rigorousintuition.ca

JackRiddler » Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:07 pm wrote:.

But I agree with most everything you say, including on Alice Miller. I hope I didn't reduce things altogether to variable discourse on procreation (or tactical-rhetorical-performative renderings of the underlying meaning of sexual policy under the NS state to benefit one or another agenda or worldview). It's just that these elements are there. And what the hell motivates "rational" interest, anyway? Why does anyone fucking care about birth rates in the abstract? They're still almost certainly living out a trauma.

Can't say I consult SPLC too often before making my judgment, and I don't think it's necessary with the Suited Brownshirts. McInnes has spoken clearly enough. He openly sought to skirt the legal line for threats and incitement to murder, even discussing the legal angles while doing so. Then his gang went on a public rampage in Manhattan after meeting with the Republican Club, and somehow the cops only arrested the protesters and none of these guys, at least at the scene. Now a couple are in Rikers, may the lord have mercy on their non-existent souls. That's enough information for me. It would be a serious misunderstanding of them to even care where they nominally falls on some ideological markup. McInnes is a trolling terrorist in the right-wing cause, probably more because it's so pleasurable to strike the pose and say the words that melt the snowflakes and maybe actually get his fingers around a random throat than because he believes in some argued doctrine. Political murder as team sports. I shall also remark, absolutely without advocating any action on it, that he has in a sense nominated himself to reap as he sows, to become the unsung Horst Wessel of the American alt-right. Chickens may just come home to roost.

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American Dream » Wed Nov 04, 2015 1:52 pm wrote:

Robert Paxton: What is Fascism?

From Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism




I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feeling than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter 2 I called them “mobilizing passions”:

a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions

the primacy of the group toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it

the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external

dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences

the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary

the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny

the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason

the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success

the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.


Fascism according to this definition, as well as behavior in keeping with these feelings, is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One ('the creation of movements') within all democratic countries – not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions”, especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is currently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular 'march' on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national 'enemies' is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two ('the rooting of fascist movements in the political system') in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past."

~ Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Allen Lane (2004), pp.218–220

www.counterfire.org

The fight against Trumpism: lessons of Hitler’s Munich Putsch


[photo] Hitler after his trial following the Munich Putsch. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00344A / Heinrich Hoffmann / cropped from original / CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE

As far as historical parallels can be made, we must draw the lessons from the past in the fight against fascism, writes John Westmoreland


Since US fascists stormed Capitol Hill at the urging of Donald Trump last Wednesday, commentators have been pulling out analogies from the historical record to try and make sense of it.

The rhetoric of leading US politicians, both Democrat and Republican, and the mainstream media too, would have us believe that the attack by Trump supporters was an attempted fascist coup. Fascists were certainly present, but they were trying to keep Trump in power, not overthrow the system and replace it with a dictatorship.

Walden Bello, for one, has likened the situation in America to Weimar Germany, which was of course overthrown by Hitler and the Nazis. Many have likened the events of last week to Hitler’s 1923 Munich Putsch – a failed attempt at a military coup. But this is hardly a realistic comparison. Weimar Germany was fragile because it was suffering crippling terms imposed by the victors of World War One. Furthermore, the strength of the German Labour movement by comparison was colossal, and made Nazism much more appealing to the ruling class.

Nevertheless, although Weimar Germany then and America today are very different, the political trajectory from Hitler’s failed coup is worth considering. The fractured and often bizarre fascist elements in the USA have to be dealt with. We don’t want them to get organised, we want to crush them in their infancy. And in that sense, the mistakes made by the German left should be avoided at all costs.

Three important issues that 1923 and 2021 have in common are: the attack on parliamentary democracy by the far right; the idealisation of parliament and the rejection of non-parliamentary solutions by the mainstream left; and the two-faced attitude of the forces of the state to law and order.

The Munich Putsch
The Munich Putsch was an attempt to overthrow the democratic Weimar Republic, which replaced the dictatorial rule of Kaiser Wilhelm after Germany’s defeat in 1918. Weimar was considered to be the most democratic constitution in the world.

The First World War was ended by revolution in Germany. That revolution was then brutally suppressed by the army and the Freikorps. The Freikorps were ex-soldiers recruited by former officers into paramilitary units that would later provide the Nazis with their stormtroopers.

The Weimar constitution had progressive features such as proportional representation and universal suffrage. But in reality it was a charade. The Kaiser’s fanatical supporters continued to dominate in the army, civil service and judiciary. German capitalism had been built on blood. It was an imperial power that had brutally crushed domestic opposition, using military force on striking workers on a number of occasions.

In this respect Weimar Germany was much like the US today, a democratic veil covering rapacious capitalist rule. Bourgeois democrats fetishised the Weimar constitution in the same way ‘American democracy’ is given a quasi-religious status today. However, it was always going to end in a battle for power between the contending classes that had fought for and against revolution in 1919. At stake was whether Germany could satisfy the democratic demands of the working class, or whether German capital would turn to militarism to reclaim its place in the world.

When Hitler led his stormtroopers to take over Munich in 1923 his intention was to march on Berlin where he expected the army and remnants of the Kaiser Reich to support him. He was after all working in partnership with the war hero General Ludendorff. This had happened in Italy the year before. Mussolini’s fascists marched on Rome and were simply handed power by the king. It should be noted Italy’s fascist numbers were minute compared to the forces on the left. The state was the deciding factor, and would be in Germany.

Hitler got his timing wrong. The crisis of 1923, when workers led by the KPD had raised the flag of revolution in Saxony and Thuringia, had passed. The ruling class didn’t need Nazism and Hitler never made it out of Munich.

Hitler ended up in court alongside Ludendorff and other conspirators tried for treason, a charge which carried the death penalty. That Ludendorff walked free and Hitler got eighteen months (he served nine months) is usually put down to a lenient judge sympathetic to Hitler’s cause. However, if justice had been served and these ‘patriots’ had been executed it would have been a massive blow to the right. There is little doubt that the army would have entered the fray if Ludendorff had been found guilty, let alone punished.

The ‘democratic’ state decided it was better to compromise with the forces that would eat them alive in 1933 rather than uphold the constitution and equality before the law. The writing was on the wall.

The Democrats and Republicans in the USA are almost certainly going to follow their Weimar forebears. Trump is not going to be sent to prison, and the state is unlikely to challenge the right of Proud Boys and the MAGA crew to bear arms. We don’t have any illusions in the state solving the problem of fascism for us. Fascism’s whole purpose is to destroy the left and working-class organisation. Therefore it’s our job to take care of the fascists, and the state that lets them thrive.

Hitler as Germany’s saviour
What should have put paid to Hitler once and for all rebounded to his favour.

Of course Hitler went to court knowing that the judge was on his side, but what was much more important were the letters he received expressing the admiration of right-wing forces across Germany and beyond. The weird ‘little corporal’ was now a man of national importance.

In his speech from the dock, Hitler mocked the charge sheet and declared that he had acted only in the interests of Germany. The trial was a propaganda coup. Despite him legging it when the shooting started, Hitler was now a hero, denouncing the Weimar traitors, unafraid of his accusers. His eighteen-month sentence was a victory in that it reinforced his noble intentions. Hitler was allowed to manufacture himself as a man of destiny with the court as his stage.

Hitler clearly had fascist views of his own. However, he can be just as easily understood as a creation of the German right. His core views had been taught to him in army indoctrination classes during the revolutionary events after the war. But in prison – where he had private quarters and was treated as a celebrity – he absorbed all the fanciful claims made of him by his adoring fans. In particular he liked the idea that Weimar democracy would betray Germany and only he could save the day.

Hitler had one truly remarkable quality – he could readily absorb the manic energy of the counter-revolution and give voice to its anger. The main advantage he held was that the long-suffering German middle classes – ‘human dust’ to Trotsky – wanted, indeed longed for, someone to believe in. That faith would outweigh any rational argument. Matters were to be settled on the streets.

However, it has to be said that Hitler learned the lessons of 1923 much better than his democratic opponents. Hitler correctly judged the coup attempt to have been mistaken. Ludendorff was unreliable and Berlin was not ready for dictatorship. He decided that instead of leading a military insurrection the best way to power was through the Reichstag, and using the chaotic proportional voting system to expose its weakness.

The Nazi terror stands as a reminder of why the left should never ape bourgeois democrats who fetishise their constitutions. To Germany’s respectable parliamentarians Hitler’s taking their democratic system seriously somehow made him safe. The ban on the Nazis was dropped. Hitler cashed in on his celebrity. He soon outplayed the democrats at their own game.

If the American left falls behind the Democrats in dealing with Trump through constitutional manoeuvres instead of leading a fight against fascism and the system that incubates it, further perils await us.

1929 and the collapse of Weimar
In 1929 the American banks that had loaned Germany the capital they needed to reboot their economy recalled their loans. The result would be over six million unemployed workers, and the collapse of German banking.

Defenders of the Weimar Republic like to say that it was brought down by external forces. Outside forces can be blamed for initiating the crisis in Germany, but the German economy was already in trouble. And the Weimar system proved totally inadequate when the crisis hit. A good case can be made against liberal historians who like to say that extremists of the left and right brought down Weimar. It was in fact the Weimar parties themselves who deserted democracy.

In 1930 the ‘grand coalition’ governed Germany, with the SPD’s (German Labour Party) Hermann Muller as Chancellor. It was touted as the most successful democratic government the Weimar Republic had seen. But democracy is of little use to a capitalist class in crisis. Furthermore Weimar’s system of proportional representation meant coalition governments were inevitable, and inherently unstable when the pressure was on. When coalition government broke down the President ruled by appointing his own Chancellor and cabinet.

The Muller coalition government ended in March 1930. The issue was one we are familiar with. Should the working class pay for the crisis? Muller took the view that impoverishing the workers would make the crisis worse. The SPD had been a mainstay of Weimar democracy. They had helped crush the German Revolution in 1919 in favour of a parliamentary system. They desperately wanted to keep their voters onside with the Communists starting to make headway.

The other Weimar parties knew that if they abandoned the coalition they would be voting for class rule in place of democracy, yet this is precisely what they did. In 1933 they would vote for Hitler’s Enabling Act upon which his dictatorship was founded.

The view of the majority of the Weimar parties – the two liberal parties, the Catholic Centre Party and the Conservatives (still loyal to the Kaiser) – was that benefits and protections must be cut. Muller was therefore forced to resign. Germany was now under the direction of its ailing reactionary President, General Paul von Hindenburg.

The period of presidential rule, 1930-33, saw Germany’s ruling class pave the way for Hitler to become Chancellor.

Terrified of democracy in a period of acute working-class suffering, the elites channelled power into their own hands. The Reichstag hardly sat. Hindenburg appointed the right-wing Catholic Heinrich Brüning as Chancellor who made swingeing cuts to wages and benefits.

Brüning was then replaced by the aristocratic Franz von Papen whose ‘Cabinet of the Barons’ smashed the left-wing stronghold of Prussia and imposed direct control and a virtual dictatorship. The Nazis took full advantage of the situation. Many see Papen’s ‘Prussian coup’ as the last chance for the left to reassert its power. The failure of the SPD to defend their territory was disastrous.

It was von Papen who persuaded Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor in January 1933. He hoped Hitler would smash working-class organisation and then be replaced. Papen boasted that “We’ve hired him”.

Throughout the period of presidential rule, Hitler pursued a two-pronged assault on Weimar democracy and the left. Nazi stormtroopers were more or less given free rein to terrorise the left, breaking up meetings and murdering their opponents. At the same time, Hitler used the decay and chaos to present himself as Germany’s saviour. He openly boasted that if he became Chancellor he would end parliamentary democracy, and yet the ruling class threw money at the Nazis to bring the working class to heel.

The ‘Hitler myth’ of him seizing power couldn’t be further from the truth. Hitler was rewarded by the elites and helped into power on the promise that he would crush democracy and the left, and return Germany to greatness.

The Weimar state transitioned into the Nazi state without much difficulty. Individuals and groups resisted to an extent, but acquiescence under the excuse of ‘national duty’ was the main attitude of state officials, who later claimed to be only ‘doing my job’.

This is important today. Around the world, neoliberal capitalism is vomiting up fascist and authoritarian figures who have been able to seize the state and direct it against trade unionists and socialists. The industrial military complex is no defence against fascism in America either.

The lessons for the left
There were plenty of opportunities for the German left to stop Hitler.

Even in 1933 Trotsky argued that the German left had the organisation and strength to smash the Nazis if they joined in a united front with the single aim of defeating Nazism. The SPD and the KPD (Communists) outnumbered the Nazis, and the working class were incomparably stronger than the middle class rubbish that ran to Hitler. A united call to action would mobilise millions of German workers against the Nazis and the ruling class hiding behind them.

The crisis today is different in so many ways from the crisis in the 20s and 30s. But there is a crisis, and the ruling class is happy to use right-wing populists and let bullies have the field. In that sense we have to act independently from the parties of the ruling class and their state.

The working class is the decisive factor in politics, as it always has been. The left needs to build a mass active anti-fascist movement to take on the fascists on the street. Numbers are important because we have to show we are the majority. This will be vital this Sunday and next Wednesday when once again Trump’s supporters are threatening to challenge Biden’s Presidential inauguration. The police and National Guard will be visible. But they are there to show who is in charge, not to defend us.

We need to take on the system that breeds fascism too. Therefore we should not march to defend Biden but to protest the system both Democrats and Republicans prop up. We need a movement built around working-class demands that will channel our economic and political anger against the system.

www.salon.com
Trump the fascist artist: How the MAGA crowd is motivated by aesthetics, not ideas
A Marxist philosopher named Walter Benjamin foresaw the rise of Trumpism more than eighty years ago

By MATTHEW ROZSA
DECEMBER 5, 2020 7:00PM (UTC)
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/05/trump- ... -not-ideas


More than eighty years ago, a then-obscure German philosopher wrote an essay that foresaw the essential reason behind President Donald Trump's enduring political appeal. His name was Walter Benjamin; born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Benjamin was present for a pivotal moment in history, and watched Hitler rise to power. By the time he wrote his most famous essay, he was an exile living in France amidst financial hardships, having recognized that the Reichstag fire three years earlier signified that the Nazis had achieved total power in Germany.

In 1936 — as Hitler was violating international treaties with impunity and preparing Germany for war (a threat that many Western powers did not take seriously) — Benjamin, a Marxist and a Jew who was thus obviously opposed to the Nazis, postulated that modern fascists succeed when they are entertainers. Not just any entertainer — a circus clown or a juggler-turned-fascist wouldn't do. Specifically, modern fascists were entertainers with a distinct aesthetic, one that appeals to mass grievances by encouraging their supporters to feel like they are personally expressing themselves through their demagogue of choice.

Benjamin's insight, which appears to have been largely forgotten, is that keeping fascism out of power means recognizing how they use aesthetic entertainment to create their movements. That does require us to admit, cringe-inducing though it may be, that Trump is an artist — albeit a tacky, shallow and transparently self-aggrandizing one. More importantly, his movement, the MAGA crowd, has a distinct aesthetic which he has created and honed for them.

The key passage from Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which was published in 1936, deserves to be quoted in full:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

Earlier in the essay, Benjamin describes how the history of art itself had changed in modern history. Although works of art were initially created carefully by individual craftsmen working under mentors, industrialization made it possible for art to be produced on a large scale and distributed quickly and easily among millions of people. (Bear in mind that he wrote this in 1936, when printing presses and radio were the main means of mass distribution, television was in its infancy and the internet had yet to be conceived.)

Not surprisingly, this meant that politicians had learned how to utilize art to advance their own agendas. Fascists, however, took things one step further: They recognized that, by using purely aesthetic entertainment to create solidarity among their supporters, they could distract them from the economic and social forces oppressing them, and instead build political movements based around the ability to creatively express their grievances. In other words, you could promote policies that rampantly redistributed wealth upwards, consolidated power in the hands of a few and dismantled democracies, and one's followers would not care as long as they had the aesthetic entertainment to comfort them and make them believe they were being heard by those very politicians who fundamentally despised them.

Because Benjamin was most concerned with Adolf Hitler, who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, his essay drew particular attention to Hitler's love of extravagant military exhibitions. Clearly, there are parallels to Trump, who has used gaudy military pageantry in unprecedented ways to impress his supporters, as well as declared literal war on many of his own citizens, in part to achieve that same effect. Benjamin quotes Italian fascist and futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose celebration of war is chillingly poetic:

War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.

Obviously, Trump's understanding of art and entertainment precedes his military displays, and may explain how he became the first president to lack either political or military experience. Acknowledging that he did not actually write the books like "The Art of the Deal," which helped make him famous, he still played a major role in choosing the faux-opulent and brassy architectural style that distinguished his early buildings. He was a major creative force behind his hit reality TV show "The Apprentice," which he hosted for a decade until shortly before he began his 2016 presidential campaign. While it would be a stretch to describe Trump as having the soul of an artist, he has always intuitively understood that people like to be entertained, and that making a spectacle of your businesses (such as his real estate holdings) and of oneself (such as through his reality TV show) is good for business.

By developing a knack for entertaining the masses in a self-promotional way — whether by claiming credit for art he did nothing to produce, like "The Art of the Deal," or actually playing a role in artistic choices over investments like his buildings and his TV show — Trump created an image for himself as the quintessential American businessman, the type of billionaire that, as comedian John Mulaney astutely observed in 2009, is a caricature of what a hobo might imagine a wealthy person to be like. For the first sixty-plus years of his life, Trump became adept at using aesthetic presentations to make himself into a pop culture icon.

When he decided to run for president, he simply transferred that understanding to the political realm.

There are two main ways that he did this prior to his presidency, both of which he has continued to do during his administration. The first is through his tweets, which took advantage of Americans' dwindling attention span by regularly packing memorable, punchy ideas into very small packages. As Amanda Hess wrote in Slate back in 2016, the secret to Trump's ability to create a political movement off of Twitter is that "whether he realizes it or not—and he's tweeted that he has 'a very high IQ,' so I'm assuming he does—his most Trump-ian tweets manage to hit upon all three of Aristotle's modes of persuasion: logos (the appeal to logic), ethos (the appeal to credibility), and pathos (the appeal to emotion)."

Trump has tweeted so much that it would take an entire academic paper to deconstruct all of them thoroughly, but Hess' analysis of a Trump tweet directed at one of his rivals in the 2016 Republican primaries, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is quite revealing. After quoting Trump's tweet — "Jeb Bush never uses his last name on advertising, signage, materials etc. Is he ashamed of the name BUSH? A pretty sad situation. Go Jeb!" — Hess points out that "he seized on a truth about Jeb Bush's campaign branding, leveraged it to question the very legitimacy of the Bush name, declared the situation 'sad,' and still had leftover space to offer some condescending words of encouragement."

One finds the same strategy in his tweets trying to delegitimize Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election, which the president insists he won even though he has repeatedly failed in court to prove any of his claims. On Thursday he nevertheless tweeted, "The 'Republican' Governor of Georgia, [Brian Kemp], and the Secretary of State, MUST immediately allow a signature verification match on the Presidential Election. If that happens, we quickly and easily win the State and importantly, pave the way for a big David and Kelly WIN!" Again, Trump very strategically packed a lot into this single tweet: An insult against a fellow Republican who he feels has been disloyal by not helping him steal the election, to inspire anger; a seeming appeal to logic by requesting "a signature verification match"; and the offer of rewards for other powerful if his wishes are granted.

But the other aesthetic that Trump has honed impeccably is the art of trolling. As my colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote in her book "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself," this fit with a longstanding trend among American conservatives. Indeed, for years before Trump's rise, they began transitioning away from advocating for traditional conservative ideas and instead focused on encouraging their followers to be bitter, hateful and paranoid. Over time, American right-wing politics was no longer defined by beliefs, but by intense hostility toward perceived threats that they invariably attributed to the left.

"Watch Fox News any day of the week, and most of what they cover is a bunch of segments about how liberals are hypocrites or liberals are the worst," Marcotte told Salon in 2018 when discussing her book. "Everything is just reinforcing the stereotype of liberals as these hate objects you can just feel justified in trying to punish." She later added that "conservative audiences respond to this kind of media because they want to. I think we underestimate how much people are going to do what they want to do and believe what they want to believe." While Trump supporters may recognize that certain government programs help them, they will disregard those facts if a right-winger appeals to their hostility toward racial minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants or members of other marginalized groups.

This trolling approach defines Trump's official speeches, his press conferences, the rhetoric he employs at political rallies and virtually every other aspect of his political life. For his followers, this type of communication trope has become ingrained into their being. Plenty of conservative politicians appealed to their supporters' basest instincts prior to Trump, but the president and his followers made overtly vilifying the left and gleefully savoring upsetting leftists through their words and actions into their central appeal. He did this when he kicked off his aborted 2012 presidential campaign by promoting a racist conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama and his successful 2016 effort by disparaging Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. He has done this on the countless occasions when he has made inflammatory statements about important issues that inevitably upset the left and, just as inevitably, put Trump in the headlines. He and his supporters have even sold T-shirts with controversial messages by appealing to supporters' desire to "drive liberals crazy." Frequently, Trump supporters will actually admit that they don't agree with his rhetoric, but they enjoy his sadistic bullying because it makes them feel good. In other words, they connect with the aesthetic.

Trump's is an an approach that goes beyond mere rhetoric and enters the realm of performance art, a fact that Trump himself unintentionally acknowledged during his first speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, when he urged his supporters to chant "12 more years" in order to "really drive [liberals] crazy." That moment epitomized precisely how Trump has transformed traditional political rhetoric into performance art: Instead of simply making the case for his candidacy or advocating for certain ideas, Trump focused on creating a moment in which he would entreat his followers to join him in a performance — not for a major political point, but simply to elicit a desired emotional response from their supposed common enemy. It was the type of performance art that Trump has perfected: To act like a troll, and encourage his supporters to act like trolls, and thereby create an act of mass catharsis through creative self-expression that did absolutely nothing to address any legitimate economic or social concerns that his supporters might have.

If Trump was simply using these ends to advance an otherwise traditional political career, it would debase democracy but not necessarily pose a threat to it. The problem is that Trump is not a traditional American politician; he has all the hallmarks of being a fascist. As Italian philosopher Umberto Eco wrote in a 1995 essay about fascism, "behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives." There are many drives that fuel fascist movements and are present with Trump, including a glorification of an imagined past through appeals to traditionalism (hence Trump's slogan to "Make America Great Again"), a hostility toward intellectuals and a fear of difference (to quote Eco, "the first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders" and is thus "racist by definition"). Fascist movements also pander to the individual and social frustrations of their followers, heavily rely on nationalism, convince themselves that their opponents are elitists and utilize a specific type of machismo that "implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality." When fascists talk about their support of "the People," it is not in terms of a belief in individual rights but rather as "a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People."

Even if Trump never again holds political office, the fascist tendencies that he exploited will continue to thrive, and it is not inconceivable that a future fascist political aspirant will figure out how to replicate his ability to create a political aesthetic as the glue that holds their movement together. The ongoing debacle over Trump's refusal to accept his 2020 election loss is a perfect example of that. For Trump himself, this is almost certainly a symptom of his obvious narcissism, the fact that in his world nothing is worse than being a "loser." Yet it is telling that so many people are buying into his claims (a recent poll found that 73 percent of likely Republican voters and 44 percent of all likely voters are questioning Biden's victory), despite there being no evidence of voter fraud whatsoever.

Even if Trump miraculously vanishes from the political scene after leaving office, his lies about the 2020 election are likely to foreshadow future ways in which American fascists use mass entertainment to win over support. As Marcotte recently noted, polls show that most Republican voters do believe that their votes counted, and there are no plausible signs of waning interest in participating in future elections, because they realize that Trump's claims of being robbed are yet another performance art piece in which they can participate.

"Republican voters understand perfectly that Trump's lies are part of a con game — and they imagine they're in on the con," Marcotte wrote. Replace "con" with "spectacular show," or "mass entertainment," or even (dare I say it) "work of art." That's the Trump aesthetic.

The reality is that the problems facing ordinary Americans economically, socially, ecologically and internationally are largely due to the forces identified by the left: income inequality, lack of access to basic needs like healthcare, student debt, predatory lending and so on are all side effects of capitalism. Yet as long as fascists know how to win over supporters by appealing to an aesthetic — whether military parades and catchy tweets or trolling public statements and conspiracy theories that exist mainly to create a shared false narrative that can upset and delegitimize the left — their followers will misidentify the source of their misery, as Benjamin foresaw.

Liberalism: the two-faced tyranny of wealth

1. The rule of money

2. Liberalism as deception

3. Liberalism and fascism

4. Fake “lessons from history”

5. A spectacle of lies

6. Case study: Macronist France

7. Conclusions

https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/l ... of-wealth/

[...]

3. Liberalism and fascism

prison2

If one pillar of liberalism is deceit, the other is the inherent violence of the capitalist system, which this deceit serves to conceal.

This violence is deeply embedded in the system. There is violence in the fact that we are excluded from living freely on and from the land; there is violence in the way that refusal to take part in the capitalist system risks leading to homelessness, hunger and early death; there is violence in the imposition of the system’s laws, whether this is carried out by a bailiff, a cop, a judge or a prison warden.

Sometimes this violence does not even have to be real. It is the threat of violence which imposes the system’s will and control. But this threat is still violence, in the same way that it is violence to hold a knife at someone’s throat to force them to act in a certain way.

When things are going well for capitalist society, economic liberals can put on the mask of political liberalism and pretend that they are absolutely committed to “freedom and democracy”.

But when their power is under threat, they are forced to qualify such commitment with talk of emergencies and crises and very quickly withdraw the “rights” they were so proud to hand out to the population.

riot dogs

Usually, a brief period of repression will be enough to restore liberal order and they can then go back to showing their other, smiley, face. But sometimes faith in their system has been so eroded, and the threat of radical change or even revolution so great, that liberalism is forced to take on an even more severe form.

This is, roughly, the argument made by Ishay Landa in his book The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism. As the title hints, Landa regards fascism as being a continuation and adaptation of liberalism.

He writes: “Far from being the antithesis of fascism, an absolute Other, the liberal order significantly contributed to fascism, informing many of its far reaching manifestations… Fascism was an organic product of developments largely (that is to say: not entirely) from within liberal society and ideology. It was an extreme attempt at solving the crisis of liberalism, breaking out of its aporia, and saving the bourgeoisie from itself”. (10)

Ishay Landa bookIf fascists were (and are) often critical of liberalism, he explains, it was not on account of its economics, its capitalism. It was, rather, the nice face of liberalism, the political liberalism of human rights and democratic liberties, which irritated them. The fascists’ main criticism was that liberalism was too nice, too weak, too eroded by its own “democratic” posturing, to effectively see off the threat posed by “the masses”, by socialism, communism or anarchism, to the status quo.

Landa marshals an impressive range of voices from the liberal and fascist traditions to demonstrate just how much they have in common.

He points, for example, to the 17th century English liberal philosopher John Locke, who justified the use of violence to protect sacrosanct “property”, endorsed child labour from the age of three, wished to criminalise beggars and vagabonds and wrote of the need to bring the masses to “obedience”, adding: “The greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe”. (11)

Landa also examines the work of Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), a liberal economist who had an enormous influence on Benito Mussolini and on Italian Fascism in general. Pareto was committed to an unfettered capitalism, arguing that market forces arose from the “strength of life”. (12)

nazi worker poster
Nazi propaganda
The notion that there was something socialist about fascism can be traced back to the fascists themselves, notably with the term “national socialism”.

But the fascists, like the liberals, had no qualms about using deceit to advance their cause and Landa argues that their “socialism” was deliberately misleading from the very start, a kind of “redwashing” or branding of their pro-capitalist agenda to make it acceptable to the public and, at the same time, to undermine genuine socialism.

He notes: “Capitalism had scarce little popular appeal after the First World War and amidst protracted world economic crisis. A much better prospect for supporters of capitalism lay in feigning to embrace socialism, so as to infiltrate it inside an ideological and political Trojan horse and defeat it from within”. (13)

Today’s received wisdom that there was something “anti-capitalist” about historical fascism is false, and swallows fascist propaganda at face value.

nazis and coca-colaNazism in power was right-wing, extremely right-wing! It was so far from being socialist or anti-capitalist that it won the support of some of the most prominent German industrialists, such as Alfred and Gustav Krupp, Kurt Shröder, Frantz Thyssen and Albert Vögler (14) and had good relationships with the likes of IBM and Coca-Cola.

The mere fact of state intervention in the economy is no indicator of socialistic intent, says Landa. The important question that we need to ask is “on whose side and for whose benefit did the fascists intervene in the economy?” (15)

The answer is that they did so for the benefit of the capitalists. As historian John Weiss notes: “Hitler used tax relief policies, for example, to push production by heavy industry to a maximum”. (16)

This was not a state intervention from the left, but from the right, stresses Landa, intended “to boost the economic and political interests of capitalism”. (17)

Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was a great enthusiast for private property and free enterprise. He regarded economic competition between individuals, the “play of free forces”, as being essential for a nation’s health. Only this way could be the “aristocratic principle of nature” assure that the fittest persons, “superior individuals”, would prevail. (18)

And, like other economic liberals, the Nazi dictator believed that political liberalism had to be ditched in order to allow capitalism to maintain control, declaring in a speech to industrialists: “It is impossible to sustain market-economy in a period of democracy”. (19)

Hitler’s warmongering economic expansionism was greatly inspired by the example of the liberal-capitalist British Empire. He enthused in Mein Kampf: “No nation has more carefully prepared its economic conquest with the sword with greater brutality and defended it later on more ruthlessly than the British…. England always possessed the armament that she needed. She always fought with the weapons that were required for success”. (20)

He praised Britain for the “great work-camps for all sorts of parasites” (21) it had built in South Africa and later, of course, made his own deadly use of the model.

Concludes Landa: “Rather than seeing Hitler’s system as a departure from the way of the West, it makes more sense to conceive of Nazism as a fanatic, die-hard attempt to pursue the logic of Western 19th century capitalism to its utmost conclusion, to go all the way, rejecting the contemptuous compromises of the bourgeoisie with socialism”. (22)

4. Fake “lessons from history”

VE Day

After the defeat of historical fascism, the baton of The Big Lie was passed back into the hands of mainstream liberalism.

Post-war liberalism was, of course, happy to use the modern sophisticated propaganda techniques developed by fascism for its own purposes, not least in commercial advertising campaigns.

But it went a step further by using the example of fascism, and indeed the lies propagated by fascism about own agenda, as additional weapons in its endless war to conceal the truth about capitalist “democracy” and to vilify opponents of its system.

[...]

winteroak.org.uk
Fascism, newnormalism and the left
by Paul Cudenec
https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/07/26/fas ... -the-left/


Sometimes secondhand books can come into our possession in ways that make it quite clear they need us to read them.

Such was the case with Le fascisme italien by Pierre Milza and Serge Berstein, (1) which reached me by means of a random sequence of events including a friend moving flat, an unexpected traffic jam and a small public park on the outskirts of Paris.

It did not disappoint and, as I am about to explain in more detail, helped me to see a number of crucial issues more clearly.

Firstly, it confirmed that, despite constant claims to the contrary, fascism was not at all anti-capitalist, but extremely pro-capitalist.

Secondly, it presented interesting parallels with the Coronavirus-linked totalitarian mindset so dominant in 2020, which I am calling ‘newnormalism’.

Thirdly, it sparked some wider reflection on my part about the participation of most of the left in this 21st century authoritarianism and how that relates to my own anti-fascist position.

FASCISM AND CAPITALISM

It is well known, I think, that Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, began his political career on the left and, when he started building a movement immediately after the First World War, the initial programme that attracted support was left-wing, with anarchist influences.


However, as Milza and Berstein make abundantly clear, this prototype fascism was quickly and drastically ditched as Mussolini realised the only way he was going to gain the power he craved was with the support of capitalists and big landowners.

Much much later, at the end of the Second World War, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to rally the Italian people behind them in the face of defeat, the hardcore fascist Saló republic rediscovered their socialist side, but it was all hopelessly too late.

Having lived through the fascist ventennio (20 years), the population were not going to fall for any more redwashing attempts or superficial anti-bourgeois posturing. They had seen clearly that fascism in power defended the interests of Capital, rather than the people.

The authors trace this story back to 1910, when the Italian Nationalist Association was founded with “the support of certain business circles, in particular that of heavy industry”, (2) who had a very obvious direct vestes interest in promoting the nationalist call for Italian participation in the approaching war in Europe.

It was Mussolini’s sudden support for Italy going to war (on the Allied side), that led to him being thrown out of the socialist party, the PSI, splitting from others on the left. This left him ideally placed to benefit from capitalist funding, though it is not clear whether his conversion to the war cause was actually motivated by this consideration.

It is known that Mussolini received money from the French government and from pro-war businessmen like Filippo Naldi.

The first fascist general assembly in 1919 took place in a hall in Milan lent by a group of wealthy capitalists.

Funds started to roll in from business, banks and big landowners

Fascism benefited greatly from the ruling classes’ fear of a Bolshevik-style revolution in Italy, with post-war waves of strikes and a rural movement which reclaimed land from rich property owners.

Explain the authors: “The fear born in the world of the country landowners as a result of the land occupation movement greatly outlived the phenomenon itself and helped pushed them into the arms of fascism, through fear of a challenge to property rights”. (3)

Business organisations such as Confagricoltura and Confindustria were set up to defend capitalism. Fascism was happy to win favour by providing them with foot soldiers, squadristi, who physically attacked trade unionists and leftists in a wave of “preventative counter-revolution”. (4)

This, say Milza and Berstein, represented fascism’s big break and funds started to roll in from business, banks and big landowners.

Moreover, the fascists started receiving the support of local authorities, the army and the police in their fight against leftist ‘subversion’. They were the system’s emergency weapon against the threat of revolution.

“Prefects, magistrates and officers of the Carabinieri, let the fascists carry on and assure them of impunity. The moment that the State started to crumble, the bourgeoisie, so frightened by the popular uprising of 1919-20, lent their support to fascism’s reactionary violence”. (5)


Fascist squadristi
In November 1920, for instance, violent fascist squads descended on Bologna, where the radical left had gained control of the local council. There were nine deaths and more than 100 injuries.

Elsewhere, in the next couple of years, they smashed up trade union and co-operative HQs and attacked working-class districts, wielding clubs and revolvers to force strikers back to work.

By now the fascists had stopped pretending to be left-wing and were openly singing the praises of capitalism and economic liberalism. (6)

Fascist economic policies were all in the interests of the ruling class.

“Mussolini himself set before the future party a manfesto which no longer owed anything to the leftist tendencies of 1919. In the economic realm it was absolute liberalism, with the State indulging in no intervention or nationalisation, or any fiscal measures deemed ‘populist’. On the political and social side, a strong State was to be created, capable of imposing the ban on strikes in the public sector”. (7)

This was authoritarian capitalism, meant to please “the big money interests from whom Mussolini was now seeking political and financial backing”. (8)

As the future dictator said himself: “We are liberal economically, but we will never be so politically”. (9) This was a question of sacrificing political liberalism in the interests of economic liberalism, aka capitalism. (10) (For more on the little-appreciated similarities between fascism and liberalism, see this article on the orgrad website)


Once the fascists were in power, the clamp-down on opposition was ruthless. Strikes were banned and workers found themselves defenceless against their bosses.

Fascist economic policies were all in the interests of the ruling class. When finance minister Alberto De Stefani reformed the tax system in 1923 this “was above all to the profit of the rich”. (11)

He offered tax breaks for foreign investors, did away with the “red tape” of bodies controlling food prices and rents, ended state funding for co-operatives and halted land reforms which threatened the interests of rich landowners.

After 1925, in the face of economic crisis, the pure economic liberalism of the Manchester School went out of the window, in favour of state intervention.

But this was intervention in the interests of business and Capital, not in the interests of the Italian people whom fascism mendaciously claimed to represent!

‘Development’ was at the forefront of fascist plans, as is the case with all industrial capitalists. More land was cultivated and an infrastructure of roads, new towns and industrial estates was built.


“A vast programme of public works was undertaken, carried out by private firms, who were offered lucrative contracts by the State. Electrification of the rail system began, with the construction of tunnels on the Rome-Naples and Bologna-Florence lines. A massive roadbuilding programme was entrusted to ANAS (Azienda Nazionale Autonoma delle Strade), created in 1928, which oversaw the showcase construction of big toll motorways, the first in Europe”. (12)

This was nothing other than a bailing-out of the capitalist economy by the pro-business fascist state, for which the cost would ultimately have to be borne by the public.

Ring any bells in 2020?

Banks were also treated to fascist largesse, notably BCI, saved by the Italian state with a massive influx of money.

Note the authors: “There was neither socialisation nor nationalisation. The State became capitalist; it guaranteed the property of most of the shareholders and their future dividends. The only socialisation was that of the losses, assumed by the public purse”. (13)


In 1931, Mussolini even set up a body, L’Istituto mobiliare italiano, with the role of helping businesses in financial trouble, declaring that this was “a means of energetically driving the Italian economy towards its corporative phase, which is to say a system which fundamentally respects private property and initiative, but ties them tightly to the State, which alone can protect, control and nourish them”. (14)

But the emphasis was very much on the big businesses and financiers allied with the fascist regime. Economic crisis saw numerous small and medium-sized firms go to the wall or gobbled up by big companies, as the fascist state aided this concentration of wealth into ever-fewer hands. (15)

“As for the working classes,” add Milza and Berstein, “they paid the price for this alliance, with unemployment, reduced wages and higher cost of living”. (16)

Fascist corporatism, with its officially-approved phoney trade unions, was supposed to bring together workers and bosses in the interests of the nation, but did nothing of the sort: “It allowed big industry and financial groups to use the State’s arbitration and power of coercion to reinforce their positions and impose their law on their employees”. (17)

“Far from being destroyed by fascism as the first proto-fascist manifesto suggested, Italian capitalism found in it a defender which managed to save it from revolution or collapse and went on to reinforce its structures and its means of action”. (18)

It was not for nothing that the bankers of J.P. Morgan boosted the fascist regime with a $100m loan between 1925 and 1927 (19) or that Winston Churchill praised, during a 1927 visit, Mussolini’s success in defending Italy from what he termed international subversion. He meant the radical left. (20)

FASCISM AND NEWNORMALISM


Already, in the above account of Milza and Berstein’s work, there are some striking parallels with society a hundred years after the fascists seized power in Italy, in particular regarding the way in which a pro-capitalist regime will use the power of the State not to control big business, but to rescue it from collapse, defend its wealth and impose its interests on the people.

But the similarities become still more alarming when we consider the ideological framing of the fascist mission.

Everything was to be “new” under fascism. A new creed for a new Italian people in a new Italy. The old days were gone for good and nothing would ever be the same again. Mussolini’s dictatorship was the New Normal.

The regime tried to change the date to symbolise this complete rupture, insisting that party members stopped thinking in terms of the 1920s or 1930s and instead spoke of Year 8 or 10 of the fascist New Order. (21)

It also tried to abolish handshakes – not because they might spread disease but because they represented the decadent old world that had been left behind. Socially-distanced fascist salutes were preferred. (22)


It hoped that a fascist future would be carried forward by a new brainwashed generation, building a cult of youth and a structure of youth organisations which aimed to foster “obedience and fanatical attachment to the regime”. (23)

Fascism differed from other pro-capitalist and authoritarian regimes in that it aimed to reshape, to reinvent, everything about society.

Milza and Berstein stress “its totalitarian character, in other words the way in which it tried to direct and control every aspect of every individual’s activity and thinking”. (24)

These early 20th century fascists, like the newnormalists today, were obsessed with “remodelling the social body and transforming it radically”. (25)

Mussolini dreamed of “the fascisisation of the spirit, complete transformation of society and the creation of a new man… with a radically new conception of the world”. (26)


It is when we look at what this new fascist existence would actually involve that we can begin to understand the agenda behind this early experiment in behavioural change.

Explain the authors: “It was about reducing all Italians to the same model, that of the fascist man. This ‘new’ man was not to be defined by ideas, actions, faith or social utility but by a ‘style’, the fascist custom, taken straight from futurist raptures. Speed, dynamism, efficiency and decisiveness were its main components”. (27)

Futurism, one of the great inspirations for Italian fascism, was the ideology of industrialism, of the man-machine, of the surrender of all that was human and natural to the giant cogs and turbines of technological progress.

One of the great successes of the fascist period in Italy was the acceleration of the working rhythm

20th century industrial capitalism needed a new kind of human being – a regimented, automated human being – to fit in with its brave new world and the unimaginable profits and power that could roll off its factory conveyor belts.

Inconveniently, actual human beings – reactionaries, oldthinkers, enemies of progress – did not seem to want to remould themselves to suit the requirements of capitalist machinery, so compulsion was required.

“Only a strong power could impose on the masses the sacrifices necessary for the accumulation of capital”, (28) note Milza and Berstein and, indeed, one of the great successes of the fascist period in Italy was “the acceleration of the working rhythm”. (29)


Mussolini wanted to “modernise” Italians in the way that Margaret Thatcher modernised British people in the 1980s or in which Emmanuel Macron has been trying to modernise the French with his own brand of neoliberal authoritarianism.

And today there is a global attempt to modernise us all in order to suit the requirements of 21st century capitalism and its nightmarish Fourth Industrial Repression.

We are to be reduced to fearful, isolated, obedient and dependent cattle owned and exploited by a ruthless and truthless financial elite.

Once again, we have not been shuffling fast enough towards the abyss on our own, so “strong power” has been activated, on the back of the Coronavirus hysteria, to shove us deeper into the jaws of the life-consuming industrial beast.

The propagandistic language, hysterical mass brainwashing and police-state coercion used by the newnormalists for their “Great Reset” are straight out of Mussolini’s hundred-year-old handbook.

[...]

...today there is a global attempt to modernise us all in order to suit the requirements of 21st century capitalism and its nightmarish Fourth Industrial Repression.

We are to be reduced to fearful, isolated, obedient and dependent cattle owned and exploited by a ruthless and truthless financial elite.

Once again, we have not been shuffling fast enough towards the abyss on our own, so “strong power” has been activated, on the back of the Coronavirus hysteria, to shove us deeper into the jaws of the life-consuming industrial beast.

The propagandistic language, hysterical mass brainwashing and police-state coercion used by the newnormalists for their “Great Reset” are straight out of Mussolini’s hundred-year-old handbook.