A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

[seemslikeadream]

I would appreciate a bit more help from you in getting to the roots of the problems so that we can really move on in a different and better way.

[Searcher08]

I would appreciate a bit more help from you in getting to the roots of the problems so that we can really move on in a different and better way.

Here are the roots.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a lovely poster called AD and he wasnt here much but posted a wide range of things. And many people loved his posts and he would always leave me wanting more, as some of his personal stories were very very funny.
Then over a period of about six months, there was a change. Some subjects that I posted about which to me were actually interesting, not to mention innocuous like Annunaki, started getting attacked. I felt like I was being interrogated by an Inquisitor.
I was very puzzled and a bit shocked by this, then I noticed other people getting the same treatment posting about *their* subjects.
My focus gradually shifted to hating the treatment these others (and myself) were receiving - and standing up for them (and myself) in the face of hateful allegations and smears. I then started to also read the words and articles used to *justify* this attacking behaviour and found a lot of it very poorly written word salad.

I realised during this a clearer appreciation of my own values and that there are some people who wave flags that are not what they seem. Just like insane Christians who kill in the name of Christ, there are Anti-fascists, whose words are honed to divide, smear and belittle and whose behaviour is to separate and disrupt those they disagree with. These people can be very stupid and very sophisticated - their modus operandi is like the NeoCons / Globalists and smearing is part of the game, blame those you attack, accuse them of doing to you what you are actually doing, but always done with a escape line of deniability. They are the embodiment of equivocation and hate clear, unambiguous sensory language. And they throw mud like a baby elephant having a tantrum.

Over a period of time, the board became a place where it was ok to call people "antiSemites" (when they were not) to "fucking anti-Semites" (when they were not) to "99% of my friends would call your beliefs racist" (when they were not)
It was like seeing a multi-month Conversational Overton Window of hate in action
And by playing Mods and stirring to just below boiling, it continued.

So I went back to what I know, which is mathematics. I looked at what was happening and realised that General Discussion was slowly being turned into something different.
Threads that no one was discussing, that were on the front page MONTH after MONTH, bumped by spam week after week. First one called TIDS then another and another.

Over time , we would have a data dump full of repeated interwoven libcom posts, random articles and images and links. With hosting paid for by Jeff Wells.

I hated doing this, but felt it had to be done or the board would slowly die. And what I noticed was that slowly and steadily more new people were arriving, and more people were waking up to the way the we were being gamed and seeing it transparently and clearly and demanding it change.

People were waking up and smelling the frikken coffee and wanting change.

And those are the roots

And that is why I fight.

[American Dream]

^ for anyone outside the UK, just a quick update to let you know that there is practically no football violence in the UK these days. Except when righteous antifa mobs go looking for someone to pick on, find a few pissheads to goad into a slanging match, then run breathlessly to vice reporters to report that the far right has infiltrated every facet of working-class UK life. I mean, c'mon - look at the quality and quantity of those Clapton away supporters,

All in the eye of the beholder, I suppose:

Chelsea fans prevent black man boarding Paris metro train



Amateur footage shows Chelsea fans preventing a black man from boarding a Paris metro train, and then chanting: ‘We’re racist, we’re racist and that’s the way we like it’

[Searcher08]

As I thought, AD would make a plea for more attention (check) would lie low for a few days (check), post a couple of really interesting posts (check) before resuming baiting (check)... this time clearly inferring that Coffin Dodger is a racist.

God, I feel like Nostradamus....

Oh, and AD, regarding your smears upthread about myself.
Post a Link Or Shut The F*** Up

^ for anyone outside the UK, just a quick update to let you know that there is practically no football violence in the UK these days. Except when righteous antifa mobs go looking for someone to pick on, find a few pissheads to goad into a slanging match, then run breathlessly to vice reporters to report that the far right has infiltrated every facet of working-class UK life. I mean, c'mon - look at the quality and quantity of those Clapton away supporters,

All in the eye of the beholder, I suppose:

Chelsea fans prevent black man boarding Paris metro train



Amateur footage shows Chelsea fans preventing a black man from boarding a Paris metro train, and then chanting: ‘We’re racist, we’re racist and that’s the way we like it’

I'm not so sure jakell would welcome such people as his next door neighbors...

You know, if I were to venture a guess, it would be that you're much more ok, than not ok with Israel Shamir, and his line...

2. You do and have over the years endorsed many, many ideas which 99.9% of the people I know in the English-speaking world would consider far right and/or racist. I object to that on principle and because I still believe in muckraking, in conspiracy expose's as a (potentially) effective means of promoting positive social change. I see your posting pattern as fairly negative, in this light.

Post a Link Or Shut The F*** Up.

No kidding. I've got many an issue over which I disagree with Searcher, and several concerns, but continued, overt promulgation of fascist/right wing thinking is not something I've witnessed, silly me.

You are not against fascism AD, because here in these quotes you are working one of its central mechanisms. The majority of fascists I've known in my life had one thing in common, a severe disability when it came to being able to empathize with other human beings. There's little of that happening on all sides in this years long dispute, but the more you feel free to display yourself, the more you show your own tendencies towards harmful, dogmatic, even hateful intolerance.

It occurred to me that if I took a similar line in response to all the men on RI whom I've seen post misogynist views, I'd have to put on ignore a quarter or more of this board. To say it again for the bazillionth time, your inability to find some level of polite tolerance, indifference, or heaven forbid, engagement with people with whom you disagree is shooting yourself and your (supposed) cause in the foot. This may be virtual space, but you're speaking to actual human beings, with minds and emotions whom you might be able to influence if you weren't set on treating people like garbage, which is utterly antithetical to being anti-fascist.

If that penny doesn't drop, if I see you continuing to state negative, intolerant *suspicions* about other posters, I will ban you, for at least a month, if not longer. Enough with folks being intolerant assholes to each other, because this is, indeed, supposed to be an anti-fascist board.

[solace]

Seeing the mote in one's eye and all that. Funny how some Brits think their shit stinks less than ye old Colonials, wot? Never got over the revolution I guess.

[coffin_dodger]

You're so obnoxious, it's verging on farce.

[Searcher08]

Seeing the note in one's eye and all that. Funny how some Brit's think their shit stinks less than ye old Colonials, wot? Never got over the revolution I guess.

A triple intersecting Venn diagram of Vacuity, Viciousness and... Very poor spelling.

'Note's in one's eye' lulz

@CD The predictability is verging on atomic clock level!

[semper occultus]

....all the amazing posters we've lost over the years and yet this shit-stain hangs around like a fart in a space-suit...

[Sounder]

I would appreciate a bit more help from you in getting to the roots of the problems so that we can really move on in a different and better way.

For people like AD every problem is an external event, and now he wants 'help', from the mods I presume, to 'get to the roots of the problems'.

The problem, like most 'problems' is internal.

AD may not be ready for the dark night of the soul, but hopefully he is helping others to realize that they might be ready.

AD is a Fabian socialist, and their notions, like his are to rearrange the externals of this situation in a way that benefits very few while killing and impoverishing very many.

Hey AD how are your friends in Kiev and Aleppo doing right now?

[norton ash]

Seeing the mote in one's eye and all that. Funny how some Brits think their shit stinks less than ye old Colonials, wot? Never got over the revolution I guess.

Drunk young men whose chosen guiding light is a sports team would appear to be a blessing shared by most of the world's nations.They make fine ambassadors and are much beloved in every neighbourhood they visit.

[American Dream]

The Far Right is dynamic- always morphing, adapting:

Reclaim Australia : What do they want, anyway?

Posted on February 20, 2015 by @ndy

A few days ago, an anonymous party published a website titled ‘Reclaim Australia’. The site has published what is at this stage the most complete statement of demands the rally organisers have managed to compile. Below is my response.

This peaceful rally is part of the national Reclaim Australia [r]ally and is being used to show the people of Australia we have had enough of minorities not fitting in and trying to change our Australian cultural identity.

Whether or not the Reclaim Australia rallies are peaceful affairs remains to be seen. It’s certainly curious that the author fails to specify which ‘minorities’ s/he believes are failing to ‘fit in’, what ‘fitting in’ means for these groups or what characterises the ‘Australian cultural identity’ – and how and why it should be eternally preserved. Of course, the condemnation of the failure of unspecified minorities to conform to some unspecified standard rests upon an implicit assumption: that maintaining an Australian cultural identity means being intolerant of and seeking to police the behaviour of minority populations. The Reclaim Australia rallies are, in other words, intended to be a policing action directed at cultural and religious minorities – and one religious minority in particular.

This will be a peaceful rally, [n]eo-Nazi/White [s]upremacist [b]anners/[p]lacards will not be tolerated. This is not a supremacist rally, it will simply be true[-]blue patriotic Aussies standing together to stop the minorities changing our country to suit their needs!

The fact that the author needs to reiterate the claim of peaceful intent – while at the same time acknowledging the likely presence of neo-Nazis and White supremacists at the rallies – is telling. The fact of the matter is that neo-Nazis and White supremacists have flocked to the Reclaim Australia banner, and with very good reason. Along with the organisers, they too regard themselves as battling minorities intent on destroying Australian culture and society, and imagine themselves cast in the heroic role of seeking to impose their own, very special brand of cultural, political and social conformity upon these recalcitrant populations. Beyond a shared belief in the need to ‘save’ Australia from wicked minorities, neo-Nazis and White supremacists are also closely linked to Reclaim Australia via its chief propagandist, Shermon Burgess.

As noted previously, the chief promoter of Reclaim Australia is Shermon Burgess. Burgess (aka ‘The Great Aussie Patriot’) has previously promoted a protest against Islam organised by the neo-Nazi groupuscule ‘Squadron 88′. As ‘Eureka Brigade’, he has covered the song ‘I hate commie scum’ by defunct Melbourne neo-Nazi band Fortress and indicated his enjoyment of neo-Nazi music (ISD Records). His songs have expressed his love for Ralph Cerminara (sometime leader of the Islamophobic Australian Defence League, currently in jail awaiting trial for affray and behaving in an offensive manner) and for killing Muslims and asylum seekers.

Continues at: http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=37571

[jakell]

The Far Right has a proven potential to be opportunistic, deceptive, adaptable

...(long C&P deleted)...

Really? Gosh, who'd have thought?

Any more of this and folks might consider them to be unlike the standard slack-jawed knuckledraggers, that is their default profile amongst anti-fascists (tm).

The Far Right is dynamic- always morphing, adapting:.......

Really? Gosh, who'd have thought?

[American Dream]

Shades of this:

Germany’s New Far Right

In Germany, a “modernized” far right is marrying neoliberalism and racism. What will be the Left’s response?

by Anthony Fano Fernandez


The pro-immigrant projection over a December 2014 far-right rally in Dresden.

The gap between ideology and reality could not be any more jarring: according to a European Center for Economic Research study made public in November, immigrants contribute a net plus to Germany’s welfare and social security systems.

The report’s author, economist Holger Bonin, demonstrates that in 2012, every resident of Germany without a German passport paid on average 3,300 euros more in taxes and contributions to social insurance programs than they received in state transfer payments. Yet surveys show that two-thirds of Germans are convinced that immigrants are burdens on their country’s welfare system.

Quite aside from the distastefulness of evaluating the worthiness of human life according to economic criteria, the juxtaposition of Bonin’s calculations with the polling offers a startling picture of the mentality of Germans today regarding immigration, and the convergence of the neoliberal reconfiguration of German society with racist modes of understanding these shifts.
When the neoliberal former finance minister of Berlin, Thilo Sarrazin, published his book Germany is Abolishing Itself in 2010, few observers recognized that it heralded the emergence of a new, modernized far right in Germany, one that departed significantly from the old school Nazi and national-conservative Völkisch far right of previous decades. Abandoned were collectivist socio-political models and biological racism in favor of a marriage of modern neoliberal doctrine and culturalist racism.

Continues at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/germ ... ht-pegida/

[seemslikeadream]

THE LEADERS AMERICAN DREAM....THE LEADERS ...YOU KNOW THE ONES THAT THE WORLD LOVES AND COMMEMORATES

why do you continue to blame the little ones with no real power

seemslike some kinda deflection to me

from Counter Punch

“On the subject of India,” said the British Secretary of State to India: “Winston is not quite sane… I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

JANUARY 28, 2015

Fear-Monger, War Criminal, Racist

Winston Churchill: the Imperial Monster

by MICHAEL DICKINSON
This week Britain is commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill. Millions of people worldwide watched his state funeral on television in 1965, and thousands of people lined the streets of London to pay their last respects as his cortege slowly passed. But I somehow doubt that President Obama will be adding his own warm words of remembrance for the iconic British wartime leader.

After all, his own paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was one of 150.000 rebellious Kikuyu “blackamoors” forced into detention camps during Churchill’s postwar premiership, when the British governnment began its brutal campaign to suppress the alleged “Mau Mau” uprising in Kenya, in order to protect the privileges of the white settler population at the expense of the indigenous people. About 11,000 Kenyans were killed and 81,000 detained during the British government’s campaign to protect its imperialist heritage.

Suspected Mau Mau insurgents were subject to electric shock, whippings, burning and mutilation in order to crush the local drive for independence. Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured for resisting Churchill’s empire. He never truly recovered from the ordeal.

Africa was quite a playground for young Winston. Born into the privileged British elite in in 1847, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, brought up believing the simple story that the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation, he set off as soon as he could to take his part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples,” whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill”.

In Sudan, he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages”.

In South Africa, where “it was great fun galloping about,” he defended British built concentration camps for white Boers, saying they produced “the minimum of suffering”. The death toll was almost 28,000.

When at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”.

(On his attitude to other races, Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, once said: “Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin.”

Churchill found himself in other British dominions besides Africa. As a young officer in the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, Churchill one day experienced a fleeting revelation. The local population, he wrote in a letter, was fighting back because of “the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own,” – just as Britain would if she were invaded.

This idle thought was soon dismissed however , and he gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops, believing the “natives” to be helpless children who will “willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown”.

But rebels had to be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, Churchill unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians, making a hypocritical mockery of his comment:

“Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination.”

His fear-mongering views on Islam sound strangely familiar:

“But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.”

“On the subject of India,” said the British Secretary of State to India: “Winston is not quite sane… I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance against British rule in India, Churchill raged that Gandhi:

“ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.”

In 1931 he sneered: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer of the type well-known in the East, now posing as a fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”

As Gandhi’s support increased, Churcill announced:

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

In 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused by the imperial policies of the British. In reply to the Secretary of State for India’s telegram requesting food stock to relieve the famine, Churchill wittily replied:

“If food is scarce, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?”

Up to 3 million people starved to death. Asked in 1944 to explain his refusal to send food aid, Churchill jeered:

“Relief would do no good. Indians breed like rabbits and will outstrip any available food supply.”

churchill

Churchill statue in London. Photo: Getty Images.

Just after World War I, approximately one quarter of the world’s land and population fell within the spheres of British influence. The Empire had increased in size with the addition of territories taken from its vanquished enemies.

As British Colonial Secretary, Churchill’s power in the Middle East was immense. He “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon”, allegedly drawing the expansive boundary map after a generous lunch. The huge zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze”.

He is the man who invented Iraq, another arbitrary patch of desert, which was awarded to a throneless Hashemite prince; Faisal, whose brother Abdullah was given control of Jordan. Sons of King Hussein, Faisal and Abdullah had been war buddies of Churchill’s pal, the famous “T.E. Lawrence of Arabia”.

But the lines drawn in the sand by British imperialism, locking together conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders were far from stable,and large numbers of Jordanians, Iraqis, Kurds and Palestinians were denied anything resembling real democracy.

In 1920 Churchill advocated the use of chemical weapons on the “uncooperative Arabs” involved in the Iraqi revolution against British rule.

“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas,” he declared. “I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.”

As Colonial Secretary, it was Churchill who offered the Jews their free ticket to the ‘Promised Land’ of ‘Israel’, although he thought they should not “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.” He dismissed the Palestinians already living in the country as “barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung.”

Addressing the Peel Commission (1937) on why Britain was justified in deciding the fate of Palestine, Churchill clearly displayed his white supremacist ideology to justify one of the most brutal genocides and mass displacements of people in history, based on his belief that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph”:

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

In fact, many of the views Churchill held were virtually Nazi. Apart from his support of hierarchical racism, as Home Minister he had advocated euthanasia and sterilisation of the handicapped.

In 1927, after a visit to Rome, he applauded the budding fascist dictator, Mussolini:

“What a man! I have lost my heart!… Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world… If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism.”

(“The Bestial Appetites and Passions of Leninism”, eh? Where can I get a copy?)

But years later, in his written account of the Second World War (Vol. 111), fickle-hearted Winston applauded the downfall of his erstwhile hero:

“Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.”

Britain’s American allies saw to that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they dropped their atomic bombs and killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Churchill had ordered the saturation bombing of Dresden, where, on February 13 1945, more than 500,000 German civilians and refugees, mostly women and children, were slaughtered in one day by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), who dropped over 700,000 phosphorus bombs on the city.

Prime Minister Churchill had said earlier:

“I do not want suggestions as to how we can disable the economy and the machinery of war, what I want are suggestions as to how we can roast the German refugees on their escape from Breslau.”

In Dresden he got his wish. Those who perished in the centre of the city could not be traced, as the temperature in the area reached 1600 degree Centigrade. Dresden’s citizens barely had time to reach their shelters and many who sought refuge underground suffocated as oxygen was pulled from the air to feed the flames. Others perished in a blast of white heat strong enough to melt human flesh.

Instead of being charged with being responsible for ordering one of the most horrific war crimes of recent history, in which up to half a million people died screaming in his firestorms, Churchill emerged from the war as a hero. An unwavering supporter of the British monarchy throughout his life, he was made a knight of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of knighthoods, by Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

“The monarchy is so extraordinarily useful. When Britain wins a battle she shouts, “God save the Queen”; when she loses, she votes down the prime minister,” he once said.

Shortly after the Second World War was won, however, Churchill’s Conservative government was voted down by a Britain tired of battle, austerity, and hungry for change.

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,” said Churchill, and to a certain extent he succeeded. exte habit of dictating in the nude to his male secretaries. y and conscriptioneople were massacred ‘Winnie’ became Britain’s great national icon, with his trade-mark cigar and V-sign, remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour (we won’t mention his eccentric habit of pacing about the office in the nude while dictating to secretaries!) The fat cigar clamped in his mouth a symbol of cocky British defiance, Churchill was genial courageous Big Brother figure, revered by the media. His stirring wartime speech:

“We shall fight them on the beaches! We shall never surrender!” makes no mention of “We shall bomb them in their cities! We shall make them suffer!”

Churchill’s brutality and brutishness have been ignored, but he never reckoned on the invention of the internet, or its power to allow authors to question his view of history and expose the cruelty and racism of the man.

When George W Bush moved out of the White House he left a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval office. He’d used it to inspire him on his ‘war against terrorism’. Barack Obama had it removed. I wonder if he found the bust offensive? Was it out of respect for the pain and distress his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, suffered on Churchill’s orders ?

Removing a bust is a fairly simple matter, but toppling a statue is quite another. In Westminster Square in front of Parliament in London there are several statues of deceased politicians and dignitaries, one of which I find particularly distasteful. Hands clasped behind back, the jodphur-clad figure striding purposely forward is that of Jan Christian Smuts. racist forefather of the Apartheid system in South Africa.

As for Churchill, who, as Home Secretary, said:

‘I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race.’

His hulking toadish statue stands tall on a granite plinth, clutching a walking stick, his unblinking bulldog gaze on the Houses of Parliament where he reigned twice as a Conservative Prime Minister.

If I were Prime Minister of Great Britain, one of the first things on my list would be the removal of memorials to facist-minded racist imperialists. The statues of Smuts and Churchill in Parliament Square would be the first to come down.

[American Dream]

Well worth a close reading:

Confronting Fascism centers on an essay by Don Hamerquist, formerly of the Sojourner Truth Organization, and an extended reply by J. Sakai, a Maoist best known for his book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. Hamerquist and Sakai are both independent Marxists who have worked with anarchist anti-fascists and been influenced by anti-authoritarian critiques of dogmatic Marxism. Like Thalheimer, Mason, and Vajda, they emphasize that fascism is an independent political force, not a capitalist puppet or policy. But Hamerquist and Sakai go much further than this, presenting fascism as a right-wing revolutionary force. In Sakai’s words, “Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis.” It is not revolutionary in the socialist or anarchist sense: “Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself… in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule.”23

Hamerquist and Sakai argue that most leftists seriously underestimate fascism’s potential to attract mass support within the United States and worldwide. Capitalism’s developing contradictions, they argue, create growing opportunities for a resurgence of fascist movements. Far from being a frozen relic of the past, fascism is a dynamic political force that includes a range of factions and tendencies and is evolving in response to changing conditions. Fascist groups feed on popular hostility to big business and the capitalist state, and some of them present an oppositional militance that looks more serious and committed than that of most leftist groups today. (Hamerquist particularly cites “third position” fascists, who claim to reject both the left and the right, but the argument is not limited to these groups.) The main danger of fascism today, Hamerquist argues, is not that it will seize power, but that it “might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left” causing “massive damage to the potential for a liberatory anti-capitalist insurgency.”24

A related danger that Hamerquist raises is a convergence between fascists and sections of the radical left. He points to leftward overtures from sections of the far right, and tendencies within much of the left that mesh dangerously with fascism, such as male supremacy, glorification of violence, leader cultism, hostility to open debate and discussion, and elitism. Hamerquist notes that German Communists in the early 1930s sometimes made tactical alliances with the Nazis against the Social Democrats because they considered Social Democrats the bigger threat.

Hamerquist warns that U.S. fascist groups are actively organizing around a number of issues that leftists often consider to be “ours,” such as labor struggles, environmentalism, opposition to police repression, U.S. imperialism, and corporate globalization. This kind of fascist popular appeal is nothing new. As Sakai points out, both Mussolini and Hitler galvanized people largely by attacking established elites and promoting an anti-bourgeois militance that seemed much more exciting and dynamic than conventional left politics. “Many youth in 1930s Germany viewed the Nazis as liberatory. As opposed to the German social-democrats, for example, who preached the dutiful authority of parents over children, the Hitler Youth gave rebellious children the power to keep their own hours, have an active sex and political life, smoke, drink and have groups of their own.”25

In different ways, both Hamerquist and Sakai argue that fascism’s radical approach shapes its relationship with capitalism. Of the two writers, Sakai’s position is closer to a Bonapartist model. He describes fascism as “anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist.” Under fascist regimes, “capitalism is restabilized but the bourgeoisie pays the price of temporarily no longer ruling the capitalist State.” But for Sakai this conflict is much starker than it is for Bonapartism theorists. Today’s fascism “is opposed to the big imperialist bourgeoisie… to the transnational corporations and banks, and their world-spanning ‘multicultural’ bourgeois culture. Fascism really wants to bring down the World Bank, WTO and NATO, and even America the Superpower. As in destroy.”26

Sakai argues that fascism radically reshapes the capitalist social order to create an economy of “heightened parasitism”: “a lumpen-capitalist economy more focused on criminality, war, looting and enslavement.” He describes how Hitler’s regime elevated millions of German workers into a new parasitic class of soldiers, policemen, and bureaucrats and replaced them with a new proletariat of foreign and slave laborers, retirees, and women. This process “created an Aryan society that had never existed before” -– giving Nazi racial categories a concrete, social reality that was qualitatively new (but which paralleled the color-line divisions of U.S. society).27

Sakai’s discussion belies claims that Hitler’s regime had little or no impact on the socioeconomic order. We should remember, however, that this discussion does not apply to Italian Fascism, which lacked Nazism’s overarching racialist imperative and never consolidated the same degree of control over the state. Its effect on the socioeconomic order was far more limited.

Hamerquist takes fascist anti-capitalism more seriously than Sakai does. He notes that current-day fascist movements encompass various positions on how to relate to the capitalist class, from opportunists who want to cut a deal, to pro-capitalist revolutionaries who want to pressure big business into accepting fascist rule, to some third positionists who want to overthrow the economic ruling class entirely. It is unclear how serious a challenge to capitalist economic power any fascists would mount in practice. Where it has been tested, fascist anti-capitalism has meant opposition to “bourgeois values,” specific policies, or a “parasitic” wing of capital (such as Jewish bankers) -– not the capitalist system. On the other hand, as Hamerquist warns, it would be dangerous for leftists to dismiss the prospect of a militantly anti-capitalist fascism simply because it doesn’t fit our preconceptions.

Hamerquist’s concept of fascist anti-capitalism rests partly on his analysis (following German left communist Alfred Sohn-Rethel) that German Nazism foreshadowed “a new ‘transcapitalist’ exploitative social order.” In particular, Hamerquist argues, German fascism’s genocidal labor policy broke with capitalist principles. Not just labor power, but workers themselves were “consumed in the process of production just like raw materials and fixed capital,” thus obliterating “the distinctively capitalist difference between labor and other factors of production.” True, “normal” capitalist development involves genocide “against pre-capitalist populations and against the social formations that obstruct the creation of a modern working class.” But by contrast, “the German policy was the genocidal obliteration of already developed sections of the European working classes” –- i.e., the importation of colonial-style mass killing into Europe’s industrial heartland.28

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Nazism was in the process of overthrowing the capitalist system. The labor policies Hamerquist describes did not call into question the economic power of big business, and arguably could not be sustained for more than a brief period. But the very fact that they were not sustainable may be part of the point. As Hamerquist reminds us, Marx warned that the contradictions of capitalism might end, not in socialist revolution, but in “barbarism,” “the common ruin of the contending classes.” Fascist revolution could be one version of this scenario.29

Here we should remember Thalheimer’s and Caplan’s point that the fascist state’s contradictory relationship with the business class -– defending its economic power but pursuing policies that eventually conflict with capitalist economic rationality -– is inherently unstable. In theory, this conflict could be resolved in various ways: (1) the collapse or overthrow of the fascist regime (as happened in Italy and Germany), (2) the conversion of fascist rule into a more conventional pro-capitalist regime, or (3) some kind of fascist overthrow of capitalist economic power. The last of these alternatives is the hardest to imagine, but cannot simply be dismissed as impossible or nonsensical. It would not abolish economic exploitation but would reshape it in fundamental ways, as Hamerquist suggests in his discussion of Nazi labor policy.

Sakai and Hamerquist also differ on the question of fascism’s class base. Like many others before him, Sakai links fascism to middle-class and declassed strata threatened or uprooted by rapid social and economic change -– historical losers who hate the big capitalists and want to get back the privilege they used to have. Sakai sees this dynamic in the Germans who rallied to Hitler during the Depression, the Timothy McVeigh figures who turn to neonazism as the old U.S. system of white privilege crumbles, and the Muslim world’s shopkeepers and unemployed college graduates hit by globalization, who are at the core of the pan-Islamic right. “To the increasing mass of rootless men fallen or ripped out of productive classes -– whether it be the peasantry or the salariat –- [fascism] offers not mere working class jobs but the vision of payback. Of a land for real men, where they and not the bourgeois will be the one’s [sic] giving orders at gunpoint and living off of others.”30

This discussion is helpful but oversimplified. The dynamics Sakai describes represent part of fascism’s appeal, and there is evidence that the middle classes and sections of the unemployed disproportionately supported fascism in the interwar period. But it would be a serious distortion to pigeonhole fascism as a movement of historical losers. Pre-World War II fascism didn’t just attract declining and uprooted middle classes such as small merchants, but also groups at the core of the new corporate economy, such as white-collar workers and professionals. The fascist vision criticizes modern decadence but also embraces many aspects of modernity. For example, as David Robert argues, Italian Fascism appealed to petty bourgeois activists as a vehicle for national integration, political reform, and large-scale industrial development.31

Furthermore, as Goeff Eley has pointed out about German Nazism, the movement’s dependence on a particular social class is less striking than its ability “to broaden its social base in several different directions” –- to construct “a broadly based coalition of the subordinate classes,” “without precedent in the German political system.” In contrast to the Social Democrats and Communists, who remained focused on the industrial working class, the Nazis (and to a lesser extent Italian Fascists) unified “an otherwise disjointed ensemble of discontents within a totalizing populist framework.”32

Hamerquist does not directly expand on his warning that militant fascism could build a mass base among insurgent workers (a possibility that Sakai questions). Although definitions of “working class” are subject to debate, several fascist movements in the 1930s seem to have attracted substantial numbers of workers, such as the Arrow Cross in Hungary and Father Coughlin’s Social Justice movement in the United States. In 1930-1933, workers made up about 30 percent of German Nazi Party members and a majority within the SA (Stormtroopers), the Nazis’ paramilitary wing.33

While they disagree about fascism’s class base, Hamerquist and Sakai agree that we need to rethink old leftist assumptions about fascism’s racial politics. As Hamerquist puts it, “there is no reason to view fascism as necessarily white just because there are white supremacist fascists. To the contrary there is every reason to believe that fascist potentials exist throughout the global capitalist system. African, Asian, and Latin American fascist organizations can develop that are independent of, and to some extent competitive with Euro-American ‘white’ fascism.”34 Coupled with this, some white fascists support Third World anti-imperialism or even disavow racial supremacy, and some have started to build links with socially conservative Black organizations such as the Nation of Islam.

Sakai notes that the mass displacement of Black workers over the past generation, coupled with the defeat of 1960s left Black nationalism, has fueled an unprecedented growth of authoritarian rightist organizations in the Black community. Sakai also argues that fascism’s key growth area now is in the Third World, where “pan-Islamic fascism” and related movements have largely replaced the left as the major anti-imperialist opposition force.

Unfortunately, Sakai and Hamerquist have little to say about what fascism means for women, as Xtn notes in the Introduction to Confronting Fascism. Sakai asserts that fascism is basically a male movement both in composition and outlook. In reality, as Xtn points out, fascist movements intensify patriarchy but often rely on mass support from both women and men. As I have argued elsewhere, all fascist movements are male supremacist, but they have embodied a range of doctrines on women and gender issues, both traditionalist and anti-traditionalist, and even including twisted versions of feminism. Fascism has sometimes recruited large numbers of women as active participants, largely by offering them specific benefits and opportunities -– in education, youth groups, athletics, volunteer work, and certain paid jobs -– even as it sharpened and centralized male dominance.

Two Ways of Looking at Fascism

by Matthew Lyons

http://sdonline.org/47/two-ways-of-looking-at-fascism/