.
The CARE Act includes $15.3 billion to combat homelessness, $11.6 billion for mental health services and $1.4 billion for other health and human services workforce. An additional $63 million will be provided to counties to fund the establishment of CARE courts.
The seven counties of Glenn, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and San Francisco will be the first to be phased into the program on Oct. 1 of next year with all 58 counties needing to be complaint by Dec. 1, 2024.
"This is unprecedented support that we are committing to over the next few years to make this program work," Newsom said, stating the hard work begins now to get the CARE courts and infrastructure up and running.
"We say this all time: Program passing is not necessarily problem solving," he said.
The law, however, has been met with staunched opposition from disability groups and human and civil rights organizations.
Amid consideration of the bill in June, Human Rights Watch issued a lengthy letter voicing strong opposition to the plan, while urging the legislators to reject the bill for "a more holistic, rights-respecting approach to address the lack of resources for autonomy-affirming treatment options and affordable housing."
The New York-based organization said that while the Newsom administration advertises the CARE courts as an "upstream" diversion from criminal legal and conservatorship systems, the bill just creates a new avenue for government and family members to strip people of their autonomy and place them under the state's care.
"Given the racial demographics of California's homeless population, and the historic over-diagnosing of Black and Latino people with schizophrenia, this plan is likely to place many, disproportionately Black and brown people, under state control," it said.
After Newsom signed the bill Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California accused the Democratic governor, who is a potential future presidential candidate, of returning the state to the days of forced treatment.
"There is nothing 'caring' about his so-called CARE Court bill," it said in a statement, saying it expects to see the law challenged in court.
"This outdated and coercive model of placing disabled folks in courtrooms will cause trauma and harm to Californians in vulnerable situations and will reinforce institutional racism."
Newsom disregarded criticisms of the plan from progression groups on Wednesday, telling reporters that their opinions are what have led to the situation the state is now in.
"Their point of view is expressed by what you see on the streets and sidewalks throughout this state," he said. "Their point of view was expressed in the halls of the legislature and they were overwhelming rejected because in a progressive legislature they said: 'Enough. We're going to move in a different direction. We could do more. We could do better. We're not here to listen to the same excuses of why we can't do something; we're going to give this an opportunity.'"
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the CARE Act into law outside of a San Jose, Calif., mental health treatment center on Wednesday. Photo courtesy of Office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom/Release
Sept. 15 (UPI) -- California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a controversial law to establish so-called CARE courts that can order some people suffering from mental health issues and substance use disorders to submit to mental health treatment.
The Democratic governor signed the Community Assistance Recovery and Empowerment Act during a press conference at a San Jose, Calif., mental health treatment center on Wednesday, calling the law a "paradigm shift" and a "a new path forward" for thousands of homeless Californians suffering from mental health issues.
"This problem is solvable. We know that. We don't have to fall prey to the cynicism and all the negativity that it's just too big and too hard," he said. "It's hard and it's big, but we can meet this moment and we can create many, many moments in the future to do justice to those who need us who are suffering and struggling."
The CARE Act will permit families, clinicians, first responders and other authorized adults to petition a civil court to create a so-called CARE plan for a specific individual experiencing severe mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychotic disorders.
The court can order an individual to comply with the program for up to a year with the option to extend it another 12 months, and provides behavioral healthcare, medication, housing and other services. Those who do not comply with the court-ordered treatment plan may be referred to conservatorship.
Newsom introduced the plan in March and was overwhelmingly passed by the state legislator late last month and amid state efforts to combat issues concerning its unhoused population.
According to statistics from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, as of January 2020, 161,548 people experienced homelessness in the state on any given night, representing 28% of the nation's homeless population.
It also found that California experienced the largest increase in homelessness from the year before and more than half of all unsheltered people in the country were in The Golden State.
The CARE Act includes $15.3 billion to combat homelessness, $11.6 billion for mental health services and $1.4 billion for other health and human services workforce. An additional $63 million will be provided to counties to fund the establishment of CARE courts.
The seven counties of Glenn, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and San Francisco will be the first to be phased into the program on Oct. 1 of next year with all 58 counties needing to be complaint by Dec. 1, 2024.
"This is unprecedented support that we are committing to over the next few years to make this program work," Newsom said, stating the hard work begins now to get the CARE courts and infrastructure up and running.
"We say this all time: Program passing is not necessarily problem solving," he said.
The law, however, has been met with staunched opposition from disability groups and human and civil rights organizations.
Amid consideration of the bill in June, Human Rights Watch issued a lengthy letter voicing strong opposition to the plan, while urging the legislators to reject the bill for "a more holistic, rights-respecting approach to address the lack of resources for autonomy-affirming treatment options and affordable housing."
The New York-based organization said that while the Newsom administration advertises the CARE courts as an "upstream" diversion from criminal legal and conservatorship systems, the bill just creates a new avenue for government and family members to strip people of their autonomy and place them under the state's care.
"Given the racial demographics of California's homeless population, and the historic over-diagnosing of Black and Latino people with schizophrenia, this plan is likely to place many, disproportionately Black and brown people, under state control," it said.
After Newsom signed the bill Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California accused the Democratic governor, who is a potential future presidential candidate, of returning the state to the days of forced treatment.
"There is nothing 'caring' about his so-called CARE Court bill," it said in a statement, saying it expects to see the law challenged in court.
"This outdated and coercive model of placing disabled folks in courtrooms will cause trauma and harm to Californians in vulnerable situations and will reinforce institutional racism."
Newsom disregarded criticisms of the plan from progression groups on Wednesday, telling reporters that their opinions are what have led to the situation the state is now in.
"Their point of view is expressed by what you see on the streets and sidewalks throughout this state," he said. "Their point of view was expressed in the halls of the legislature and they were overwhelming rejected because in a progressive legislature they said: 'Enough. We're going to move in a different direction. We could do more. We could do better. We're not here to listen to the same excuses of why we can't do something; we're going to give this an opportunity.'"
OCTOBER 14, 2020
Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime
Art by Nick Roney
“The intellectuals cast a veil over the dictatorial character of bourgeois democracy not least by presenting democracy as the absolute opposite of fascism, not as just another natural phase of it where the bourgeois dictatorship is revealed in a more open form.”
– Bertolt Brecht
Time and again we hear that liberalism is the last bulwark against fascism. It represents a defense of the rule of law and democracy in the face of aberrant, malevolent demagogues intent on destroying a perfectly good system for their own gain. This apparent opposition has been deeply engrained in contemporary so-called Western liberal democracies through their shared origin myth. As every school child in the U.S. learns, for instance, liberalism defeated fascism in World War II, beating back the Nazi beast in order to establish a new international order that—for all of its potential faults and misdeeds—was built upon key democratic principles that are antithetical to fascism.
This framing of the relationship between liberalism and fascism not only presents them as complete opposites, but it also defines the very essence of the fight against fascism as the struggle for liberalism. In so doing, it forges an ideological false antagonism. For what fascism and liberalism share is their undying devotion to the capitalist world order. Although one prefers the velvet glove of hegemonic and consensual rule, and the other relies more readily on the iron fist of repressive violence, they are both intent on maintaining and developing capitalist social relations, and they have worked together throughout modern history in order to do so. What this apparent conflict masks—and this is its true ideological power—is that the real, fundamental dividing line is not between two different modes of capitalist governance, but between capitalists and anti-capitalists. The long psychological warfare campaign waged under the deceptive banner of ‘totalitarianism’ has done much to further dissimulate this line of demarcation by disingenuously presenting communism as a form of fascism. As Domenico Losurdo and others have explained with great historical precision and detail, this is pure ideological pap.
Given the ways in which the current public debate on fascism tends to be framed in relationship to purported liberal resistance, there could scarcely be a timelier task than that of scrupulously re-examining the historical record of actually existing liberalism and fascism. As we shall see even in this brief overview, far from being enemies, they have been—sometimes subtle, sometimes forthright—partners in capitalist crime. For the sake of argument and concision, I will here focus primarily on a conjunctural account of the non-controversial cases of Italy and Germany. However, it is worth stating at the outset that the Nazi racial police state and colonial rampage—which far surpassed Italy’s capabilities—were modeled on the United States.
Liberal Collaboration in the Rise of European Fascism
It is of the utmost importance that Western European fascism emerged within parliamentary democracies rather than conquering them from the outside. The fascists rose to power in Italy at a moment of severe political and economic crisis on the heels of WWI, and then later the Great Depression. This was also a time when the world had just witnessed the first successful anti-capitalist revolution in the U.S.S.R. Mussolini, who had cut his teeth working for MI5 to break up the Italian peace movement during WWI, was later backed by big industrial capitalists and bankers for his anti-worker, pro-capitalist political orientation. His tactic was to work within the parliamentary system, by mobilizing powerful financial supporters to bankroll his expansive propaganda campaign while his black shirts rode roughshod over picket lines and working-class organizations. In October of 1922, magnates in the Confederation of Industry and major bank leaders provided him with the millions necessary for the March on Rome as a spectacular show of force. However, he did not seize power. Instead, as Daniel Guérin explained in his masterful study Fascism and Big Business, Mussolini was summoned by the king on October 29th and was, according to parliamentary norms, entrusted with forming a cabinet. The capitalist state turned itself over without a fight, but Mussolini was intent on forming an absolute majority in parliament with the help of the liberals. They supported his new electoral law in July 1923 and then made a joint slate with the fascists for the election on April 6, 1924. The fascists, who had only had 35 seats in parliament, gained 286 seats with the help of the liberals.
The Nazis rose to power in much the same way, by working within the parliamentary system and courting the favor of big industrial magnates and bankers. The latter provided the financial support necessary to grow the Nazi party and eventually secure the electoral victory of September 1930. Hitler would later reminisce, in a speech on October 19, 1935, on what it meant to have the material resources necessary to support 1,000 Nazi orators with their own cars, who could hold some 100,000 public meetings in the course of a year. In the December 1932 election, the Social Democrat leaders, who were far to the left of contemporary liberals but shared their reformist agenda, refused to form an eleventh-hour coalition with the communists against Nazism. “As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany,” wrote Michael Parenti, “the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” Prior to the election, the Communist Party candidate Ernst Thaelmann had argued that a vote for the conservative Field Marshal von Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and for war. Only weeks after Hindenburg’s election, he invited Hitler to become chancellor.
Fascism in both cases came to power through bourgeois parliamentary democracy, in which big capital bankrolled the candidates who would do its bidding while also creating a populist spectacle—a false revolution—that marshaled or suggested mass appeal. Its conquest of power took place within this legal and constitutional framework, which secured its apparent legitimacy on the home front, as well as within the international community of bourgeois democracies. Leon Trotsky understood this perfectly and diagnosed what was going on at the time with remarkable insight:
The results are at hand: bourgeois democracy transforms itself legally, pacifically, into a fascist dictatorship. The secret is simple enough: bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorship are the instruments of one and the same class, the exploiters. It is absolutely impossible to prevent the replacement of one instrument by the other by appealing to the Constitution, the Supreme Court at Leipzig, new elections, etc. What is necessary is to mobilize the revolutionary forces of the proletariat. Constitutional fetishism brings the best aid to fascism.
Once its power was secure, however, fascism revealed its authoritarian face, transforming itself into what Trotsky referred to as a military-bureaucratic dictatorship of the Bonapartist type. It unflinchingly set about—at a rather different pace in Italy than in Germany—completing the task it had been hired to accomplish by crushing organized labor, eradicating opposition parties, destroying independent publications, putting a halt to elections, scapegoating and eliminating racialized underclasses, privatizing public assets, launching projects of colonial expansion and investing heavily in a war economy beneficial to its industrial supporters. In establishing the direct dictatorship of big capital, it even destroyed some of the more plebeian and populist elements in its own ranks, while crushing many confused liberals under the juggernaut of repressive class warfare.
It was not only within Italy and Germany that bourgeois democracy allowed for the rise of fascism. This was also true internationally. Capitalist states refused to form an antifascist coalition with the U.S.S.R., a country that fourteen of them had invaded and occupied from 1918 to 1920 in a failed attempt to destroy the world’s first workers’ republic. During the Spanish Civil War, which historians like Eric Hobsbawm have characterized as a miniature version of the great mid-century war between fascism and communism, Western liberal democracies did not officially support the left-leaning government that had been elected. Instead, they stood idly by while the Axis powers provided massive support to General Francisco Franco as he oversaw a military coup d’état. It is highly revealing that Franco, a self-declared fascist who is often sidelined in discussions of European fascism, understood with remarkable clarity why the epiphenomenal characteristics of fascism would differ considerably based on the precise conjuncture: “Fascism, since that is the word that is used, fascism presents, wherever it manifests itself, characteristics which are varied to the extent that countries and national temperaments vary.” It was the U.S.S.R. that came to the aid of the Republicans battling fascism in Spain, sending both soldiers and materials. Franco would later return the favor, so to speak, by deploying a volunteer military force to fight godless communism alongside the Nazis. Franco would also, of course, become one of the great postwar allies of the United States in its fight against the Red Menace.
In 1934, the United Kingdom, France and Italy signed the Munich Agreement, in which they agreed to allow Hitler to invade and colonize the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. “The sheer reluctance of Western governments to enter into effective negotiations with the Red state,” wrote Eric Hobsbawm, “even in 1938-39 when the urgency of an anti-Hitler alliance was no longer denied by anyone, is only too patent. Indeed, it was the fear of being left to confront Hitler alone which eventually drove Stalin, since 1934 the unswerving champion of an alliance with the West against him, into the Stalin-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, by which he hoped to keep the U.S.S.R. out of the war.” This non-aggression pact was then disingenuously presented in the Western media as an undeniable indication that the Nazis and communists were somehow allies.
International Capitalism and Fascism
It was not only large industrialists and bankers, as well as landowners, within Italy and Germany that supported and profited from the fascist rise to power. This was equally true of many of the major corporations and banks whose headquarters were in Western bourgeois democracies. Henry Ford was perhaps the most notorious example since in 1938 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, which was the highest honor that could be bestowed upon any non-German (Mussolini had received one earlier the same year). Ford had not only funneled ample funding into the Nazi Party, he had provided it with much of its anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik ideology. Ford’s conviction that “Communism was a completely Jewish creation,” to quote James and Suzanne Pool, was shared by Hitler, and some have suggested that the latter was so close ideologically to Ford that certain passages from Mein Kampf were directly copied from Ford’s anti-Semitic publication The International Jew.
Ford was only one of the American companies invested in Germany, and many other U.S. banks, firms and investors profited handsomely from Aryanizations (the expulsion of Jews from business life and the forced transfer of their property into ‘Aryan’ hands), as well as from the German rearmament program. According to Christopher Simpson’s masterful study, “a half-dozen key U.S. companies—International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and du Pont—had become deeply involved in German weapons production.” In fact, American investment in Germany sharply increased after Hitler came to power. “Commerce Department reports show,” writes Simpson, “that U.S. investment in Germany increased some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe.” The German subsidiaries of U.S. companies like Ford and General Motors, as well as several oil companies, made wide use of forced labor in concentration camps. Buchenwald, for instance, provided concentration camp labor for GM’s enormous Russelsheim plant, as well as for the Ford truck plant located in Cologne, and Ford’s German managers made extensive use of Russian POW’s for war production work (a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions).
John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who would later respectively become the Secretary of State and the head of the CIA, ran Sullivan & Cromwell, which some consider to have been the largest Wall Street law firm at the time. They played a very important role in overseeing, advising and managing global investment in Germany, which had become one of the most important international markets—particularly for American investors—during the second half of the 1920s. Sullivan & Cromwell worked with nearly all of the major U.S. banks, and they oversaw investments in Germany in excess of a billion dollars. They also worked with dozens of companies and governments all over the world, but John Foster Dulles, according to Simpson, “clearly emphasized projects for Germany, for the military junta in Poland, and for Mussolini’s fascist state in Italy.” In the postwar era, Allen Dulles worked tirelessly to protect his business partners, and he was remarkably successful in securing their assets and helping them avoid prosecution.
Whereas most liberal accounts of fascism focus on its political theater and epiphenomenal eccentricities, thereby avoiding a systemic and radical analysis, it is essential to recognize that if liberalism allowed for the growth of European fascism, it is capitalism that drove this growth.
Who Defeated Fascism?
It is not surprising that the bourgeois democracies of the West were extremely slow to open the Western front, allowing their erstwhile enemy, the U.S.S.R., to be bled by the pro-capitalist Nazi war machine (which received ample funding from White Russians). In fact, the day after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Harry Truman flatly declared: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious in any circumstances.” After the U.S. entered the war, powerful officials like Allen Dulles worked behind the scenes to try and broker a peace deal with Germany that would allow the Nazis to focus all of their attention on eradicating the U.S.S.R.
The widespread idea, at least within the U.S., that fascism was ultimately defeated by liberalism in WWII, due primarily to the U.S. intervention in the war, is a baseless canard. As Peter Kuznick, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton reminded listeners in a recent discussion, 80% of the Nazis who died in the war were killed on the Eastern Front with the U.S.S.R., where Germany had deployed 200 divisions (versus only 10 in the West). 27 million Soviets gave their lives fighting fascism, whereas 400,000 American soldiers died in the war (which amounts to approximately 1.5% of the Soviet death toll). It was, above all, the Red Army that defeated fascism in WWII, and it is communism—not liberalism—that constitutes the last bulwark against fascism. The historical lesson should be clear: one cannot be truly antifascist without being anti-capitalist.
The Ideology of False Antagonisms
The ideological construction of false antagonisms, in the case of liberalism and fascism, serves multiple purposes:
+ It establishes the primary front of struggle as one between rival positions within the capitalist camp.
+ It channels people’s energy into fighting over the best methods for managing capitalist rule rather than abolishing it.
+ It eradicates the true lines of demarcation of global class struggle.
+ It attempts to simply take the communist option off the table (by removing it entirely from the field of struggle, or disingenuously presenting it as a form of ‘totalitarianism’).
Not unlike sporting events, which are very important ideological rituals in the contemporary world, the logic of false antagonisms amps up and overinflates all of the idiosyncratic differences and personal rivalries between two opposing teams to such an extent that the frenzied fans come to forget that they are ultimately playing the same game.
In the reactionary political culture of the U.S., which has attempted to redefine the Left as liberal, it is of the utmost importance to recognize that the primary opposition that has structured, and continues to organize, the modern world is the one between capitalism—which is imposed and maintained through liberal ideology and institutions, as well as fascist repression, depending on the time, place and population in question—and socialism. By replacing this opposition by the one between liberalism and fascism, the ideology of false antagonisms aims at making the fight of the century into a capitalist spectacle rather than a communist revolution.
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