Fascism: What’s in a Word?
The word “fascism” is a lightning rod. No one wants to be called a fascist. Everyone is ready to call someone else a fascist.
Like many highly charged words, the more common its usage becomes, the more inexact its meaning becomes.
Today, Trump is a fascist, Putin is a fascist, Modi is a fascist, Radical Islam is Islamofascism, the House and Senate members who passed the FISA renewal are fascists, Ukraine is a fascist country, political correctness is fascism, anti-Zionists are fascists, Zionists are fascists, and so on….
Clearly, the word “fascism” in these contexts is most often an expression of extreme disapproval-- a kind of expletive.
A problem arises when the claimant-- the person using the word-- has something more definite in mind, something more exacting. A problem arises when the user of the word intends to draw an association with the real, historically concrete phenomena of fascism that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and rose tragically to ravage and terrorize nearly the entire world.
The idea that people or organizations are preparing to organize Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Silver Shirts or whatever to intimidate or overthrow conventional political processes is understandably reprehensible. But to conjure such an image in order to influence the political process, though without sufficient warrant, is misleading.
In a highly charged political context, it is not only misleading, but also unhelpful, and even incendiary.
Even a policy as sanctified by much of the left as the New Deal has been called fascist, proto-fascist, or fascist-tinged by commentators from across the political spectrum. And the “sainted” FDR has been labeled fascist by many. Critics from both left and right have seen parallels between elements of the New Deal and Mussolini’s corporatism. Still others have found similarities between the Rooseveltian Civilian Conservation Corps and Hitler’s German Labor Services. Since the New Deal was a mish-mash of trial-and-error pragmatism, it is a disservice to wed it with any particular ideology.
Of course, “fascism” depends on how we define it. Problems of definition arose immediately after World War II and the defeat of the major fascist powers. The emerging Cold War led to the US and its allies accepting a narrow definition when it came to new-found allies among former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In its conflict with the Soviets, US leaders relied on Germans and Eastern Europeans with dubious, fascist ties to advance weapons programs, utilize intelligence, and bolster anti-Communism. Vetting of fascists by ideology was a haphazard process at best.
On the other hand, attempts to link fascism to Communism was an ongoing project. Determined efforts to find common features to justify anti-Communism led to a construct called “totalitarianism.” Popularized by Hannah Arendt, Cold Warriors wanted and got a tally of supposed similarities that served their purposes and served to generate a common definition of two disparate ideologies.
Thus, the Cold War created both a narrow and broad interpretation of fascism-- one for practical purposes, the other for propaganda purposes.
As the Cold War warmed in the 1980s, academics like Stanley Payne (Fascism, Wisconsin, 1980), made attempts at more independent, nuanced, and objective definitions of “fascism.” Payne engaged in comparative historical analysis and arrived at his typological description of fascism. Unfortunately, it suffered somewhat from raw empiricism and a failure to properly weigh the factors disclosed. To its credit, it undercut the Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism by emphasizing anti-Communism as a common feature of fascism, and not conflating it with Communism.
Further, Payne in 1980 recognizes the historically met concept of “liberal authoritarianism” -- a form of illiberal liberalism-- that might serve to explain much of the confusion of our anti-Trump left today, who are anxious to dispense with the Bill of Rights to save “our” democracy.
In a recent essay regarding the “fascism is imminent” fashion of today, noted liberal commentator, Patrick Lawrence, riffs on the concept of “liberal authoritarianism.” Lawrence declares in his article This Isn’t Fascism posted on Consortium News that “I cannot quite tell what people mean when they speak of fascism in our current circumstances. And [as] far as one can make out, a lot of people who use the term, and maybe most, do not know what they mean, either.”
Unfortunately, while Payne still serves as a keystone for contemporary Western academic scholarship, the old Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism has resumed, particularly under a new wave of retro-Cold Warriors like Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder.
But more consequentially, the charge of fascism-- invoked irresponsibly-- has served as a weapon in electoral politics. Specifically, many in the Democratic Party-- bereft of an appealing program-- charge that a vote for Biden is a vote against fascism. Given that Biden’s failure on inflation and his bloody war-mongering are rejected, especially by youth and the Party’s left wing, portraying Trump as a fascist is an act of desperation, but an act that will ultimately do little to forego the rise of Trump and his ilk.
Again, invoking Lawrence:
Much of this, let’s call it the pollution of public discourse, comes from the liberal authoritarians. Rachel Maddow, to take one of the more pitiful cases, wants us to think Trump the dictator will end elections, destroy the courts, and render the Congress powerless. The MSNBC commentator has actually said these things on air.
One-man rule is the theme, if you listen to the Rachel Maddows. The evident intent is to cast Donald Trump in the most fearsome light possible, as it becomes clear Trump could well defeat President Biden at the polls come Nov. 5.
We can mark this stuff down to crude politicking in an election year, surely. There is nothing new in it. But this is not the point.
Opportunistic voices on the left will often draw a crude analogy with the rise of Nazism. They argue the simplistic and false case that disunity on the left opened the door for Hitler’s ascendency to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933. They repeat an old whitewash of history-- dismissing Hitler’s backing by the German capitalists, the perfidy of the weak government, and the betrayal of the Social Democrats. They ignore the economic crisis, the rulers’ failure to address the crisis, and the peoples’ desperate search for a radical answer to that failure. An unquestionable sign of that desperation was the continuing growth of the votes for the Communist Party, along with the decline in votes for the Social Democrats, and other centrist parties.
Nazism was not inevitable, but ushered in on a fear of revolution, of workers’ power, by a despairing ruling class. That was the reality wherever fascism seized power in twentieth-century fascism.
Today, the answer to a deepening crisis of capitalist rule that is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses is not rallying support around the failed policies that created and deepened the crisis. The answer is not to cry wolf or remind the people that matters could get worse. They know that!
The answer is to develop real answers to the despair facing working people-- reducing inequality, raising living standards, guaranteeing health care, increasing social benefits, improving affordable public transportation, protecting the environment, improving public education, and so on. These issues have existed for many decades, worsening with each passing year. There is no mystery. We are offered only two parties and they are determined to evade these issues.
Lawrence makes a similar point:
suppose it might make America’s many-sided crisis — political, economic, social — more comprehensible if we name it [fascism] to suggest it has a frightening antecedent. But this is profoundly counterproductive. So long as we, some of us, go on persuading ourselves we face the threat of fascism or Fascism, either one, we simply obscure what it is we actually face.
We name it wrongly... I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively.
But that still leaves us with the question: What is fascism? Is there no cogent definition?
Indeed, there is one that springs forth from a deep and thorough study by the late Marxist thinker, R. Palme Dutt. Published in 1934, soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers) locates fascism in the cauldron of the rise of Communism, a deep economic crisis, and the collapse of capitalist class legitimacy.
Dutt, unlike servile academics weaving a bizarre, historically challenged link between Communism and fascism, discovers direct ties between capitalism and fascism (p. 72-73).
Fascism manufactures its ideology around its practice. Dutt explains:
Fascism, in fact, developed as a movement in practice, in the conditions of threatening proletarian revolution, as a counter-revolutionary mass movement supported by the bourgeoisie, employing weapons of mixed social demagogy and terrorism to defeat the revolution and build up a strengthened capitalist state dictatorship; and only later endeavoured to adorn and rationalize this process with a “theory” (p. 75).
Dutt’s operational definition contrasts favorably with the failed attempt by writers like Payne who attempted to engage comparative studies in order to arrive at a superficial typography of fascism.
Dutt further adds the class dimensions, absent in nearly all non-Marxist definitions:
Fascism, in short, is a movement of mixed elements, dominantly petit-bourgeois, but also slum-proletariat and demoralized working class, financed and directed by finance-capital, by the big industrialists, landlords and financiers, to defeat the working-class revolution and smash working-class organizations (p. 82).
Elegant in its simplicity, robust in its comprehensiveness, Dutt’s explication of fascism aptly characterizes historic fascism from the march on Rome to the Generals’ coup in Indonesia and Pinochet’s regime in Chile. When social conditions deteriorate drastically and workers and their organizations threaten the capitalist order, the rulers throw their support behind counter-revolutionaries prepared to defend and strengthen the capitalist order, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy.
These institutions and organizations fester within bourgeois society as latent counter-revolutionary forces ready to be unleashed at the right moment by a desperate capitalist ruling class.
Clearly, Dutt’s study and elucidation of fascism clears the muddy waters stirred by today’s alarmists and opportunists. There is no imminent threat of revolution; the revolutionary left and the workers’ organizations currently pose little threat to the capitalist order, unfortunately.
There is no emergent organized mass movement responding to a counter-revolutionary call. The mass movements of the right-- the Black Legions, the KKK, the Proud Boys, the militias, etc.-- do exist, should conditions ever ripen for a mobilization against the working class; but for today, they remain unacceptable to most of the ruling class.
For the most part, the capitalist class, especially its dominant monopoly sector, is satisfied to conduct its business within the confines of bourgeois democracy. “Finance-capital… the big industrialists, landlords and financiers…” defend and protect the two-party system because they regard it as functioning adequately, though the “lawfare” attacks piling up on Trump and the rabid media attacks against him show that an important section of the ruling class considers his unpredictability to be a threat to stability.
Others think that his buffoonery and bluster serve as a safety valve for the discontent infecting the citizenry, much as Berlusconi’s clown-act pacified and entertained Italians unhappy over their political fate for three decades.
In any case, Trump does not pose the threat of fascism that many would like us to believe.
We need to find other words to describe the deep crisis of bourgeois legitimacy that we are enduring, words that do not force us into a frenzied defensive posture that deflects us from finding real solutions to a real and profound problems facing working people.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2024/05/fas ... -word.html
Fascism
Re: Fascism
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
The West of “democratic values” alongside nazi-fascist terror
Hugo Dionísio
October 13, 2024
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism puts all of us, the Western peoples, on the side and under the Nazi-fascist influence!
The siege of Russia is not confined to the military, commercial, institutional or financial spheres. Prior to this, another barrier has been set up – or rather, “nurtured” – in the sense of forming a kind of aggressive and active “sanitary belt”, made up with the states whose borders communicate, by land or sea, with those of the Russian Federation.
This “sanitary belt”, conceptualized from what we know to be the western ruling classes mental framework, is deeply ideological in nature, aiming to touch, in a repulsive way, on the deepest values embodied in Russian history over the last 100 years and, through this connection, provoke an antagonistic relationship characterized by a mutual repulsive effect, preventing any human communication that could be established between the parties.
The sovereign strength that resides in Russia’s multinational, multi-ethnic and multi-religious culture, which was responsible, from the outset, for the ability to aggregate forces that made the defeat of Nazi-fascism in the Second World War possible, is also what separates the mineral, human and energy reserves, among others, from the clutches of Western capitalism and its momentum fueled by the imperialist phase it is in.
If the brutality of an ideology like Nazi-fascism was the fuel for the aggression against the then Soviet homeland in the first half of the 20th century, it was its historical preservation and recovery – in an unparalleled process of revisionism and whitewashing – that made possible, in the first decades of the 21st century, to use it as fuel for the “sanitary belt” around Russia. 100 years later, the recipe is being repeated, however with the clear limitations that desperation imposes.
What could be more antagonistic and mutually repulsive than Nazism in contact with what could be considered the “Russian soul” updated with the events that happened through the 20th century? What more vivid and carnal image is there, in its brutality and violence, than the nightmare suffered, mainly by the Russian people, at the hands of Nazi terror?
The first to suffer the effects of this “sanitary belt” are the very citizens of Russian origin who, after the collapse of the USSR, settled in Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia and now live there. In addition to banning the Russian media, violating their right to opinion and information, on the basis of a supposed policy of combating “Kremlin propaganda” (something that is also seen throughout the EU and outside the national constitutions of the various countries), Latvia has even promoted the elimination of the teaching of Russian from school curricula, which has caused concern on the part of UN human rights experts regarding the protection of the rights of ethnic minorities. For those who accuse Russia of not taking them into account…
According to the narrative, the Kremlin uses Russian as a weapon, which it then uses as a vehicle for its propaganda, perpetrated through the so-called “state media”, which they refer to as all media that, whether funded by the Russian executive or not, is not aligned with the Western narrative. What they never mention is that, after all, the use of Russian as a vehicle for propaganda is not, as they say, exclusive to Russian sources, since Latvia itself finances media outlets such as Meduza, which, writing in Russian, only aim to pass on information in line with the Western narrative.
While not as radical as Latvia in removing the Russian language from school curricula, Estonia is nevertheless an example of the destruction of monuments alluding to the Soviet victory over Nazism. Especially under Kaja Kallas, the process of removing these monuments accelerated and was even discussed within the European framework, including the removal of the Soviet Tank on the outskirts of the city of Narva. According to Kaja Kallas, the tank is a “crime weapon” – perhaps the “crime” of defeating Nazis – “and people are dying in Ukraine with the same kind of tank”.
But this persecution of Soviet – not just Russian – culture and memory tells us that the propagation of a Russophobic logic incorporates a dimension that goes beyond mere ethnic confrontation, represented, for example, in the discussion about limitations on the acquisition of real estate by Russian citizens in Latvia, following a proposal made by the Finnish authorities. For those who say that the Russian people are oppressed, this generalization is incomprehensible.
The linking between the ethnic confrontation with the Russian-speaking and Russian populations and with Soviet past and the memory of the victory over Nazi-fascism has its origins in the wave of collaborationism and sympathy with Nazi ideology that occurred in these countries by certain population layers and ruling classes before, at the beginning of and during the Second World War. Holding the Russian Federation responsible, as the sole repository of the collective historical memory of the victory obtained by the multinational Red Army over the Nazi hordes, bridges the gap between the greed for the vast resources held by Russia and the need to find ideological, theoretical, psychological and emotional grounds to justify aggression.
This theoretical and ideological justification, in my view, is provided by neo-Nazism and the glorification of the collaborationist past with Hitler’s forces. The strength of this anti-communist, racist and white supremacist ideology, placed in the foreground, combined with a process of historical revision and the whitewashing of Nazi-fascist terror, bridges the gap, from the past to the present, between the anti-communism that justified the aggression against the USSR and the Russophobia that serves as an excuse for the current siege.
In order to promote the “sanitary belt” with the Russian Federation, whose function is to prevent healthy contact between Europe (mainly Germany), Russia, the Eurasian republics and China, it was necessary to recover the historical asset that Nazi ideology constitutes for the U.S. and for the collective west ruling classes. As with all assets, you only recover those that already exist per se. The recovery of the Nazi historical heritage is the result of a longer process of preserving and revitalizing that asset.
Today, when we see the glorification of the “Brothers of the Forest“, an openly anti-communist group that emerged in the Baltic countries, formed by former members of the local Waffen-SS and who fought against what they called “Soviet occupation”, even after the end of WWII, and were responsible for horrific crimes against civilians and Soviet police, operating with Western intelligence information, or we saw the whitewashing and enthronement of organizations such as “Sonderkommando A”, which, collaborating with the Nazi forces, using Latvians and Lithuanians, murdered almost 250.000 Jews in Lithuania by 1944, we see that the Nazi historical heritage is very much alive and stronger than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War.
In order to enable its resurgence and recovery, a whole process of revisionism had to be implemented, minimizing the damage and whitewashing its crimes. In Lithuania, homage was paid to General Povilas Plechavicius who fought alongside the Nazis, in 2008 the Lithuanian parliament equated communist and Nazi ideologies, which represented a normalization and historical recovery of Nazism (as opposed to a demonization, as many claim) and, in 2010, the Lithuanian courts declared the swastika “part of the country’s cultural heritage”, proving that ideological equation is nothing more than a process of historical recovery of that past.
The fact is that since 1991, thousands of communists have been persecuted in Lithuania, while demonstrations with Nazi symbols and racist slogans have been allowed. Symptomatic! As Jean Pierre Faye said in the preface to “The Archipelago of Bloodbath” book written by Chomsky and Herman, the act of including Nazism and Communism in the bag of “totalitarianism” allowed the U.S. to support the most backward, reactionary and tyrannical forces, as long as they didn’t claim to be supporters of “totalitarianism”. So, equating communist and Nazi ideologies, the fact is that the Lithuanian authorities, like many others today in the European Union of “values” and “democracy”, persecute communists, but tolerate – to say the least – neo-Nazi far right-wing demonstrations. What’s more, the profusion of openly reactionary and racist governments in the European Union is almost irrefutable proof of the reasons behind the equation. The fact is that in all these countries, communists are persecuted, while Nazis are admitted. Nothing like practice as a criterion for gauging the truth!
In the Portuguese case, a group like movement 1143 (the date that signals the birth of Portuguese nation), aligned with the most extremist factions in Portugal ( ) and with people who have a history of persecuting – and murdering – migrants and minorities of any kind (communists, homosexuals, blacks, Asians or Muslims), is characterized in the mainstream media as a simple “nationalist group” (). What does this have to do with André Ventura’s support (he is a Trump follower from the “Chega” party) against what he referred to as “uncontrolled immigration“? And why doesn’t André Ventura, the media outlets that give him voice and space and the powerful interests that support him, point out that it is private companies that hire immigrants, that it is employers’ associations that petition governments to open borders, that are the UBERs of this life that exploit immigration the most and that it is the European Union itself, which André Ventura defends, that encourages, causes and legitimizes all the immigration we are witnessing? And why don’t they attack the uncontrolled tourism that is destroying Lisbon, an activity for which most immigrants work?
Now, this racist logic that bridges the gap with anti-communism in order to link Russia, today, as the sole repository of the Soviet past and from there to its current demonization, in order to justify aggression, isolation and oppression that will enable it to be plundered – as happened in the terrible 90s of the 20th century under Boris Yeltsin – finds a clear example in Meta’s permission (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) for its users to express hateful messages against Russians.
This Russophobic perspective, which is absolutely unacceptable for a Europe that calls itself “a Europe of values”, represents a fundamental pillar for these countries’ membership to NATO and shows what mechanisms the U.S. is using to get the “elected” countries to make membership of the Atlantic alliance not just a matter of defense against Russia, but, above all, an existential necessity. And the level of extremism deployed is so great that you only have to listen to the way the elite, who make up the Kiev regime, talk about Russians, not distinguishing between them, to realize that the hatred is indiscriminate, deep, visceral, as only something irrational, like racism, can be. And NATO’s very survival depends on this irrational, animal hatred.
To preserve in time, recover and revitalize the Nazi historical heritage, there is one country in particular that has fulfilled this role like no other: Canada! Even today, Canada refuses to provide the identities of the 900 escaped Nazis who found sanctuary there.
In a previous article, I explained what a living museum the University of Alberta and Canadian society are for fugitives from the Nuremberg trials, particularly those from the 14th Galician Waffen SS division. However, Canada’s legacy in this respect goes much further, having become a peaceful refugee for scientists, military personnel and other Nazi escapees.
Although in this country, between 1985 and 1986, and after a lot of political and popular pressure, an investigation was carried out into the matter, at the time called the Deschênes Commission, even compiling names, the truth is that the work left a lot to be desired and was carried out to produce results that were, to say the least, ambiguous.
The commission did not investigate materials held in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries, potentially losing crucial evidence there; Judge Deschênes set strict conditions for consulting evidence from these countries, but since the Soviet response to the consultation only arrived in June 1986, this was considered too late for the commission to travel and examine, which suggests that surveying material reality was perhaps not the mission’s main objective.
The commission did not investigate a list of 38 additional names provided at the end of the inquiry, due to what it considered time constraints; the investigation of a list of 71 German scientists and technicians was incomplete; the second part of the commission’s final report, containing allegations against specific individuals and recommendations on how to proceed in certain cases, remains confidential and has not been released to the public; an unedited copy of Alti Rodal’s report to the Deschênes Commission, which contains detailed accounts of how war criminals entered Canada and the government’s responsibility for their entry, has not been fully released; the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police files on Nazi war criminals held by these agencies have not been made public; evidence of the previous activities of members of the Galicia Division has not been examined, particularly those referring to potential war crimes committed in other German police units before joining the division. A secret study conducted by the commission found that British and American authorities transported Nazi collaborators to Canada from Eastern Europe shortly after the Second World War without informing the Canadian government and with minimal scrutiny.
Even today, the withholding of this evidence leads to ongoing debates about the accuracy and integrity of the commission’s work, with many arguing that the commission’s work instead helped cover up the historical record on Nazi war criminals in Canada. It seems that the Deschênes Commission aimed more at whitewashing the past, rather than evaluating it and judging the crimes committed.
The whole affair was revived during the controversy over the reception of Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian parliament. The accusations of whitewashing have multiplied, which is not surprising, considering that this was the commission that declared the members of the Galicia Waffen SS Division innocent of committing war crimes, because, it claimed, they had been examined when they were admitted to the country.
Today, after all this pressure, it is argued that the full disclosure of the commission’s work could not only damage the credibility of the Canadian government, but could also “help Russia” by helping to reinforce the Kremlin’s “denazification” narrative. The problem is not knowing the truth, the problem is demonizing Russia, discrediting its version of the facts and justifying the continuation of the war.
What this reality demonstrates more than ever, and especially when we hear Blinken say that the U.S. is an Arctic country and that it wants to form an organization with Canada and the Baltic European countries to keep that region “conflict-free” (now would be the time to laugh out loud), is that Canada has not only been an important “museum warehouse” for the preservation, protection and recovery of Nazi assets, but is now also part of the “sanitary belt” that the U.S. is promoting around Russia. All this also shows that Canada is nothing more than a republic of the “Bananas” and a retreat camp for human assets that are important to Anglo-American imperialism.
What this sad reality teaches us is that the historical revisionism that aimed to compare communism to Nazism didn’t just aim to normalize the latter and historically disable the former, erasing the USSR’s contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It was much more than that. It aimed to create a repulsive barrier between Russia and those countries that would geographically were to be its natural allies, the European countries… Coincidentally, for those who accuse Putin of being “fascist” and “far right”, it is the Europe of “values” and “democracy” that is on the Nazi side…
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism doesn’t just put Russia on the other side…. It puts all of us, the Western peoples, on the side and under the Nazi-fascist influence!
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... st-terror/
Hugo Dionísio
October 13, 2024
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism puts all of us, the Western peoples, on the side and under the Nazi-fascist influence!
The siege of Russia is not confined to the military, commercial, institutional or financial spheres. Prior to this, another barrier has been set up – or rather, “nurtured” – in the sense of forming a kind of aggressive and active “sanitary belt”, made up with the states whose borders communicate, by land or sea, with those of the Russian Federation.
This “sanitary belt”, conceptualized from what we know to be the western ruling classes mental framework, is deeply ideological in nature, aiming to touch, in a repulsive way, on the deepest values embodied in Russian history over the last 100 years and, through this connection, provoke an antagonistic relationship characterized by a mutual repulsive effect, preventing any human communication that could be established between the parties.
The sovereign strength that resides in Russia’s multinational, multi-ethnic and multi-religious culture, which was responsible, from the outset, for the ability to aggregate forces that made the defeat of Nazi-fascism in the Second World War possible, is also what separates the mineral, human and energy reserves, among others, from the clutches of Western capitalism and its momentum fueled by the imperialist phase it is in.
If the brutality of an ideology like Nazi-fascism was the fuel for the aggression against the then Soviet homeland in the first half of the 20th century, it was its historical preservation and recovery – in an unparalleled process of revisionism and whitewashing – that made possible, in the first decades of the 21st century, to use it as fuel for the “sanitary belt” around Russia. 100 years later, the recipe is being repeated, however with the clear limitations that desperation imposes.
What could be more antagonistic and mutually repulsive than Nazism in contact with what could be considered the “Russian soul” updated with the events that happened through the 20th century? What more vivid and carnal image is there, in its brutality and violence, than the nightmare suffered, mainly by the Russian people, at the hands of Nazi terror?
The first to suffer the effects of this “sanitary belt” are the very citizens of Russian origin who, after the collapse of the USSR, settled in Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia and now live there. In addition to banning the Russian media, violating their right to opinion and information, on the basis of a supposed policy of combating “Kremlin propaganda” (something that is also seen throughout the EU and outside the national constitutions of the various countries), Latvia has even promoted the elimination of the teaching of Russian from school curricula, which has caused concern on the part of UN human rights experts regarding the protection of the rights of ethnic minorities. For those who accuse Russia of not taking them into account…
According to the narrative, the Kremlin uses Russian as a weapon, which it then uses as a vehicle for its propaganda, perpetrated through the so-called “state media”, which they refer to as all media that, whether funded by the Russian executive or not, is not aligned with the Western narrative. What they never mention is that, after all, the use of Russian as a vehicle for propaganda is not, as they say, exclusive to Russian sources, since Latvia itself finances media outlets such as Meduza, which, writing in Russian, only aim to pass on information in line with the Western narrative.
While not as radical as Latvia in removing the Russian language from school curricula, Estonia is nevertheless an example of the destruction of monuments alluding to the Soviet victory over Nazism. Especially under Kaja Kallas, the process of removing these monuments accelerated and was even discussed within the European framework, including the removal of the Soviet Tank on the outskirts of the city of Narva. According to Kaja Kallas, the tank is a “crime weapon” – perhaps the “crime” of defeating Nazis – “and people are dying in Ukraine with the same kind of tank”.
But this persecution of Soviet – not just Russian – culture and memory tells us that the propagation of a Russophobic logic incorporates a dimension that goes beyond mere ethnic confrontation, represented, for example, in the discussion about limitations on the acquisition of real estate by Russian citizens in Latvia, following a proposal made by the Finnish authorities. For those who say that the Russian people are oppressed, this generalization is incomprehensible.
The linking between the ethnic confrontation with the Russian-speaking and Russian populations and with Soviet past and the memory of the victory over Nazi-fascism has its origins in the wave of collaborationism and sympathy with Nazi ideology that occurred in these countries by certain population layers and ruling classes before, at the beginning of and during the Second World War. Holding the Russian Federation responsible, as the sole repository of the collective historical memory of the victory obtained by the multinational Red Army over the Nazi hordes, bridges the gap between the greed for the vast resources held by Russia and the need to find ideological, theoretical, psychological and emotional grounds to justify aggression.
This theoretical and ideological justification, in my view, is provided by neo-Nazism and the glorification of the collaborationist past with Hitler’s forces. The strength of this anti-communist, racist and white supremacist ideology, placed in the foreground, combined with a process of historical revision and the whitewashing of Nazi-fascist terror, bridges the gap, from the past to the present, between the anti-communism that justified the aggression against the USSR and the Russophobia that serves as an excuse for the current siege.
In order to promote the “sanitary belt” with the Russian Federation, whose function is to prevent healthy contact between Europe (mainly Germany), Russia, the Eurasian republics and China, it was necessary to recover the historical asset that Nazi ideology constitutes for the U.S. and for the collective west ruling classes. As with all assets, you only recover those that already exist per se. The recovery of the Nazi historical heritage is the result of a longer process of preserving and revitalizing that asset.
Today, when we see the glorification of the “Brothers of the Forest“, an openly anti-communist group that emerged in the Baltic countries, formed by former members of the local Waffen-SS and who fought against what they called “Soviet occupation”, even after the end of WWII, and were responsible for horrific crimes against civilians and Soviet police, operating with Western intelligence information, or we saw the whitewashing and enthronement of organizations such as “Sonderkommando A”, which, collaborating with the Nazi forces, using Latvians and Lithuanians, murdered almost 250.000 Jews in Lithuania by 1944, we see that the Nazi historical heritage is very much alive and stronger than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War.
In order to enable its resurgence and recovery, a whole process of revisionism had to be implemented, minimizing the damage and whitewashing its crimes. In Lithuania, homage was paid to General Povilas Plechavicius who fought alongside the Nazis, in 2008 the Lithuanian parliament equated communist and Nazi ideologies, which represented a normalization and historical recovery of Nazism (as opposed to a demonization, as many claim) and, in 2010, the Lithuanian courts declared the swastika “part of the country’s cultural heritage”, proving that ideological equation is nothing more than a process of historical recovery of that past.
The fact is that since 1991, thousands of communists have been persecuted in Lithuania, while demonstrations with Nazi symbols and racist slogans have been allowed. Symptomatic! As Jean Pierre Faye said in the preface to “The Archipelago of Bloodbath” book written by Chomsky and Herman, the act of including Nazism and Communism in the bag of “totalitarianism” allowed the U.S. to support the most backward, reactionary and tyrannical forces, as long as they didn’t claim to be supporters of “totalitarianism”. So, equating communist and Nazi ideologies, the fact is that the Lithuanian authorities, like many others today in the European Union of “values” and “democracy”, persecute communists, but tolerate – to say the least – neo-Nazi far right-wing demonstrations. What’s more, the profusion of openly reactionary and racist governments in the European Union is almost irrefutable proof of the reasons behind the equation. The fact is that in all these countries, communists are persecuted, while Nazis are admitted. Nothing like practice as a criterion for gauging the truth!
In the Portuguese case, a group like movement 1143 (the date that signals the birth of Portuguese nation), aligned with the most extremist factions in Portugal ( ) and with people who have a history of persecuting – and murdering – migrants and minorities of any kind (communists, homosexuals, blacks, Asians or Muslims), is characterized in the mainstream media as a simple “nationalist group” (). What does this have to do with André Ventura’s support (he is a Trump follower from the “Chega” party) against what he referred to as “uncontrolled immigration“? And why doesn’t André Ventura, the media outlets that give him voice and space and the powerful interests that support him, point out that it is private companies that hire immigrants, that it is employers’ associations that petition governments to open borders, that are the UBERs of this life that exploit immigration the most and that it is the European Union itself, which André Ventura defends, that encourages, causes and legitimizes all the immigration we are witnessing? And why don’t they attack the uncontrolled tourism that is destroying Lisbon, an activity for which most immigrants work?
Now, this racist logic that bridges the gap with anti-communism in order to link Russia, today, as the sole repository of the Soviet past and from there to its current demonization, in order to justify aggression, isolation and oppression that will enable it to be plundered – as happened in the terrible 90s of the 20th century under Boris Yeltsin – finds a clear example in Meta’s permission (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) for its users to express hateful messages against Russians.
This Russophobic perspective, which is absolutely unacceptable for a Europe that calls itself “a Europe of values”, represents a fundamental pillar for these countries’ membership to NATO and shows what mechanisms the U.S. is using to get the “elected” countries to make membership of the Atlantic alliance not just a matter of defense against Russia, but, above all, an existential necessity. And the level of extremism deployed is so great that you only have to listen to the way the elite, who make up the Kiev regime, talk about Russians, not distinguishing between them, to realize that the hatred is indiscriminate, deep, visceral, as only something irrational, like racism, can be. And NATO’s very survival depends on this irrational, animal hatred.
To preserve in time, recover and revitalize the Nazi historical heritage, there is one country in particular that has fulfilled this role like no other: Canada! Even today, Canada refuses to provide the identities of the 900 escaped Nazis who found sanctuary there.
In a previous article, I explained what a living museum the University of Alberta and Canadian society are for fugitives from the Nuremberg trials, particularly those from the 14th Galician Waffen SS division. However, Canada’s legacy in this respect goes much further, having become a peaceful refugee for scientists, military personnel and other Nazi escapees.
Although in this country, between 1985 and 1986, and after a lot of political and popular pressure, an investigation was carried out into the matter, at the time called the Deschênes Commission, even compiling names, the truth is that the work left a lot to be desired and was carried out to produce results that were, to say the least, ambiguous.
The commission did not investigate materials held in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries, potentially losing crucial evidence there; Judge Deschênes set strict conditions for consulting evidence from these countries, but since the Soviet response to the consultation only arrived in June 1986, this was considered too late for the commission to travel and examine, which suggests that surveying material reality was perhaps not the mission’s main objective.
The commission did not investigate a list of 38 additional names provided at the end of the inquiry, due to what it considered time constraints; the investigation of a list of 71 German scientists and technicians was incomplete; the second part of the commission’s final report, containing allegations against specific individuals and recommendations on how to proceed in certain cases, remains confidential and has not been released to the public; an unedited copy of Alti Rodal’s report to the Deschênes Commission, which contains detailed accounts of how war criminals entered Canada and the government’s responsibility for their entry, has not been fully released; the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police files on Nazi war criminals held by these agencies have not been made public; evidence of the previous activities of members of the Galicia Division has not been examined, particularly those referring to potential war crimes committed in other German police units before joining the division. A secret study conducted by the commission found that British and American authorities transported Nazi collaborators to Canada from Eastern Europe shortly after the Second World War without informing the Canadian government and with minimal scrutiny.
Even today, the withholding of this evidence leads to ongoing debates about the accuracy and integrity of the commission’s work, with many arguing that the commission’s work instead helped cover up the historical record on Nazi war criminals in Canada. It seems that the Deschênes Commission aimed more at whitewashing the past, rather than evaluating it and judging the crimes committed.
The whole affair was revived during the controversy over the reception of Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian parliament. The accusations of whitewashing have multiplied, which is not surprising, considering that this was the commission that declared the members of the Galicia Waffen SS Division innocent of committing war crimes, because, it claimed, they had been examined when they were admitted to the country.
Today, after all this pressure, it is argued that the full disclosure of the commission’s work could not only damage the credibility of the Canadian government, but could also “help Russia” by helping to reinforce the Kremlin’s “denazification” narrative. The problem is not knowing the truth, the problem is demonizing Russia, discrediting its version of the facts and justifying the continuation of the war.
What this reality demonstrates more than ever, and especially when we hear Blinken say that the U.S. is an Arctic country and that it wants to form an organization with Canada and the Baltic European countries to keep that region “conflict-free” (now would be the time to laugh out loud), is that Canada has not only been an important “museum warehouse” for the preservation, protection and recovery of Nazi assets, but is now also part of the “sanitary belt” that the U.S. is promoting around Russia. All this also shows that Canada is nothing more than a republic of the “Bananas” and a retreat camp for human assets that are important to Anglo-American imperialism.
What this sad reality teaches us is that the historical revisionism that aimed to compare communism to Nazism didn’t just aim to normalize the latter and historically disable the former, erasing the USSR’s contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It was much more than that. It aimed to create a repulsive barrier between Russia and those countries that would geographically were to be its natural allies, the European countries… Coincidentally, for those who accuse Putin of being “fascist” and “far right”, it is the Europe of “values” and “democracy” that is on the Nazi side…
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism doesn’t just put Russia on the other side…. It puts all of us, the Western peoples, on the side and under the Nazi-fascist influence!
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... st-terror/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
he West of “Democratic Values” Alongside Nazi-Fascist Terror
Posted by Internationalist 360° on October 13, 2024
Hugo Dionísio
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism places all of us, the Western peoples, under the Nazi-fascist influence!
The siege of Russia is not confined to the military, commercial, institutional or financial spheres. Prior to this, another barrier was set up – or rather, “nurtured” – in the sense of forming a kind of aggressive and active “sanitary belt”, made up with the states whose borders communicate, by land or sea, with those of the Russian Federation.
This “sanitary belt”, conceptualized from what we know to be the western ruling classes mental framework, is deeply ideological in nature, aiming to touch, in a repulsive way, on the deepest values embodied in Russian history over the last 100 years and, through this connection, provoke an antagonistic relationship characterized by a mutual repulsive effect, preventing any human communication that could be established between the parties.
The sovereign strength that resides in Russia’s multinational, multi-ethnic and multi-religious culture, which was responsible, from the outset, for the ability to aggregate forces that made the defeat of Nazi-fascism in the Second World War possible, is also what separates the mineral, human and energy reserves, among others, from the clutches of Western capitalism and its momentum fueled by the imperialist phase it is in.
If the brutality of an ideology like Nazi-fascism was the fuel for the aggression against the then Soviet homeland in the first half of the 20th century, it was its historical preservation and recovery – in an unparalleled process of revisionism and whitewashing – that made possible, in the first decades of the 21st century, to use it as fuel for the “sanitary belt” around Russia. 100 years later, the recipe is being repeated, however with the clear limitations that desperation imposes.
What could be more antagonistic and mutually repulsive than Nazism in contact with what could be considered the “Russian soul” updated with the events that happened through the 20th century? What more vivid and carnal image is there, in its brutality and violence, than the nightmare suffered, mainly by the Russian people, at the hands of Nazi terror?
The first to suffer the effects of this “sanitary belt” are the very citizens of Russian origin who, after the collapse of the USSR, settled in Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia and now live there. In addition to banning the Russian media, violating their right to opinion and information, on the basis of a supposed policy of combating “Kremlin propaganda” (something that is also seen throughout the EU and outside the national constitutions of the various countries), Latvia has even promoted the elimination of the teaching of Russian from school curricula, which has caused concern on the part of UN human rights experts regarding the protection of the rights of ethnic minorities. For those who accuse Russia of not taking them into account…
According to the narrative, the Kremlin uses Russian as a weapon, which it then uses as a vehicle for its propaganda, perpetrated through the so-called “state media”, which they refer to as all media that, whether funded by the Russian executive or not, is not aligned with the Western narrative. What they never mention is that, after all, the use of Russian as a vehicle for propaganda is not, as they say, exclusive to Russian sources, since Latvia itself finances media outlets such as Meduza, which, writing in Russian, only aim to pass on information in line with the Western narrative.
While not as radical as Latvia in removing the Russian language from school curricula, Estonia is nevertheless an example of the destruction of monuments alluding to the Soviet victory over Nazism. Especially under Kaja Kallas, the process of removing these monuments accelerated and was even discussed within the European framework, including the removal of the Soviet Tank on the outskirts of the city of Narva. According to Kaja Kallas, the tank is a “crime weapon” – perhaps the “crime” of defeating Nazis – “and people are dying in Ukraine with the same kind of tank”.
But this persecution of Soviet – not just Russian – culture and memory tells us that the propagation of a Russophobic logic incorporates a dimension that goes beyond mere ethnic confrontation, represented, for example, in the discussion about limitations on the acquisition of real estate by Russian citizens in Latvia, following a proposal made by the Finnish authorities. For those who say that the Russian people are oppressed, this generalization is incomprehensible.
The linking between the ethnic confrontation with the Russian-speaking and Russian populations and with Soviet past and the memory of the victory over Nazi-fascism has its origins in the wave of collaborationism and sympathy with Nazi ideology that occurred in these countries by certain population layers and ruling classes before, at the beginning of and during the Second World War. Holding the Russian Federation responsible, as the sole repository of the collective historical memory of the victory obtained by the multinational Red Army over the Nazi hordes, bridges the gap between the greed for the vast resources held by Russia and the need to find ideological, theoretical, psychological and emotional grounds to justify aggression.
This theoretical and ideological justification, in my view, is provided by neo-Nazism and the glorification of the collaborationist past with Hitler’s forces. The strength of this anti-communist, racist and white supremacist ideology, placed in the foreground, combined with a process of historical revision and the whitewashing of Nazi-fascist terror, bridges the gap, from the past to the present, between the anti-communism that justified the aggression against the USSR and the Russophobia that serves as an excuse for the current siege.
In order to promote the “sanitary belt” with the Russian Federation, whose function is to prevent healthy contact between Europe (mainly Germany), Russia, the Eurasian republics and China, it was necessary to recover the historical asset that Nazi ideology constitutes for the U.S. and for the collective west ruling classes. As with all assets, you only recover those that already exist per se. The recovery of the Nazi historical heritage is the result of a longer process of preserving and revitalizing that asset.
Today, when we see the glorification of the “Brothers of the Forest“, an openly anti-communist group that emerged in the Baltic countries, formed by former members of the local Waffen-SS and who fought against what they called “Soviet occupation”, even after the end of WWII, and were responsible for horrific crimes against civilians and Soviet police, operating with Western intelligence information, or we saw the whitewashing and enthronement of organizations such as “Sonderkommando A”, which, collaborating with the Nazi forces, using Latvians and Lithuanians, murdered almost 250.000 Jews in Lithuania by 1944, we see that the Nazi historical heritage is very much alive and stronger than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War.
In order to enable its resurgence and recovery, a whole process of revisionism had to be implemented, minimizing the damage and whitewashing its crimes. In Lithuania, homage was paid to General Povilas Plechavicius who fought alongside the Nazis, in 2008 the Lithuanian parliament equated communist and Nazi ideologies, which represented a normalization and historical recovery of Nazism (as opposed to a demonization, as many claim) and, in 2010, the Lithuanian courts declared the swastika “part of the country’s cultural heritage”, proving that ideological equation is nothing more than a process of historical recovery of that past.
The fact is that since 1991, thousands of communists have been persecuted in Lithuania, while demonstrations with Nazi symbols and racist slogans have been allowed. Symptomatic! As Jean Pierre Faye said in the preface to “The Archipelago of Bloodbath” book written by Chomsky and Herman, the act of including Nazism and Communism in the bag of “totalitarianism” allowed the U.S. to support the most backward, reactionary and tyrannical forces, as long as they didn’t claim to be supporters of “totalitarianism”. So, equating communist and Nazi ideologies, the fact is that the Lithuanian authorities, like many others today in the European Union of “values” and “democracy”, persecute communists, but tolerate – to say the least – neo-Nazi far right-wing demonstrations. What’s more, the profusion of openly reactionary and racist governments in the European Union is almost irrefutable proof of the reasons behind the equation. The fact is that in all these countries, communists are persecuted, while Nazis are admitted. Nothing like practice as a criterion for gauging the truth!
In the Portuguese case, a group like movement 1143 (the date that signals the birth of Portuguese nation), aligned with the most extremist factions in Portugal ( ) and with people who have a history of persecuting – and murdering – migrants and minorities of any kind (communists, homosexuals, blacks, Asians or Muslims), is characterized in the mainstream media as a simple “nationalist group” (). What does this have to do with André Ventura’s support (he is a Trump follower from the “Chega” party) against what he referred to as “uncontrolled immigration“? And why doesn’t André Ventura, the media outlets that give him voice and space and the powerful interests that support him, point out that it is private companies that hire immigrants, that it is employers’ associations that petition governments to open borders, that are the UBERs of this life that exploit immigration the most and that it is the European Union itself, which André Ventura defends, that encourages, causes and legitimizes all the immigration we are witnessing? And why don’t they attack the uncontrolled tourism that is destroying Lisbon, an activity for which most immigrants work?
Now, this racist logic that bridges the gap with anti-communism in order to link Russia, today, as the sole repository of the Soviet past and from there to its current demonization, in order to justify aggression, isolation and oppression that will enable it to be plundered – as happened in the terrible 90s of the 20th century under Boris Yeltsin – finds a clear example in Meta’s permission (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) for its users to express hateful messages against Russians.
This Russophobic perspective, which is absolutely unacceptable for a Europe that calls itself “a Europe of values”, represents a fundamental pillar for these countries’ membership to NATO and shows what mechanisms the U.S. is using to get the “elected” countries to make membership of the Atlantic alliance not just a matter of defense against Russia, but, above all, an existential necessity. And the level of extremism deployed is so great that you only have to listen to the way the elite, who make up the Kiev regime, talk about Russians, not distinguishing between them, to realize that the hatred is indiscriminate, deep, visceral, as only something irrational, like racism, can be. And NATO’s very survival depends on this irrational, animal hatred.
To preserve in time, recover and revitalize the Nazi historical heritage, there is one country in particular that has fulfilled this role like no other: Canada! Even today, Canada refuses to provide the identities of the 900 escaped Nazis who found sanctuary there.
In a previous article, I explained what a living museum the University of Alberta and Canadian society are for fugitives from the Nuremberg trials, particularly those from the 14th Galician Waffen SS division. However, Canada’s legacy in this respect goes much further, having become a peaceful refugee for scientists, military personnel and other Nazi escapees.
Although in this country, between 1985 and 1986, and after a lot of political and popular pressure, an investigation was carried out into the matter, at the time called the Deschênes Commission, even compiling names, the truth is that the work left a lot to be desired and was carried out to produce results that were, to say the least, ambiguous.
The commission did not investigate materials held in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries, potentially losing crucial evidence there; Judge Deschênes set strict conditions for consulting evidence from these countries, but since the Soviet response to the consultation only arrived in June 1986, this was considered too late for the commission to travel and examine, which suggests that surveying material reality was perhaps not the mission’s main objective.
The commission did not investigate a list of 38 additional names provided at the end of the inquiry, due to what it considered time constraints; the investigation of a list of 71 German scientists and technicians was incomplete; the second part of the commission’s final report, containing allegations against specific individuals and recommendations on how to proceed in certain cases, remains confidential and has not been released to the public; an unedited copy of Alti Rodal’s report to the Deschênes Commission, which contains detailed accounts of how war criminals entered Canada and the government’s responsibility for their entry, has not been fully released; the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police files on Nazi war criminals held by these agencies have not been made public; evidence of the previous activities of members of the Galicia Division has not been examined, particularly those referring to potential war crimes committed in other German police units before joining the division. A secret study conducted by the commission found that British and American authorities transported Nazi collaborators to Canada from Eastern Europe shortly after the Second World War without informing the Canadian government and with minimal scrutiny.
Even today, the withholding of this evidence leads to ongoing debates about the accuracy and integrity of the commission’s work, with many arguing that the commission’s work instead helped cover up the historical record on Nazi war criminals in Canada. It seems that the Deschênes Commission aimed more at whitewashing the past, rather than evaluating it and judging the crimes committed.
The whole affair was revived during the controversy over the reception of Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian parliament. The accusations of whitewashing have multiplied, which is not surprising, considering that this was the commission that declared the members of the Galicia Waffen SS Division innocent of committing war crimes, because, it claimed, they had been examined when they were admitted to the country.
Today, after all this pressure, it is argued that the full disclosure of the commission’s work could not only damage the credibility of the Canadian government, but could also “help Russia” by helping to reinforce the Kremlin’s “denazification” narrative. The problem is not knowing the truth, the problem is demonizing Russia, discrediting its version of the facts and justifying the continuation of the war.
What this reality demonstrates more than ever, and especially when we hear Blinken say that the U.S. is an Arctic country and that it wants to form an organization with Canada and the Baltic European countries to keep that region “conflict-free” (now would be the time to laugh out loud), is that Canada has not only been an important “museum warehouse” for the preservation, protection and recovery of Nazi assets, but is now also part of the “sanitary belt” that the U.S. is promoting around Russia. All this also shows that Canada is nothing more than a republic of the “Bananas” and a retreat camp for human assets that are important to Anglo-American imperialism.
What this sad reality teaches us is that the historical revisionism that aimed to compare communism to Nazism didn’t just aim to normalize the latter and historically disable the former, erasing the USSR’s contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It was much more than that. It aimed to create a repulsive barrier between Russia and those countries that would geographically were to be its natural allies, the European countries… Coincidentally, for those who accuse Putin of being “fascist” and “far right”, it is the Europe of “values” and “democracy” that is on the Nazi side…
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism doesn’t just place Russia on the other side…. It places all of us, the Western peoples, under the Nazi-fascist influence!
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/10/ ... st-terror/
Posted by Internationalist 360° on October 13, 2024
Hugo Dionísio
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism places all of us, the Western peoples, under the Nazi-fascist influence!
The siege of Russia is not confined to the military, commercial, institutional or financial spheres. Prior to this, another barrier was set up – or rather, “nurtured” – in the sense of forming a kind of aggressive and active “sanitary belt”, made up with the states whose borders communicate, by land or sea, with those of the Russian Federation.
This “sanitary belt”, conceptualized from what we know to be the western ruling classes mental framework, is deeply ideological in nature, aiming to touch, in a repulsive way, on the deepest values embodied in Russian history over the last 100 years and, through this connection, provoke an antagonistic relationship characterized by a mutual repulsive effect, preventing any human communication that could be established between the parties.
The sovereign strength that resides in Russia’s multinational, multi-ethnic and multi-religious culture, which was responsible, from the outset, for the ability to aggregate forces that made the defeat of Nazi-fascism in the Second World War possible, is also what separates the mineral, human and energy reserves, among others, from the clutches of Western capitalism and its momentum fueled by the imperialist phase it is in.
If the brutality of an ideology like Nazi-fascism was the fuel for the aggression against the then Soviet homeland in the first half of the 20th century, it was its historical preservation and recovery – in an unparalleled process of revisionism and whitewashing – that made possible, in the first decades of the 21st century, to use it as fuel for the “sanitary belt” around Russia. 100 years later, the recipe is being repeated, however with the clear limitations that desperation imposes.
What could be more antagonistic and mutually repulsive than Nazism in contact with what could be considered the “Russian soul” updated with the events that happened through the 20th century? What more vivid and carnal image is there, in its brutality and violence, than the nightmare suffered, mainly by the Russian people, at the hands of Nazi terror?
The first to suffer the effects of this “sanitary belt” are the very citizens of Russian origin who, after the collapse of the USSR, settled in Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia and now live there. In addition to banning the Russian media, violating their right to opinion and information, on the basis of a supposed policy of combating “Kremlin propaganda” (something that is also seen throughout the EU and outside the national constitutions of the various countries), Latvia has even promoted the elimination of the teaching of Russian from school curricula, which has caused concern on the part of UN human rights experts regarding the protection of the rights of ethnic minorities. For those who accuse Russia of not taking them into account…
According to the narrative, the Kremlin uses Russian as a weapon, which it then uses as a vehicle for its propaganda, perpetrated through the so-called “state media”, which they refer to as all media that, whether funded by the Russian executive or not, is not aligned with the Western narrative. What they never mention is that, after all, the use of Russian as a vehicle for propaganda is not, as they say, exclusive to Russian sources, since Latvia itself finances media outlets such as Meduza, which, writing in Russian, only aim to pass on information in line with the Western narrative.
While not as radical as Latvia in removing the Russian language from school curricula, Estonia is nevertheless an example of the destruction of monuments alluding to the Soviet victory over Nazism. Especially under Kaja Kallas, the process of removing these monuments accelerated and was even discussed within the European framework, including the removal of the Soviet Tank on the outskirts of the city of Narva. According to Kaja Kallas, the tank is a “crime weapon” – perhaps the “crime” of defeating Nazis – “and people are dying in Ukraine with the same kind of tank”.
But this persecution of Soviet – not just Russian – culture and memory tells us that the propagation of a Russophobic logic incorporates a dimension that goes beyond mere ethnic confrontation, represented, for example, in the discussion about limitations on the acquisition of real estate by Russian citizens in Latvia, following a proposal made by the Finnish authorities. For those who say that the Russian people are oppressed, this generalization is incomprehensible.
The linking between the ethnic confrontation with the Russian-speaking and Russian populations and with Soviet past and the memory of the victory over Nazi-fascism has its origins in the wave of collaborationism and sympathy with Nazi ideology that occurred in these countries by certain population layers and ruling classes before, at the beginning of and during the Second World War. Holding the Russian Federation responsible, as the sole repository of the collective historical memory of the victory obtained by the multinational Red Army over the Nazi hordes, bridges the gap between the greed for the vast resources held by Russia and the need to find ideological, theoretical, psychological and emotional grounds to justify aggression.
This theoretical and ideological justification, in my view, is provided by neo-Nazism and the glorification of the collaborationist past with Hitler’s forces. The strength of this anti-communist, racist and white supremacist ideology, placed in the foreground, combined with a process of historical revision and the whitewashing of Nazi-fascist terror, bridges the gap, from the past to the present, between the anti-communism that justified the aggression against the USSR and the Russophobia that serves as an excuse for the current siege.
In order to promote the “sanitary belt” with the Russian Federation, whose function is to prevent healthy contact between Europe (mainly Germany), Russia, the Eurasian republics and China, it was necessary to recover the historical asset that Nazi ideology constitutes for the U.S. and for the collective west ruling classes. As with all assets, you only recover those that already exist per se. The recovery of the Nazi historical heritage is the result of a longer process of preserving and revitalizing that asset.
Today, when we see the glorification of the “Brothers of the Forest“, an openly anti-communist group that emerged in the Baltic countries, formed by former members of the local Waffen-SS and who fought against what they called “Soviet occupation”, even after the end of WWII, and were responsible for horrific crimes against civilians and Soviet police, operating with Western intelligence information, or we saw the whitewashing and enthronement of organizations such as “Sonderkommando A”, which, collaborating with the Nazi forces, using Latvians and Lithuanians, murdered almost 250.000 Jews in Lithuania by 1944, we see that the Nazi historical heritage is very much alive and stronger than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War.
In order to enable its resurgence and recovery, a whole process of revisionism had to be implemented, minimizing the damage and whitewashing its crimes. In Lithuania, homage was paid to General Povilas Plechavicius who fought alongside the Nazis, in 2008 the Lithuanian parliament equated communist and Nazi ideologies, which represented a normalization and historical recovery of Nazism (as opposed to a demonization, as many claim) and, in 2010, the Lithuanian courts declared the swastika “part of the country’s cultural heritage”, proving that ideological equation is nothing more than a process of historical recovery of that past.
The fact is that since 1991, thousands of communists have been persecuted in Lithuania, while demonstrations with Nazi symbols and racist slogans have been allowed. Symptomatic! As Jean Pierre Faye said in the preface to “The Archipelago of Bloodbath” book written by Chomsky and Herman, the act of including Nazism and Communism in the bag of “totalitarianism” allowed the U.S. to support the most backward, reactionary and tyrannical forces, as long as they didn’t claim to be supporters of “totalitarianism”. So, equating communist and Nazi ideologies, the fact is that the Lithuanian authorities, like many others today in the European Union of “values” and “democracy”, persecute communists, but tolerate – to say the least – neo-Nazi far right-wing demonstrations. What’s more, the profusion of openly reactionary and racist governments in the European Union is almost irrefutable proof of the reasons behind the equation. The fact is that in all these countries, communists are persecuted, while Nazis are admitted. Nothing like practice as a criterion for gauging the truth!
In the Portuguese case, a group like movement 1143 (the date that signals the birth of Portuguese nation), aligned with the most extremist factions in Portugal ( ) and with people who have a history of persecuting – and murdering – migrants and minorities of any kind (communists, homosexuals, blacks, Asians or Muslims), is characterized in the mainstream media as a simple “nationalist group” (). What does this have to do with André Ventura’s support (he is a Trump follower from the “Chega” party) against what he referred to as “uncontrolled immigration“? And why doesn’t André Ventura, the media outlets that give him voice and space and the powerful interests that support him, point out that it is private companies that hire immigrants, that it is employers’ associations that petition governments to open borders, that are the UBERs of this life that exploit immigration the most and that it is the European Union itself, which André Ventura defends, that encourages, causes and legitimizes all the immigration we are witnessing? And why don’t they attack the uncontrolled tourism that is destroying Lisbon, an activity for which most immigrants work?
Now, this racist logic that bridges the gap with anti-communism in order to link Russia, today, as the sole repository of the Soviet past and from there to its current demonization, in order to justify aggression, isolation and oppression that will enable it to be plundered – as happened in the terrible 90s of the 20th century under Boris Yeltsin – finds a clear example in Meta’s permission (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) for its users to express hateful messages against Russians.
This Russophobic perspective, which is absolutely unacceptable for a Europe that calls itself “a Europe of values”, represents a fundamental pillar for these countries’ membership to NATO and shows what mechanisms the U.S. is using to get the “elected” countries to make membership of the Atlantic alliance not just a matter of defense against Russia, but, above all, an existential necessity. And the level of extremism deployed is so great that you only have to listen to the way the elite, who make up the Kiev regime, talk about Russians, not distinguishing between them, to realize that the hatred is indiscriminate, deep, visceral, as only something irrational, like racism, can be. And NATO’s very survival depends on this irrational, animal hatred.
To preserve in time, recover and revitalize the Nazi historical heritage, there is one country in particular that has fulfilled this role like no other: Canada! Even today, Canada refuses to provide the identities of the 900 escaped Nazis who found sanctuary there.
In a previous article, I explained what a living museum the University of Alberta and Canadian society are for fugitives from the Nuremberg trials, particularly those from the 14th Galician Waffen SS division. However, Canada’s legacy in this respect goes much further, having become a peaceful refugee for scientists, military personnel and other Nazi escapees.
Although in this country, between 1985 and 1986, and after a lot of political and popular pressure, an investigation was carried out into the matter, at the time called the Deschênes Commission, even compiling names, the truth is that the work left a lot to be desired and was carried out to produce results that were, to say the least, ambiguous.
The commission did not investigate materials held in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries, potentially losing crucial evidence there; Judge Deschênes set strict conditions for consulting evidence from these countries, but since the Soviet response to the consultation only arrived in June 1986, this was considered too late for the commission to travel and examine, which suggests that surveying material reality was perhaps not the mission’s main objective.
The commission did not investigate a list of 38 additional names provided at the end of the inquiry, due to what it considered time constraints; the investigation of a list of 71 German scientists and technicians was incomplete; the second part of the commission’s final report, containing allegations against specific individuals and recommendations on how to proceed in certain cases, remains confidential and has not been released to the public; an unedited copy of Alti Rodal’s report to the Deschênes Commission, which contains detailed accounts of how war criminals entered Canada and the government’s responsibility for their entry, has not been fully released; the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police files on Nazi war criminals held by these agencies have not been made public; evidence of the previous activities of members of the Galicia Division has not been examined, particularly those referring to potential war crimes committed in other German police units before joining the division. A secret study conducted by the commission found that British and American authorities transported Nazi collaborators to Canada from Eastern Europe shortly after the Second World War without informing the Canadian government and with minimal scrutiny.
Even today, the withholding of this evidence leads to ongoing debates about the accuracy and integrity of the commission’s work, with many arguing that the commission’s work instead helped cover up the historical record on Nazi war criminals in Canada. It seems that the Deschênes Commission aimed more at whitewashing the past, rather than evaluating it and judging the crimes committed.
The whole affair was revived during the controversy over the reception of Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian parliament. The accusations of whitewashing have multiplied, which is not surprising, considering that this was the commission that declared the members of the Galicia Waffen SS Division innocent of committing war crimes, because, it claimed, they had been examined when they were admitted to the country.
Today, after all this pressure, it is argued that the full disclosure of the commission’s work could not only damage the credibility of the Canadian government, but could also “help Russia” by helping to reinforce the Kremlin’s “denazification” narrative. The problem is not knowing the truth, the problem is demonizing Russia, discrediting its version of the facts and justifying the continuation of the war.
What this reality demonstrates more than ever, and especially when we hear Blinken say that the U.S. is an Arctic country and that it wants to form an organization with Canada and the Baltic European countries to keep that region “conflict-free” (now would be the time to laugh out loud), is that Canada has not only been an important “museum warehouse” for the preservation, protection and recovery of Nazi assets, but is now also part of the “sanitary belt” that the U.S. is promoting around Russia. All this also shows that Canada is nothing more than a republic of the “Bananas” and a retreat camp for human assets that are important to Anglo-American imperialism.
What this sad reality teaches us is that the historical revisionism that aimed to compare communism to Nazism didn’t just aim to normalize the latter and historically disable the former, erasing the USSR’s contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It was much more than that. It aimed to create a repulsive barrier between Russia and those countries that would geographically were to be its natural allies, the European countries… Coincidentally, for those who accuse Putin of being “fascist” and “far right”, it is the Europe of “values” and “democracy” that is on the Nazi side…
The historical rehabilitation of Nazism doesn’t just place Russia on the other side…. It places all of us, the Western peoples, under the Nazi-fascist influence!
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/10/ ... st-terror/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
Abel Prieto Jiménez: “It is Imperative to Generate Anti-Fascist Culture and Thought”
Posted by Internationalist 360° on October 26, 2024
Flor de Paz
As part of the Cuban intellectual vanguard of our times and an opinion leader on the island and in Latin America, Abel Prieto Jiménez, president of Casa de las Américas and twice Cuban Minister of Culture, reflects on the dangers of neo-Nazism with a critical, sobering, thought-provoking perspective that broadens horizons.
His dedication to the search for data and facts on an urgent matter: the flourishing of neo-fascist expressions and ideologies in the world, makes it clear that this is one of the concerns of Abel Prieto Jimenez, president of Casa de las Americas and twice Cuban Minister of Culture. He spoke on the subject in his lecture Another Assault on Reason, at the Third International Colloquium Patria, held in Havana in March.
His reflections on the phenomenon of neo-fascism can also be found in publications such as Faces of Fascism and Speeches and Hate Crimes, as well as in different media and speeches in forums of many kinds. Such is his militancy in relation to the subject and his capacity to summon intellectuals from all over the world.
As part of the Cuban intellectual vanguard of our time and an opinion leader on the island and in Latin America, Abel Prieto’s approaches to this urgent issue point to a critical, sobering and suggestive look, which sketches horizons on the dangers of this emergence of neo-Nazism.
While contextualizing processes and historical elements connected with this worrying reality, his vision as a man of culture allows him to foresee actions of the left in a time that does not evolve by cycles, but rather responds to local responses and global actions of a right wing that insists on revealing its true garb, as part of a strategy dressed as pseudo-democracy.
In one of the iconic halls of the Casa de las Americas, from “his proverbial armchair” -as Miguel Barnet wrote a little less than a month ago in his words of praise to Abel on the occasion of his being conferred the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa in Social Sciences by the Marta Abreu Central University of Las Villas- he gave this interview for Resumen Latinoamericano.
– In the last two decades we have seen a resurgence of Nazism, Fascism and the legacies of Francoism in Spain, how do you explain this flourishing?
You just have to take a look at the elections that have taken place for the European Parliament, that fascist ultra-right has had an important electoral victory, and this case is very striking.
I have read a lot on the subject, I have looked through a lot of information, there are many analyses and evaluations. Ignacio Ramonet gave a lecture here at Casa de las Américas -we broadcast it on YouTube- on the strategies of the new extreme right to conquer power.
He insists that we should not confuse this extreme right with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco; qualitatively, there are features that differentiate them. And he explains -and other scholars agree- that after all these years of neoliberalism, this model, which began to be applied with great rigor in the 80s of the last century, had in Pinochet’s Chile a kind of terrible trial. Along with Pinochet’s crimes came the experts, the economists of the Chicago School, to impose this experiment in which the State is reduced to the minimum expression and it is the market that imposes its laws. Then, in the face of the establishment of this neoliberal model, there has been no lack of hesitation, caution, mediocrity on the left or the pseudo-left, which has allowed itself to be captured by this doctrine and has not given alternative answers to the implacable imposed market which has been creating desperation.
There are many people who feel they have lost their class; the middle classes – Ramonet says it very eloquently – have gone bankrupt and have fallen into a kind of vacuum in terms of identity and feel cornered. They are anxious about the phenomenon of migration; the rejection of migration is one of the springs that nourish the ranks of the new fascism, the idea that immigrants are going to take away jobs, that they are going to receive help from governments, to muddy the white race, to bring miscegenation, detestable, mediocre, savage, barbaric customs. It is like the famous fable of the invasion of the barbarians who come to invade us. Against this are the theories of white supremacism, hatred of those who are different, women, of feminist movements, against which they have a truly rabid fury.
There is a theorist of Milei, his name is Agustín Laje (with j), who has a book titled La batalla cultural; it is an interesting book because it reveals that there is doctrine behind an energumen like Milei. He speaks of neo-Marxist lesbofeminism; imagine what denomination he found to hate to give arguments against feminism.
That desperation, that uncertainty, that lack of answers, has nourished the ranks of the new fascism; traditional politics promises and delivers nothing, and the number of young people joining neo-fascist movements and following neo-fascist demagogues is tremendous.
Milei’s voters are under thirty years old; young people. But in Spain, Vox is being nourished by teenagers, boys taking their first steps in politics hating women, immigrants, blacks, Arabs, those who have a sexual orientation different from the orthodox, LGTBI, gay communities. Fascism gives these bewildered, confused people the idea that they are part of a collectivity.
There is a Jewish American journalist, Talia Levin, who infiltrated the neo-Nazi groups in the United States and chronicled her days with these very fierce people who stormed the Capitol. She says that what a lot of people are looking for is a simple understanding of things, that the Nazis say what is bad and what is good in a very simple way, without nuance, and they reach out to people who are looking for simple, elementary, primitive answers to the crisis and crossroads they face every day.
The age of conspiracism. Trump, the cult of lies and the assault on Capitol Hill, by Ignacio Ramonet, is a book that I recommend. It is exciting because it explains the role of social networks in the growth of hate groups and neo-Nazi groups. It is published in Cuba by Editorial Ciencias Sociales.
The networks – where many young people attracted by fascist groups manifest themselves – are ideal spaces for this type of doctrine and congregations to flourish, because they do not reason: they react with anger, with hatred and invite the most brutal confrontation.
There is an Italian scholar, Leonardo Bianchi, who calls Instagram “FascioInstagram”, because this social network is full of images of Mussolini, of teenagers making the Nazi salute, portraying themselves in places where the Duce, Mussolini, made some famous speech.
Suddenly, they have approached the history of this genocidal, racist, brutal doctrine by idealizing it. Look at the problem, in Italy many young people take selfies with Società Sportiva jackets, which is a sports club, but its acronym: SS, alludes to the Hitlerian SS. It is an absolutely uncritical look at this phenomenon, looking for reasons to idealize it, to exalt it.
There is also another cause, the cultural one. The world is going backwards intellectually, we read less, we analyze less what we read; what Alessandro Baricco -the great Italian writer, the writer of the novel, Silk, a great novelist and essayist- said, that today people surf information, like on the surfboards, they never go deep, they always stay on the surface.
And he is quite right about that; it is true that the tendency is to see the headlines and move on to something else. The image of the world is fragmented in today’s society, and at the same time the tendency to superficiality does enormous damage.
There is no lack of warnings in today’s world about how teenagers -not only Cubans, but in general in the world-, have more difficulties in learning, in oral expression, in what they call reading comprehension, which is reading a text and then being able to explain the message of what they have read.
People reading or believing they are reading, deciphering those signs, are unable to explain what they have read, what the author wanted to tell them. In the context of this cultural and intellectual regression that we are experiencing, which is a true cultural crisis, it is easy for a very primitive doctrine with simple slogans to flourish.
There are many people re-reading the famous book by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, The Principles of Propaganda. When you read it you realize that the same principles influence the networks: repeat the messages, make, them very simple, do not encourage the audience to think, to analyze anything, they have to be very elementary messages, reiterate them, so the lie will become the truth.
On the other hand, there is the positive side of these technologies. I would not have been able to gather the information I have on this new fascism without access to the Internet. So it makes it easy, but at the same time it creates addiction.
A few days ago, in the Spanish press, the idea of a bill was brought to the Spanish Council of Ministers to force manufacturers of cell phones, tablets, devices that have access to the Internet, to add a parental control application so parents can control what teenagers are consuming and influence this dependence in some way; it must be said: it is a drug.
Yesterday I was reading a paper by two American psychologists who analyzed cases of teenagers with deep depression and attempted suicide, and these scholars agree that in 2012 there was a growth of this indicator, according to international records, but particularly in the United States and Great Britain.
The problem became evident, above all, in teenage girls who attempted suicide or fell into a terrible depression. And the fact is that 2012 is the time of the social media boom, when more people enter the networks and start sharing.
So, if a girl is obese, feels self-conscious, inferior, because the model of beauty imposed on her through all these media is thinness, like that of a barbie, she needs the likes, because she is very dependent on the approval of the community that follows her on the networks, which is typical of adolescence.
There is an analyst who says that the adolescent has to look at his phone continuously to see if a photo he has posted has been liked, if he has received any flattery or insult. And they are subjected to this particular pressure in that tremendously contradictory and complex moment in which they are trying to build their personality, to understand the world, to understand themselves.
All this helps these neo-fascist groups of the ultra-right -which present themselves as manly, tough, with a type of aggressive, anti-system discourse, to monopolize the feeling of discontent.
The caste, as Milei calls politicians, feel that in the fascists’ discourse there is a harsher criticism, more open to that which makes them feel bad, humiliated.
It is a sum of issues and questions that have to do above all with the fact that today’s world, culturally, is convincing you all the time that capitalism is the only way to imagine the social order. As Paulo Freire said: ‘The great cultural triumph of capitalism is that the poor blame themselves for their misery, that they never blame the system’. And it is true, they have achieved this triumph. It has to do with that cultural colonization that through the networks hijacks the subjectivity of millions of people.
And there is all that dazzled emigration towards a kingdom of supposed opportunities, of supposed happiness, where people even put themselves in the hands of human traffickers, a risky, terrible thing. We have it in Cuba, in all America.
So technologies, which are no longer new, have been an exceptionally useful instrument for fascism. Today the role of social networks is irreplaceable in the promotion of these ideas and their leaders.
At the same time, the management of emotions has been important for the new fascism: to appeal to that component that goes beyond the rational and has to do with the emotional; this has a great influence on people, especially on youth, people without hope, people who are confused, disconcerted, who have lost faith in so many things.
They continue to use textbooks, as in the case of the two great theoreticians (if we can call them that) of Milei: Agustín Laje and Nicolás Márquez, which use traditional tools of cultural promotion and incorporate with great success the new techniques.
– Are there links between Nazi-fascist thinking in the United States and its variants in Europe?
Ramonet’s thesis is that Donald Trump has greatly influenced the new fascism in the United States and Europe to become naturalized. He says that in another era people were ashamed to say that they were attracted to a far-right candidate, that they were supporters of a neo-Nazi party or group.
Trump has exalted the pride of being on the far right of the political spectrum, the pride of being racist, of being an extreme nationalist, furious; that fanaticism around Trump has influenced the whole world, he has been an inspirer of the new fascism. In this sense, Milei is like a small Trump clone.
I think the differences that may exist between the phenomenon of neo-fascism in the United States and in Europe is that fascists (in) the United States are not interested in figures like Franco or Mussolini. In Spain, however, Francoism is important for Vox. But even for Vox it is significant, in addition to removing Franco’s image, to clean up the horrendous traces left by the conquest and colonization of America. Remember that they invented the concept of the Iberosphere.
When López Obrador said that the King of Spain should ask for forgiveness for the genocide committed by the Spaniards with the conquest and colonization of our America, Vox reacted with tremendous violence and promoted tributes to Hernán Cortés wherever they could. Their search for an honorable past and honorable ancestors, goes through Franco, but it reaches Hernán Cortés and the fierce conquistadors and colonizers.
It is a peculiar mentality, and it is very curious that they want to mix it up with Latin American issues. Vox has been continuously organizing forums; they did one in Colombia a few months before Petro won, when the polls suggested the Historical Pact and Petro could win. Vox went there with all the fascists of this continent to hold a terrible, ultra-right summit; they also did this in Peru and Mexico. They have been moving.
– They want to reformulate history in their favor.
Yes, they want to reread history. There is a tremendous anecdote, which makes me shudder.It was in the cemetery of La Almudena, in Madrid, where the Franco regime shot more than three thousand people. There was a memorial there with a verse by Miguel Hernandez: “because I am like the felled tree, which sprouts: because I still have life” in bronze letters, and the three thousand names of those who were shot who were identified, because others will never be identified. Then the Madrid City Council, with an ultra-conservative, ultra-right-wing majority, decided to tear that fragment from the verse and put: ‘Peace, reconciliation, love, to all the victims of ideological conflicts’, as if paying homage to the victims of Francoism and the victims of the communists, of the republicans.
They called it historical resignification; the city council in its official document said that the monument of La Almudena had to be resignified, and what they did was to annul it, absolutely”.
– These are forms of negationism in the face of the genocide of fascism. How can they be understood in the face of the evidence provided by the documentary proofs?
Well, Milei is a denier of the great crimes of the so-called civil-military dictatorship in Argentina, which was not in the thirties of the last century, nor around the Second World War. These crimes are very close in time, and yet there is already a denialist current.
Thirty thousand people were murdered, disappeared, but in reality they disappeared to die, to be murdered.
– Will this movement, which is already established in both continents, continue to gain strength?
Here in our America, the victory of Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico was very important, because in this country there is a hard right wing.
They built a candidate and fabricated a coalition from the United States came the infamy that López Obrador had contacts with drug trafficking, a truly shameful thing to try to morally damage one of the greatest leaders of our America, but they did not succeed in damaging his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Lula won in Brazil, but by a landslide, as soccer fans say, with a relatively narrow margin. And Bolsonaro and his supporters, fanatics too, are still there. In Brazil there is danger. There is an area of the Brazilian population where there are poor people, which is another new phenomenon, because it is not only young people who are at risk. An Italian friend of the Network in Defense of Humanity told me, and later I confirmed it in documents I read: in the slums of the big cities, working class, humble people who traditionally voted for the Communist Party, now vote for fascism.
Fidel was obsessed with how to confront the poor right-wing, how to present arguments to the people, how through confusion, lies and distortions they could convince a humble person who has nothing to expect from a fascist demagogue to follow that madness.
– Perhaps because of a lack of culture.
Of course, because of Martí’s famous phrase: “To be cultured is the only way to be free”. Fidel said: “Without culture there is no possible freedom”. And it is true that this is a danger. In Fidel’s speech at the University on November 17, 2005, which is truly shocking, there is a passage dedicated to what he calls conditioned reflexes.
He says that commercial advertising and all that machinery of manipulation of the minds create conditioned reflexes. Imperialism suddenly says: ‘Cuba is bad, socialism is bad’.
And there go the poor of the earth, the people without jobs, without health care, without education, without any kind of state support to have any hope, and they repeat: ‘Cuba is bad, socialism is bad’. Fidel explained how that conditioned reflex takes away the ability to think, positions a person against their own interests as a class and brings them closer to those who have always despised and used them. That is today’s drama: the poor voting for fascism.
You asked me if this could have some kind of counterweight. I believe that Fidel also gave us the answer in his closing speech at the International Meeting for the Balance of the World as a tribute to the 150th anniversary of the birth of José Martí, in 2003; the year in which George W. Bush, using the attack on the Twin Towers as a pretext, launched the global crusade against terrorism, announced the invasion of Iraq; in Miami they were saying: ‘Iraq now, Cuba later’.
Bush speaks to West Point students and tells them that the U.S. military has to be prepared to invade and occupy eighty or more obscure corners of the world.It was a time when we were looking at a fascist threat just like we are now. Many people from all over the world came to Havana for that Martí event, concerned about the fate of Cuba and the noble ideas, and about the militaristic, threatening, fascist wave. A few years before, socialism had collapsed in the USSR and in the so-called socialist camp. And the people asked: “What can be done, Fidel, what can be done? Fidel said: “Sow ideas, sow conscience”, he repeated it three times, always inspired by Martí.
Fidel was a Martiano all the time, Retamar used to say that, for Fidel, quoting Martí was like breathing, it was something so incorporated that he didn’t even have to pause or think about it. Fidel was convinced, like Martí, that ‘Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone’. Fidel believed that spaces could be opened for truth, for noble causes.
Here, in Havana, there was an event that inspired me, the Third International Colloquium Patria. It was extraordinary; I have been to many events and listened to talks and discussions and panels. In this one, everything was interesting and useful for understanding the great communicational battle that confronts us.
The left has neglected communication while the right does not, even for a second. The left has dealt relatively little with these issues and, nevertheless, they are vital, like cultural colonization itself. And today it is a proven fact that voters are being led to ultra-right candidates through social networks.
The journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde made a very interesting study on the use of the networks in the coup d’état against Evo Morales, on how Camacho, the fascist of Santa Cruz, one of the leaders of the coup, multiplied his followers on Twitter from day to night, and Jeanine Añez the same, with the use of bots. The tags #Evoassassassin, #Evogolpista, created a very toxic climate, that word that is used so much now, that facilitated the demobilization of the people, and that they saw as inevitable that Evo would leave the government.
Today the role of the networks in all electoral processes is essential. After his trial, Trump gained popularity with the image that he is a victim of a conspiracy, and he also gained money donations. As a victim he received great rewards; he opened a profile on TikTok and has a huge number of followers. Networks today are a tool as television interviews were before. He has more followers on his networks than the audience of all those star channels combined.
His messages are like fists: simple, primitive, Goebbels’ principles of propaganda. “Let’s Make America Great Again” (over and over again); the anti-Latino, anti-immigrant speech; the idea of saving the nation from a silent invasion of immigrants; this new fascism promotes selfishness, the basest, meanest instincts. It is terrible.
And then we have to go back to Fidel: ‘Sow ideas, sow conscience’, with an extra component, today they manipulate knowledge, information and emotions’.
– After World War II, the CIA hired advisors from Nazi Germany to carry out investigations, military operations, interrogations, what impact did the influence of Nazi German advisors have on the doctrines of this American agency?
I suppose so, on a certain scale. Although it is a very big ethical contradiction to recruit intelligence from Hitler’s world, the Yankees did it. Because the Yankees have nothing to do with ethics; for them principles are something remote. No Yankee politician (there may be some isolated cases) takes into account the ethical component of politics. Politics has become degraded all over the world, not only in the United States. But those advisors, that brain drain from Nazi Germany by U.S. imperialism has to do with U.S. cynicism, with that taking advantage of opportunities wherever they come from no matter what sign they have.
They did not have any kind of assessment of the origin of those scientists, of those intelligences, how they had been trained, at what cost. Remember they dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Japan was about to surrender. It was not really against the Japanese, it was against the Soviet Union, what the Yankees -Truman, a terrible murderer- wanted was to make it clear to the whole world, and mainly to the Soviet Union, who had the military supremacy, who had the lethal weapon after that war, so they massively killed the civilian population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Truman said in an interview many years later: ‘I sleep peacefully’.And Hollywood has been in charge of washing the United States of guilt, it has made a rereading of universal history, like Vox in the cemetery of La Almudena in Madrid.
When I was a child I used to watch cowboy and Indian movies, and they always asked you one question: ‘Who are you with, the Indians or the cowboys?’ One was with the cowboys -unbelievably-, because the Indians were the savages, they were painted, murderers surrounding the stagecoach where the girl and the lover were cornered.
Then that genocide that was the conquest of the West: concentrating the Indians in ghettos, alcoholizing them, terrible things they did with those populations, presented to the public all over the world as the arrival of civilization in the face of the barbarism represented by the Indians.
But then they did it with the Korean War. I also saw as a child the saga of the Korean War, when all those little Chinese, the Koreans, were machine-gunned by the Yaqui heroes. It was an idealized vision, because the Yankees were defeated in Korea. And they have done the same with the famous Vietnam syndrome. Hollywood took care of curing that complex, the humiliation they received from the Vietnamese people.
Returning to your question, the fascist ideas of those scientists imported by the United States for their operations, surely macabre, are in the minority with respect to the fascism generated by the United States.
Notice that when they created the conflict with Japan, the Japanese living in the United States were put in concentration camps in the United States. Or do you want something more fascist than the Ku Klux Klan, which is Made in the USA? The Ku Klux Klan is typically American.
There is a native fascism, ‘criollo’, with very deep roots in a violent nation, full of hatred, where there is a cult of firearms, and where every now and then in a school there appears an unbalanced boy who kills his classmates, teachers, because anyone can buy an assault weapon on the Internet.
There is a book, also tremendous, published by Editorial Ciencias Sociales, by the correspondent of Russia Today in the United States, Helena Villar. It is called Esclavos unidos. The reverse side of the American Dream; it is extraordinary. It has a chapter on opioids, on drugs, and so many arguments on how this American Dream is full of horror, death, crime.
But they have managed a great cultural machine to convince the world that they were the victors in World War II. There is a survey out there, which says that today 90 percent (percent) of the European population – or 99 percent – believe that it was the United States who defeated Hitler and nobody remembers the Soviet Union. They are convinced that they are the bearers of superior Western values, of democratic values, of modernity.
Martí fought a great battle against that from the eighties of the nineteenth century until he died, until his letter to Manuel Mercado, so that the politicians and intellectuals of Cuba and Latin America -the Latin America recently independent from Spain-, would not look for their compass in the North, would not look for their orientation, their model, in the North, and he described how the American elections were, how those representatives were bought by the corporations, by the companies. And he said, ‘Damn prosperity at all costs.’
And he added: ‘The United States has reached high levels of prosperity by metallizing everything’; metallizing it, but he uses that word a little strange. Martí did not want that modernity, he did not want capitalist prosperity based on the exploitation of the people, in which an elite had all the privileges and all the luxuries and the great masses were hungry and in conditions of extreme poverty. Martí saw clearly that this was not the way forward, and he was very distressed because in Latin America – in the face of the old empire of Spain, which represented old, decadent values – suddenly this young empire appeared, dazzling the people”.
– The governments of the United States and Europe are led by technocrats, who are like disposable instruments, but at the same time there is a positioning of the legally recognized extreme right-wing parties in government responsibilities. What is the logic that explains this architecture?
It is the logic of capital. In traditional politics, in the United States and Europe there is what they call the revolving doors: a high government official finishes the term of office of the president of which he is part of his team, and goes to work for a company that is likely to have been favored by the government and takes to the businessmen all his contacts, his relationships, which he acquired in the exercise of his functions as a public employee.
And then in today’s world it works like this: they raze Iraq and then private companies, corporations, go to rebuild Iraq. War is big business. The money that goes to Ukraine to support it in the war with Russia, the Ukrainians use it to buy weapons from the US military-industrial complex. This big business at the same time hides the deep weaknesses of the system, because this is a moment in which the United States, American imperialism, is losing hegemony -we should not forget that.
Today the unipolar world that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp has been changing, that unipolar world with the West as the sole master of the world, of the Earth, with the United States at the forefront. Now there are the BRICS, there is Russia, there is China, as the truly great power in economic and technological terms, not involved in any war, making very important investments in Africa and in Latin America.
The world is absolutely and inevitably multipolar, and this war delirium of the United States, its support for Israel in its barbarism against Palestine, and for Ukraine in the war with Russia, has to do with the desperation caused by the perception that its power has lost strength, that it is weakening, that it is losing prestige.
The BRICS is a new phenomenon that should worry them. They are all diverse countries, but not dependent on the dollar or on the financial mechanisms controlled by the United States. There is a BRICS Bank chaired by Dilma Rousseff; very worrying for the ideologues of the empire, because they are losing ground.
Where they still have a strong hegemony is in the cultural and informational spheres, unfortunately. And our obligation is to open gaps in that hegemony.
I used a metaphor when I spoke in Patria based on José Lezama Lima. He said that the method has to be the scratch in the stone; we have to make a scratch in the stone over and over again, without despairing, that through that crack the truth will come out. We have to defend the truth every day making a scratch in the stone of lies, in the wall of falsehoods, of slander”.
In the face of that expansion of Nazi-fascist thought, the first thing is what Fidel asked of us: to sow ideas, to sow consciousness; we have to generate messages, analysis, thought, through all available media, taking into account that today people read much less than before. But, undoubtedly, we have to generate an anti-fascist culture, anti-fascist thought.
Let us remember that on a Halloween in Cuba there were young people dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan and that, on another Halloween, in an institutional music contest, the winner was a young man dressed up as a Nazi officer. In this globalized world, we cannot think that we are isolated; all the most terrible doctrines, images, ideas, circulate freely all the time and fall on people of all generations, but particularly on the very young.
The left has to articulate itself. This point was very important in the conclusions of the Third International Colloquium Patria, because of the actions proposed by the participants so that the different nuclei of the culture of resistance, of emancipation, anti-fascist, connect and make us much stronger than we are dispersed, isolated. We have to achieve a great anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist front, for socialism.
Today I remembered in a meeting I had with Venezuelan friends how Chavez rescued the word socialism at a time when nobody was talking about socialism. Fidel spoke of socialism and continued defending it, but suddenly another voice emerged, someone who was like a son to Fidel, speaking of socialism when after that collapse, the great triumphal chorus of the neoliberals considered that it was buried forever.
We have to build alternatives, we have to fight day by day the idea that capitalism is the only imaginable and possible social order, that it is a kind of natural order, that capitalist competitiveness is the attitude towards life that corresponds to us as a species. All this is false.
We have to recover words that have been stolen from us. Now Milei has made the word freedom his own. Freedom is ours, true democracy is ours, human rights are ours, and all that machinery has hijacked those words from us.
I believe that it is important all this work of sowing ideas, sowing consciousness around a great global anti-fascist front. It is important that we work in the gestation of that global anti-fascist front, and there you, the communicators, the journalists, with all that extraordinary balance that the Patria Colloquia have left, but in particular the most recent one, can do a lot for a great anti-fascist communicational front, for a great front of anti-fascist and anti-capitalist communicators in search of the alternatives that our species deserves, because that other better world is possible and indispensable. We must add everyone who can be added to this anti-fascist and anti-capitalist front.
In the United States the whole cultural, political, ideological climate is contaminated by these neo-fascist currents of thought; the think tanks are contaminated, politics is contaminated, to such an extreme that the politics of that country has become right-wing. Talk of socialism, of respect for diversity, of the sovereignty of nations, have suddenly become forbidden topics.
There is a serval fear among politicians of being labeled as red, it is like a neo-Martism; we are seeing today a neo-Martism in the United States and in other places of the world; there is a permanent anti-communist court in the name of patriotic values, in the name of the values of the great nation, that is why it is such a dangerous moment”.
– From art, culture and the social sciences, important contributions have been made to the study of neo-Nazi currents from the beginning of World War II to the present day, but this accumulation of knowledge has not been sufficient to understand the dangers of these demons.
It is true that important contributions have been made in favor of that anti-fascist culture we were talking about, but the great circuits of legitimization in cultural terms, the great publishing prizes, those given by Hollywood, the Oscars, the Grammys, those given by the music industry, all are aimed at stimulating artistic and literary production that is not dangerous to the system.
There is an extraordinary book by a Spanish educator called Jon Illescas: La dictadura del videoclip: industria musical y sueños prefabricados, which is very interesting. He explains how every artist who goes out of the orthodox line of support to the system is censored, even very famous artists. The industry does not accept the slightest dalliance, heresy, and in that sense, as Illescas himself says, creators are self-censoring, avoiding conflict, rupture, confrontation”.
– What articulations are there between Nazism, Fascism, and the legacies of Francoism, in the colonialist thought that proliferates in contemporaneity?
They represent a past that is being washed by its contemporary representatives; there is a very obvious attempt to wash the image of Franco, Mussolini, of Hitler, but there is also an attempt to wash the image of Videla, of Pinochet and of the murderers of Plan Condor.
What happened on the fiftieth anniversary of the fascist coup against Allende in Chile was very painful; there were spokesmen of the ultra-right who dared to say that Allende himself was to blame for the coup because of his mistaken policies. Fortunately, there is a declassified document associated with a discussion between Richard Nixon and the director of the CIA in 1970 – Allende had not yet become president, although he was elected – in which Nixon says: ‘That communist cannot reach La Moneda’.
The emperor had had Allende killed before he began to govern, that is why it is so cruel and grotesque that they accuse Allende of errors that later forced the military to put things in order; all this is one more of the many infamies that circulate on a daily basis.
I believe that, yes, those figures of classical fascism are present today, and at the same time a whole horde of later fascists is present. Many people do not dare to criticize Pinochet, consider that he did the right thing, or that he saved Christian civilization from the ghost of communism. There is a book by Miguel Rojas Mix, a very important Chilean essayist, called El dios de Pinochet. Fisionomía del fascismo iberoamericano. It is not published in Cuba, but it explains the supposed divine inspirations that Pinochet had, how he considered himself an instrument of the Most High God, to assassinate, to leave that terrible mark of blood and death.
All of them, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and those who followed, are being washed by the new fascists, as they have also done with Spanish conquerors and colonizers who committed dreadful crimes in our lands.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/10/ ... d-thought/
Posted by Internationalist 360° on October 26, 2024
Flor de Paz
As part of the Cuban intellectual vanguard of our times and an opinion leader on the island and in Latin America, Abel Prieto Jiménez, president of Casa de las Américas and twice Cuban Minister of Culture, reflects on the dangers of neo-Nazism with a critical, sobering, thought-provoking perspective that broadens horizons.
His dedication to the search for data and facts on an urgent matter: the flourishing of neo-fascist expressions and ideologies in the world, makes it clear that this is one of the concerns of Abel Prieto Jimenez, president of Casa de las Americas and twice Cuban Minister of Culture. He spoke on the subject in his lecture Another Assault on Reason, at the Third International Colloquium Patria, held in Havana in March.
His reflections on the phenomenon of neo-fascism can also be found in publications such as Faces of Fascism and Speeches and Hate Crimes, as well as in different media and speeches in forums of many kinds. Such is his militancy in relation to the subject and his capacity to summon intellectuals from all over the world.
As part of the Cuban intellectual vanguard of our time and an opinion leader on the island and in Latin America, Abel Prieto’s approaches to this urgent issue point to a critical, sobering and suggestive look, which sketches horizons on the dangers of this emergence of neo-Nazism.
While contextualizing processes and historical elements connected with this worrying reality, his vision as a man of culture allows him to foresee actions of the left in a time that does not evolve by cycles, but rather responds to local responses and global actions of a right wing that insists on revealing its true garb, as part of a strategy dressed as pseudo-democracy.
In one of the iconic halls of the Casa de las Americas, from “his proverbial armchair” -as Miguel Barnet wrote a little less than a month ago in his words of praise to Abel on the occasion of his being conferred the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa in Social Sciences by the Marta Abreu Central University of Las Villas- he gave this interview for Resumen Latinoamericano.
– In the last two decades we have seen a resurgence of Nazism, Fascism and the legacies of Francoism in Spain, how do you explain this flourishing?
You just have to take a look at the elections that have taken place for the European Parliament, that fascist ultra-right has had an important electoral victory, and this case is very striking.
I have read a lot on the subject, I have looked through a lot of information, there are many analyses and evaluations. Ignacio Ramonet gave a lecture here at Casa de las Américas -we broadcast it on YouTube- on the strategies of the new extreme right to conquer power.
He insists that we should not confuse this extreme right with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco; qualitatively, there are features that differentiate them. And he explains -and other scholars agree- that after all these years of neoliberalism, this model, which began to be applied with great rigor in the 80s of the last century, had in Pinochet’s Chile a kind of terrible trial. Along with Pinochet’s crimes came the experts, the economists of the Chicago School, to impose this experiment in which the State is reduced to the minimum expression and it is the market that imposes its laws. Then, in the face of the establishment of this neoliberal model, there has been no lack of hesitation, caution, mediocrity on the left or the pseudo-left, which has allowed itself to be captured by this doctrine and has not given alternative answers to the implacable imposed market which has been creating desperation.
There are many people who feel they have lost their class; the middle classes – Ramonet says it very eloquently – have gone bankrupt and have fallen into a kind of vacuum in terms of identity and feel cornered. They are anxious about the phenomenon of migration; the rejection of migration is one of the springs that nourish the ranks of the new fascism, the idea that immigrants are going to take away jobs, that they are going to receive help from governments, to muddy the white race, to bring miscegenation, detestable, mediocre, savage, barbaric customs. It is like the famous fable of the invasion of the barbarians who come to invade us. Against this are the theories of white supremacism, hatred of those who are different, women, of feminist movements, against which they have a truly rabid fury.
There is a theorist of Milei, his name is Agustín Laje (with j), who has a book titled La batalla cultural; it is an interesting book because it reveals that there is doctrine behind an energumen like Milei. He speaks of neo-Marxist lesbofeminism; imagine what denomination he found to hate to give arguments against feminism.
That desperation, that uncertainty, that lack of answers, has nourished the ranks of the new fascism; traditional politics promises and delivers nothing, and the number of young people joining neo-fascist movements and following neo-fascist demagogues is tremendous.
Milei’s voters are under thirty years old; young people. But in Spain, Vox is being nourished by teenagers, boys taking their first steps in politics hating women, immigrants, blacks, Arabs, those who have a sexual orientation different from the orthodox, LGTBI, gay communities. Fascism gives these bewildered, confused people the idea that they are part of a collectivity.
There is a Jewish American journalist, Talia Levin, who infiltrated the neo-Nazi groups in the United States and chronicled her days with these very fierce people who stormed the Capitol. She says that what a lot of people are looking for is a simple understanding of things, that the Nazis say what is bad and what is good in a very simple way, without nuance, and they reach out to people who are looking for simple, elementary, primitive answers to the crisis and crossroads they face every day.
The age of conspiracism. Trump, the cult of lies and the assault on Capitol Hill, by Ignacio Ramonet, is a book that I recommend. It is exciting because it explains the role of social networks in the growth of hate groups and neo-Nazi groups. It is published in Cuba by Editorial Ciencias Sociales.
The networks – where many young people attracted by fascist groups manifest themselves – are ideal spaces for this type of doctrine and congregations to flourish, because they do not reason: they react with anger, with hatred and invite the most brutal confrontation.
There is an Italian scholar, Leonardo Bianchi, who calls Instagram “FascioInstagram”, because this social network is full of images of Mussolini, of teenagers making the Nazi salute, portraying themselves in places where the Duce, Mussolini, made some famous speech.
Suddenly, they have approached the history of this genocidal, racist, brutal doctrine by idealizing it. Look at the problem, in Italy many young people take selfies with Società Sportiva jackets, which is a sports club, but its acronym: SS, alludes to the Hitlerian SS. It is an absolutely uncritical look at this phenomenon, looking for reasons to idealize it, to exalt it.
There is also another cause, the cultural one. The world is going backwards intellectually, we read less, we analyze less what we read; what Alessandro Baricco -the great Italian writer, the writer of the novel, Silk, a great novelist and essayist- said, that today people surf information, like on the surfboards, they never go deep, they always stay on the surface.
And he is quite right about that; it is true that the tendency is to see the headlines and move on to something else. The image of the world is fragmented in today’s society, and at the same time the tendency to superficiality does enormous damage.
There is no lack of warnings in today’s world about how teenagers -not only Cubans, but in general in the world-, have more difficulties in learning, in oral expression, in what they call reading comprehension, which is reading a text and then being able to explain the message of what they have read.
People reading or believing they are reading, deciphering those signs, are unable to explain what they have read, what the author wanted to tell them. In the context of this cultural and intellectual regression that we are experiencing, which is a true cultural crisis, it is easy for a very primitive doctrine with simple slogans to flourish.
There are many people re-reading the famous book by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, The Principles of Propaganda. When you read it you realize that the same principles influence the networks: repeat the messages, make, them very simple, do not encourage the audience to think, to analyze anything, they have to be very elementary messages, reiterate them, so the lie will become the truth.
On the other hand, there is the positive side of these technologies. I would not have been able to gather the information I have on this new fascism without access to the Internet. So it makes it easy, but at the same time it creates addiction.
A few days ago, in the Spanish press, the idea of a bill was brought to the Spanish Council of Ministers to force manufacturers of cell phones, tablets, devices that have access to the Internet, to add a parental control application so parents can control what teenagers are consuming and influence this dependence in some way; it must be said: it is a drug.
Yesterday I was reading a paper by two American psychologists who analyzed cases of teenagers with deep depression and attempted suicide, and these scholars agree that in 2012 there was a growth of this indicator, according to international records, but particularly in the United States and Great Britain.
The problem became evident, above all, in teenage girls who attempted suicide or fell into a terrible depression. And the fact is that 2012 is the time of the social media boom, when more people enter the networks and start sharing.
So, if a girl is obese, feels self-conscious, inferior, because the model of beauty imposed on her through all these media is thinness, like that of a barbie, she needs the likes, because she is very dependent on the approval of the community that follows her on the networks, which is typical of adolescence.
There is an analyst who says that the adolescent has to look at his phone continuously to see if a photo he has posted has been liked, if he has received any flattery or insult. And they are subjected to this particular pressure in that tremendously contradictory and complex moment in which they are trying to build their personality, to understand the world, to understand themselves.
All this helps these neo-fascist groups of the ultra-right -which present themselves as manly, tough, with a type of aggressive, anti-system discourse, to monopolize the feeling of discontent.
The caste, as Milei calls politicians, feel that in the fascists’ discourse there is a harsher criticism, more open to that which makes them feel bad, humiliated.
It is a sum of issues and questions that have to do above all with the fact that today’s world, culturally, is convincing you all the time that capitalism is the only way to imagine the social order. As Paulo Freire said: ‘The great cultural triumph of capitalism is that the poor blame themselves for their misery, that they never blame the system’. And it is true, they have achieved this triumph. It has to do with that cultural colonization that through the networks hijacks the subjectivity of millions of people.
And there is all that dazzled emigration towards a kingdom of supposed opportunities, of supposed happiness, where people even put themselves in the hands of human traffickers, a risky, terrible thing. We have it in Cuba, in all America.
So technologies, which are no longer new, have been an exceptionally useful instrument for fascism. Today the role of social networks is irreplaceable in the promotion of these ideas and their leaders.
At the same time, the management of emotions has been important for the new fascism: to appeal to that component that goes beyond the rational and has to do with the emotional; this has a great influence on people, especially on youth, people without hope, people who are confused, disconcerted, who have lost faith in so many things.
They continue to use textbooks, as in the case of the two great theoreticians (if we can call them that) of Milei: Agustín Laje and Nicolás Márquez, which use traditional tools of cultural promotion and incorporate with great success the new techniques.
– Are there links between Nazi-fascist thinking in the United States and its variants in Europe?
Ramonet’s thesis is that Donald Trump has greatly influenced the new fascism in the United States and Europe to become naturalized. He says that in another era people were ashamed to say that they were attracted to a far-right candidate, that they were supporters of a neo-Nazi party or group.
Trump has exalted the pride of being on the far right of the political spectrum, the pride of being racist, of being an extreme nationalist, furious; that fanaticism around Trump has influenced the whole world, he has been an inspirer of the new fascism. In this sense, Milei is like a small Trump clone.
I think the differences that may exist between the phenomenon of neo-fascism in the United States and in Europe is that fascists (in) the United States are not interested in figures like Franco or Mussolini. In Spain, however, Francoism is important for Vox. But even for Vox it is significant, in addition to removing Franco’s image, to clean up the horrendous traces left by the conquest and colonization of America. Remember that they invented the concept of the Iberosphere.
When López Obrador said that the King of Spain should ask for forgiveness for the genocide committed by the Spaniards with the conquest and colonization of our America, Vox reacted with tremendous violence and promoted tributes to Hernán Cortés wherever they could. Their search for an honorable past and honorable ancestors, goes through Franco, but it reaches Hernán Cortés and the fierce conquistadors and colonizers.
It is a peculiar mentality, and it is very curious that they want to mix it up with Latin American issues. Vox has been continuously organizing forums; they did one in Colombia a few months before Petro won, when the polls suggested the Historical Pact and Petro could win. Vox went there with all the fascists of this continent to hold a terrible, ultra-right summit; they also did this in Peru and Mexico. They have been moving.
– They want to reformulate history in their favor.
Yes, they want to reread history. There is a tremendous anecdote, which makes me shudder.It was in the cemetery of La Almudena, in Madrid, where the Franco regime shot more than three thousand people. There was a memorial there with a verse by Miguel Hernandez: “because I am like the felled tree, which sprouts: because I still have life” in bronze letters, and the three thousand names of those who were shot who were identified, because others will never be identified. Then the Madrid City Council, with an ultra-conservative, ultra-right-wing majority, decided to tear that fragment from the verse and put: ‘Peace, reconciliation, love, to all the victims of ideological conflicts’, as if paying homage to the victims of Francoism and the victims of the communists, of the republicans.
They called it historical resignification; the city council in its official document said that the monument of La Almudena had to be resignified, and what they did was to annul it, absolutely”.
– These are forms of negationism in the face of the genocide of fascism. How can they be understood in the face of the evidence provided by the documentary proofs?
Well, Milei is a denier of the great crimes of the so-called civil-military dictatorship in Argentina, which was not in the thirties of the last century, nor around the Second World War. These crimes are very close in time, and yet there is already a denialist current.
Thirty thousand people were murdered, disappeared, but in reality they disappeared to die, to be murdered.
– Will this movement, which is already established in both continents, continue to gain strength?
Here in our America, the victory of Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico was very important, because in this country there is a hard right wing.
They built a candidate and fabricated a coalition from the United States came the infamy that López Obrador had contacts with drug trafficking, a truly shameful thing to try to morally damage one of the greatest leaders of our America, but they did not succeed in damaging his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Lula won in Brazil, but by a landslide, as soccer fans say, with a relatively narrow margin. And Bolsonaro and his supporters, fanatics too, are still there. In Brazil there is danger. There is an area of the Brazilian population where there are poor people, which is another new phenomenon, because it is not only young people who are at risk. An Italian friend of the Network in Defense of Humanity told me, and later I confirmed it in documents I read: in the slums of the big cities, working class, humble people who traditionally voted for the Communist Party, now vote for fascism.
Fidel was obsessed with how to confront the poor right-wing, how to present arguments to the people, how through confusion, lies and distortions they could convince a humble person who has nothing to expect from a fascist demagogue to follow that madness.
– Perhaps because of a lack of culture.
Of course, because of Martí’s famous phrase: “To be cultured is the only way to be free”. Fidel said: “Without culture there is no possible freedom”. And it is true that this is a danger. In Fidel’s speech at the University on November 17, 2005, which is truly shocking, there is a passage dedicated to what he calls conditioned reflexes.
He says that commercial advertising and all that machinery of manipulation of the minds create conditioned reflexes. Imperialism suddenly says: ‘Cuba is bad, socialism is bad’.
And there go the poor of the earth, the people without jobs, without health care, without education, without any kind of state support to have any hope, and they repeat: ‘Cuba is bad, socialism is bad’. Fidel explained how that conditioned reflex takes away the ability to think, positions a person against their own interests as a class and brings them closer to those who have always despised and used them. That is today’s drama: the poor voting for fascism.
You asked me if this could have some kind of counterweight. I believe that Fidel also gave us the answer in his closing speech at the International Meeting for the Balance of the World as a tribute to the 150th anniversary of the birth of José Martí, in 2003; the year in which George W. Bush, using the attack on the Twin Towers as a pretext, launched the global crusade against terrorism, announced the invasion of Iraq; in Miami they were saying: ‘Iraq now, Cuba later’.
Bush speaks to West Point students and tells them that the U.S. military has to be prepared to invade and occupy eighty or more obscure corners of the world.It was a time when we were looking at a fascist threat just like we are now. Many people from all over the world came to Havana for that Martí event, concerned about the fate of Cuba and the noble ideas, and about the militaristic, threatening, fascist wave. A few years before, socialism had collapsed in the USSR and in the so-called socialist camp. And the people asked: “What can be done, Fidel, what can be done? Fidel said: “Sow ideas, sow conscience”, he repeated it three times, always inspired by Martí.
Fidel was a Martiano all the time, Retamar used to say that, for Fidel, quoting Martí was like breathing, it was something so incorporated that he didn’t even have to pause or think about it. Fidel was convinced, like Martí, that ‘Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone’. Fidel believed that spaces could be opened for truth, for noble causes.
Here, in Havana, there was an event that inspired me, the Third International Colloquium Patria. It was extraordinary; I have been to many events and listened to talks and discussions and panels. In this one, everything was interesting and useful for understanding the great communicational battle that confronts us.
The left has neglected communication while the right does not, even for a second. The left has dealt relatively little with these issues and, nevertheless, they are vital, like cultural colonization itself. And today it is a proven fact that voters are being led to ultra-right candidates through social networks.
The journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde made a very interesting study on the use of the networks in the coup d’état against Evo Morales, on how Camacho, the fascist of Santa Cruz, one of the leaders of the coup, multiplied his followers on Twitter from day to night, and Jeanine Añez the same, with the use of bots. The tags #Evoassassassin, #Evogolpista, created a very toxic climate, that word that is used so much now, that facilitated the demobilization of the people, and that they saw as inevitable that Evo would leave the government.
Today the role of the networks in all electoral processes is essential. After his trial, Trump gained popularity with the image that he is a victim of a conspiracy, and he also gained money donations. As a victim he received great rewards; he opened a profile on TikTok and has a huge number of followers. Networks today are a tool as television interviews were before. He has more followers on his networks than the audience of all those star channels combined.
His messages are like fists: simple, primitive, Goebbels’ principles of propaganda. “Let’s Make America Great Again” (over and over again); the anti-Latino, anti-immigrant speech; the idea of saving the nation from a silent invasion of immigrants; this new fascism promotes selfishness, the basest, meanest instincts. It is terrible.
And then we have to go back to Fidel: ‘Sow ideas, sow conscience’, with an extra component, today they manipulate knowledge, information and emotions’.
– After World War II, the CIA hired advisors from Nazi Germany to carry out investigations, military operations, interrogations, what impact did the influence of Nazi German advisors have on the doctrines of this American agency?
I suppose so, on a certain scale. Although it is a very big ethical contradiction to recruit intelligence from Hitler’s world, the Yankees did it. Because the Yankees have nothing to do with ethics; for them principles are something remote. No Yankee politician (there may be some isolated cases) takes into account the ethical component of politics. Politics has become degraded all over the world, not only in the United States. But those advisors, that brain drain from Nazi Germany by U.S. imperialism has to do with U.S. cynicism, with that taking advantage of opportunities wherever they come from no matter what sign they have.
They did not have any kind of assessment of the origin of those scientists, of those intelligences, how they had been trained, at what cost. Remember they dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Japan was about to surrender. It was not really against the Japanese, it was against the Soviet Union, what the Yankees -Truman, a terrible murderer- wanted was to make it clear to the whole world, and mainly to the Soviet Union, who had the military supremacy, who had the lethal weapon after that war, so they massively killed the civilian population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Truman said in an interview many years later: ‘I sleep peacefully’.And Hollywood has been in charge of washing the United States of guilt, it has made a rereading of universal history, like Vox in the cemetery of La Almudena in Madrid.
When I was a child I used to watch cowboy and Indian movies, and they always asked you one question: ‘Who are you with, the Indians or the cowboys?’ One was with the cowboys -unbelievably-, because the Indians were the savages, they were painted, murderers surrounding the stagecoach where the girl and the lover were cornered.
Then that genocide that was the conquest of the West: concentrating the Indians in ghettos, alcoholizing them, terrible things they did with those populations, presented to the public all over the world as the arrival of civilization in the face of the barbarism represented by the Indians.
But then they did it with the Korean War. I also saw as a child the saga of the Korean War, when all those little Chinese, the Koreans, were machine-gunned by the Yaqui heroes. It was an idealized vision, because the Yankees were defeated in Korea. And they have done the same with the famous Vietnam syndrome. Hollywood took care of curing that complex, the humiliation they received from the Vietnamese people.
Returning to your question, the fascist ideas of those scientists imported by the United States for their operations, surely macabre, are in the minority with respect to the fascism generated by the United States.
Notice that when they created the conflict with Japan, the Japanese living in the United States were put in concentration camps in the United States. Or do you want something more fascist than the Ku Klux Klan, which is Made in the USA? The Ku Klux Klan is typically American.
There is a native fascism, ‘criollo’, with very deep roots in a violent nation, full of hatred, where there is a cult of firearms, and where every now and then in a school there appears an unbalanced boy who kills his classmates, teachers, because anyone can buy an assault weapon on the Internet.
There is a book, also tremendous, published by Editorial Ciencias Sociales, by the correspondent of Russia Today in the United States, Helena Villar. It is called Esclavos unidos. The reverse side of the American Dream; it is extraordinary. It has a chapter on opioids, on drugs, and so many arguments on how this American Dream is full of horror, death, crime.
But they have managed a great cultural machine to convince the world that they were the victors in World War II. There is a survey out there, which says that today 90 percent (percent) of the European population – or 99 percent – believe that it was the United States who defeated Hitler and nobody remembers the Soviet Union. They are convinced that they are the bearers of superior Western values, of democratic values, of modernity.
Martí fought a great battle against that from the eighties of the nineteenth century until he died, until his letter to Manuel Mercado, so that the politicians and intellectuals of Cuba and Latin America -the Latin America recently independent from Spain-, would not look for their compass in the North, would not look for their orientation, their model, in the North, and he described how the American elections were, how those representatives were bought by the corporations, by the companies. And he said, ‘Damn prosperity at all costs.’
And he added: ‘The United States has reached high levels of prosperity by metallizing everything’; metallizing it, but he uses that word a little strange. Martí did not want that modernity, he did not want capitalist prosperity based on the exploitation of the people, in which an elite had all the privileges and all the luxuries and the great masses were hungry and in conditions of extreme poverty. Martí saw clearly that this was not the way forward, and he was very distressed because in Latin America – in the face of the old empire of Spain, which represented old, decadent values – suddenly this young empire appeared, dazzling the people”.
– The governments of the United States and Europe are led by technocrats, who are like disposable instruments, but at the same time there is a positioning of the legally recognized extreme right-wing parties in government responsibilities. What is the logic that explains this architecture?
It is the logic of capital. In traditional politics, in the United States and Europe there is what they call the revolving doors: a high government official finishes the term of office of the president of which he is part of his team, and goes to work for a company that is likely to have been favored by the government and takes to the businessmen all his contacts, his relationships, which he acquired in the exercise of his functions as a public employee.
And then in today’s world it works like this: they raze Iraq and then private companies, corporations, go to rebuild Iraq. War is big business. The money that goes to Ukraine to support it in the war with Russia, the Ukrainians use it to buy weapons from the US military-industrial complex. This big business at the same time hides the deep weaknesses of the system, because this is a moment in which the United States, American imperialism, is losing hegemony -we should not forget that.
Today the unipolar world that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp has been changing, that unipolar world with the West as the sole master of the world, of the Earth, with the United States at the forefront. Now there are the BRICS, there is Russia, there is China, as the truly great power in economic and technological terms, not involved in any war, making very important investments in Africa and in Latin America.
The world is absolutely and inevitably multipolar, and this war delirium of the United States, its support for Israel in its barbarism against Palestine, and for Ukraine in the war with Russia, has to do with the desperation caused by the perception that its power has lost strength, that it is weakening, that it is losing prestige.
The BRICS is a new phenomenon that should worry them. They are all diverse countries, but not dependent on the dollar or on the financial mechanisms controlled by the United States. There is a BRICS Bank chaired by Dilma Rousseff; very worrying for the ideologues of the empire, because they are losing ground.
Where they still have a strong hegemony is in the cultural and informational spheres, unfortunately. And our obligation is to open gaps in that hegemony.
I used a metaphor when I spoke in Patria based on José Lezama Lima. He said that the method has to be the scratch in the stone; we have to make a scratch in the stone over and over again, without despairing, that through that crack the truth will come out. We have to defend the truth every day making a scratch in the stone of lies, in the wall of falsehoods, of slander”.
In the face of that expansion of Nazi-fascist thought, the first thing is what Fidel asked of us: to sow ideas, to sow consciousness; we have to generate messages, analysis, thought, through all available media, taking into account that today people read much less than before. But, undoubtedly, we have to generate an anti-fascist culture, anti-fascist thought.
Let us remember that on a Halloween in Cuba there were young people dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan and that, on another Halloween, in an institutional music contest, the winner was a young man dressed up as a Nazi officer. In this globalized world, we cannot think that we are isolated; all the most terrible doctrines, images, ideas, circulate freely all the time and fall on people of all generations, but particularly on the very young.
The left has to articulate itself. This point was very important in the conclusions of the Third International Colloquium Patria, because of the actions proposed by the participants so that the different nuclei of the culture of resistance, of emancipation, anti-fascist, connect and make us much stronger than we are dispersed, isolated. We have to achieve a great anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist front, for socialism.
Today I remembered in a meeting I had with Venezuelan friends how Chavez rescued the word socialism at a time when nobody was talking about socialism. Fidel spoke of socialism and continued defending it, but suddenly another voice emerged, someone who was like a son to Fidel, speaking of socialism when after that collapse, the great triumphal chorus of the neoliberals considered that it was buried forever.
We have to build alternatives, we have to fight day by day the idea that capitalism is the only imaginable and possible social order, that it is a kind of natural order, that capitalist competitiveness is the attitude towards life that corresponds to us as a species. All this is false.
We have to recover words that have been stolen from us. Now Milei has made the word freedom his own. Freedom is ours, true democracy is ours, human rights are ours, and all that machinery has hijacked those words from us.
I believe that it is important all this work of sowing ideas, sowing consciousness around a great global anti-fascist front. It is important that we work in the gestation of that global anti-fascist front, and there you, the communicators, the journalists, with all that extraordinary balance that the Patria Colloquia have left, but in particular the most recent one, can do a lot for a great anti-fascist communicational front, for a great front of anti-fascist and anti-capitalist communicators in search of the alternatives that our species deserves, because that other better world is possible and indispensable. We must add everyone who can be added to this anti-fascist and anti-capitalist front.
In the United States the whole cultural, political, ideological climate is contaminated by these neo-fascist currents of thought; the think tanks are contaminated, politics is contaminated, to such an extreme that the politics of that country has become right-wing. Talk of socialism, of respect for diversity, of the sovereignty of nations, have suddenly become forbidden topics.
There is a serval fear among politicians of being labeled as red, it is like a neo-Martism; we are seeing today a neo-Martism in the United States and in other places of the world; there is a permanent anti-communist court in the name of patriotic values, in the name of the values of the great nation, that is why it is such a dangerous moment”.
– From art, culture and the social sciences, important contributions have been made to the study of neo-Nazi currents from the beginning of World War II to the present day, but this accumulation of knowledge has not been sufficient to understand the dangers of these demons.
It is true that important contributions have been made in favor of that anti-fascist culture we were talking about, but the great circuits of legitimization in cultural terms, the great publishing prizes, those given by Hollywood, the Oscars, the Grammys, those given by the music industry, all are aimed at stimulating artistic and literary production that is not dangerous to the system.
There is an extraordinary book by a Spanish educator called Jon Illescas: La dictadura del videoclip: industria musical y sueños prefabricados, which is very interesting. He explains how every artist who goes out of the orthodox line of support to the system is censored, even very famous artists. The industry does not accept the slightest dalliance, heresy, and in that sense, as Illescas himself says, creators are self-censoring, avoiding conflict, rupture, confrontation”.
– What articulations are there between Nazism, Fascism, and the legacies of Francoism, in the colonialist thought that proliferates in contemporaneity?
They represent a past that is being washed by its contemporary representatives; there is a very obvious attempt to wash the image of Franco, Mussolini, of Hitler, but there is also an attempt to wash the image of Videla, of Pinochet and of the murderers of Plan Condor.
What happened on the fiftieth anniversary of the fascist coup against Allende in Chile was very painful; there were spokesmen of the ultra-right who dared to say that Allende himself was to blame for the coup because of his mistaken policies. Fortunately, there is a declassified document associated with a discussion between Richard Nixon and the director of the CIA in 1970 – Allende had not yet become president, although he was elected – in which Nixon says: ‘That communist cannot reach La Moneda’.
The emperor had had Allende killed before he began to govern, that is why it is so cruel and grotesque that they accuse Allende of errors that later forced the military to put things in order; all this is one more of the many infamies that circulate on a daily basis.
I believe that, yes, those figures of classical fascism are present today, and at the same time a whole horde of later fascists is present. Many people do not dare to criticize Pinochet, consider that he did the right thing, or that he saved Christian civilization from the ghost of communism. There is a book by Miguel Rojas Mix, a very important Chilean essayist, called El dios de Pinochet. Fisionomía del fascismo iberoamericano. It is not published in Cuba, but it explains the supposed divine inspirations that Pinochet had, how he considered himself an instrument of the Most High God, to assassinate, to leave that terrible mark of blood and death.
All of them, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and those who followed, are being washed by the new fascists, as they have also done with Spanish conquerors and colonizers who committed dreadful crimes in our lands.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/10/ ... d-thought/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
Historical Nazi Revisionism
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X
Sep 28, 2023
Nazi historical revisionism seeks to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, minimizing or denying the horrific crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II. When revisionist narratives gain traction, they risk undermining the lessons learned from history, making it easier for future generations to repeat similar atrocities. Nazi historical revisionism often lacks rigorous research methods and credibility, making it a mockery of genuine historical scholarship.
In recent years, Europe has witnessed a concerning resurgence of Nazi revisionism, fueled by far-right extremism, populist movements, and the ease of spreading such views on online platforms. Political alliances with far-right-leaning politicians have further normalized revisionist views, posing a threat to accurate historical memory and the lessons learned from the Holocaust.
The Nazis made concerted efforts to distort and rewrite history during World War II, particularly when it came to the Soviet Union's role in the conflict. They sought to downplay the significant contribution of the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe. In reality, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Eastern Front, engaging in fierce battles and suffering the most casualties. It was the Red Army that ultimately broke through the German lines and pushed them back, leading to the liberation of Eastern Europe and the eventual fall of Berlin. However, the Nazis, in their propaganda, attempted to undermine the Soviet Union's role and promote their own false narratives of superiority. Despite their efforts, the historical record remains clear: the Soviet Union played the lead role in defeating Nazi Germany and shaping the outcome of World War II.
Before and during World War II, Canada had a strict immigration policy that turned away Jewish and leftwing refugees fleeing persecution by the Nazis and fascist forces in Europe. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, during the Cold War's emergence, Canadian governments continued to limit immigration for Jews, communists, and others considered undesirable.
They actively encouraged around 160,000 predominantly anti-Soviet migrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom had collaborated with or shared extreme anti-Soviet and antisemitic views. These migrants had initially welcomed the Nazis as liberators during the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, resulting in millions of Soviet citizens' deaths.
This shift was a response to the previous wave of Ukrainian migrants who had shown solidarity with international socialism, and Indigenous communities who were building a robust labor union force while advocating for progressive social policies. These earlier Ukrainian migrants had drawn the scrutiny of Canadian authorities, leading to their surveillance and imprisonment.
Canada welcomed Nazi sympathizers, including veterans from Baltic and Ukrainian Waffen SS divisions and fighters from Eastern Europe's guerrilla armies. These militias, backed by the Nazis, formed the Committee of Subjugated Nations in 1943, later rebranding as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations in 1946 with support from US, UK, and West German intelligence agencies.
During World War II, Centrist political leaders and parties in various countries faced the challenge of responding to the rise of fascism in Europe. While some centrists opposed fascism and extremism, others were hesitant to take strong and decisive actions. Their desire for stability and avoidance of conflict sometimes led to appeasement policies, as seen in the Munich Agreement in 1938 when Western democracies tried to appease Adolf Hitler. This approach, driven by centrist tendencies, emboldened fascist regimes like Nazi Germany and allowed them to expand their influence and aggression.
The horseshoe theory, which suggests similarities between the far left and far right, isn't backed by historical or factual accuracy. The Nazis propagated the false belief that Jews were responsible for the rise of Bolshevik communism and were using it to seek global dominance. Consequently, they frequently referred to communism as "Judeo-Bolshevism." In the eyes of the Nazis, conquering the Soviet Union became a perceived imperative in their quest to eliminate what they perceived as Jewish influence on a global scale. This distorted ideology played a significant role in shaping their policies and actions during World War II.
The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in 1935, were foundational to Nazi racial policies. These laws were directly inspired by American racial legislation, such as the segregation laws in the Southern United States. The Nuremberg Laws introduced a systematic classification of people based on their racial heritage, particularly targeting Jews, similar to the racial segregation of African Americans under Jim Crow. The American eugenics movement, which advocated for selective breeding and the promotion of "Aryan" purity, also influenced Nazi ideas on racial hygiene and the concept of a "master race."
The Nazi regime, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, used propaganda extensively to shape public opinion, confuse people and maintain control. They employed various techniques, including the dissemination of false information, manipulation of emotions, and the creation of a cult of personality around Hitler. By creating this sense of nationalistic pride and portraying the Nazi Party as the savior of Germany, they were able to garner support from a significant portion of the population. They demonized certain groups, particularly Jews, as scapegoats for Germany's problems, fueling hatred and division. The consistent repetition of these messages through posters, films, speeches, and other media channels made it challenging for many people to discern the truth from the propaganda, contributing to the confusion and the spread of Nazi ideology.
Newspapers were another essential channel for disseminating wartime propaganda. Headlines and articles were carefully curated to boost morale, demonize the enemy, and rally citizens behind their respective causes. Nazi authorities attempted to conceal the extent of their atrocities, using misinformation and secrecy to mask the horrors of concentration camps.
The aftermath of World War II saw the pursuit of justice against Nazi war criminals through various means, such as the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent hunt for those responsible for heinous crimes. A lesser-known aspect of post-war history involves the immigration of some former Nazis to Canada and the United States. While many high-ranking Nazis faced prosecution, a number managed to enter North America, securing prominent positions. Canada, like the United States, was primarily concerned with attracting skilled labor and did not thoroughly vet all immigrants for wartime activities.
One of the most well-documented cases of former Nazis finding refuge in the United States is Operation Paperclip. This covert CIA program aimed to recruit German scientists, engineers, and technicians, many of whom had worked on advanced military projects during the war. The goal was to harness their expertise for American interests, particularly in the context of the emerging Cold War.
As the old right-wing ideologies became discredited in Western Europe due to their associations with fascism and a struggling capitalist system, the CIA recognized the need to counter anti-NATO trade unionists and intellectuals by cultivating a Democratic Left, whether genuine or manufactured, to engage in ideological warfare. To achieve this, a dedicated CIA sector was established, navigating around potential right-wing Congressional opposition. The Democratic Left served as a tool to combat the radical left and to provide ideological support for U.S. hegemony in Europe. It's important to note that the ideology of the democratic left had no real influence over shaping U.S. strategic policies and interests; their role was primarily one of ideological reinforcement in service of U.S. objectives.
In the early 1950s, the CIA turned to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence for insights into the British Columbia shipping industry. Their interest in Canadian trade often stemmed from worries about transactions involving the Soviets, nations under Moscow's influence, and notable figures like Norman Bethune, who had ties to the USSR due to his fervent commitment to socialism and healthcare reform. Bethune's advocacy in 1935 for socialist ideals and his experiences in the USSR were closely monitored.
During the Cold War, the USA concealed or downplayed Soviet support for liberation movements by adopting a public stance emphasizing support for self-determination and independence, promoting non-alignment to prevent African nations from aligning with the Soviet bloc, covertly engaging in proxy conflicts framed as battles against Soviet expansionism, discrediting liberation movements as Soviet proxies, and favoring moderate leaders within these movements to shape their direction in ways that aligned with American interests. This complex strategy allowed the U.S. to navigate the Cold War dynamics in Africa while not openly opposing the broader goals of decolonization.
In the mid-20th century, McCarthyism and the formation of NATO were two significant events that shaped the political landscape of the era. McCarthyism, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was a period of intense anti-communist sentiment in the United States. McCarthy and his supporters conducted investigations and accused many individuals of being communist sympathizers without substantial evidence. This era of fear and suspicion had a profound impact on American society, leading to blacklists and the infringement of civil liberties. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949, primarily to combat socialism and to counter the expansion of Soviet influence in Europe during the Cold War. NATO's primary goal was the collective defense against external “socialist threats” in Europe.
There has been criticism of how broader issues concerning Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, mass murder, and genocide, including the Holocaust, have been kept under wraps in society by Ultranationalist Ukrainian diaspora groups, the Liberal government, and mainstream corporate media.
Nazis in Ukraine: Seeing through the fog of the information war
These cases, like that of Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal Foreign Minister, have brought attention to the historical narratives surrounding wartime collaboration and its impact on contemporary society. While these instances may not be unique, they highlight the importance of acknowledging historical facts, even when they involve close family members, to ensure a truthful understanding of the past.
https://agonas.substack.com/p/unmasking ... evisionism
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X
Sep 28, 2023
Nazi historical revisionism seeks to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, minimizing or denying the horrific crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II. When revisionist narratives gain traction, they risk undermining the lessons learned from history, making it easier for future generations to repeat similar atrocities. Nazi historical revisionism often lacks rigorous research methods and credibility, making it a mockery of genuine historical scholarship.
In recent years, Europe has witnessed a concerning resurgence of Nazi revisionism, fueled by far-right extremism, populist movements, and the ease of spreading such views on online platforms. Political alliances with far-right-leaning politicians have further normalized revisionist views, posing a threat to accurate historical memory and the lessons learned from the Holocaust.
The Nazis made concerted efforts to distort and rewrite history during World War II, particularly when it came to the Soviet Union's role in the conflict. They sought to downplay the significant contribution of the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe. In reality, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Eastern Front, engaging in fierce battles and suffering the most casualties. It was the Red Army that ultimately broke through the German lines and pushed them back, leading to the liberation of Eastern Europe and the eventual fall of Berlin. However, the Nazis, in their propaganda, attempted to undermine the Soviet Union's role and promote their own false narratives of superiority. Despite their efforts, the historical record remains clear: the Soviet Union played the lead role in defeating Nazi Germany and shaping the outcome of World War II.
Before and during World War II, Canada had a strict immigration policy that turned away Jewish and leftwing refugees fleeing persecution by the Nazis and fascist forces in Europe. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, during the Cold War's emergence, Canadian governments continued to limit immigration for Jews, communists, and others considered undesirable.
They actively encouraged around 160,000 predominantly anti-Soviet migrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom had collaborated with or shared extreme anti-Soviet and antisemitic views. These migrants had initially welcomed the Nazis as liberators during the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, resulting in millions of Soviet citizens' deaths.
This shift was a response to the previous wave of Ukrainian migrants who had shown solidarity with international socialism, and Indigenous communities who were building a robust labor union force while advocating for progressive social policies. These earlier Ukrainian migrants had drawn the scrutiny of Canadian authorities, leading to their surveillance and imprisonment.
Canada welcomed Nazi sympathizers, including veterans from Baltic and Ukrainian Waffen SS divisions and fighters from Eastern Europe's guerrilla armies. These militias, backed by the Nazis, formed the Committee of Subjugated Nations in 1943, later rebranding as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations in 1946 with support from US, UK, and West German intelligence agencies.
During World War II, Centrist political leaders and parties in various countries faced the challenge of responding to the rise of fascism in Europe. While some centrists opposed fascism and extremism, others were hesitant to take strong and decisive actions. Their desire for stability and avoidance of conflict sometimes led to appeasement policies, as seen in the Munich Agreement in 1938 when Western democracies tried to appease Adolf Hitler. This approach, driven by centrist tendencies, emboldened fascist regimes like Nazi Germany and allowed them to expand their influence and aggression.
The horseshoe theory, which suggests similarities between the far left and far right, isn't backed by historical or factual accuracy. The Nazis propagated the false belief that Jews were responsible for the rise of Bolshevik communism and were using it to seek global dominance. Consequently, they frequently referred to communism as "Judeo-Bolshevism." In the eyes of the Nazis, conquering the Soviet Union became a perceived imperative in their quest to eliminate what they perceived as Jewish influence on a global scale. This distorted ideology played a significant role in shaping their policies and actions during World War II.
The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in 1935, were foundational to Nazi racial policies. These laws were directly inspired by American racial legislation, such as the segregation laws in the Southern United States. The Nuremberg Laws introduced a systematic classification of people based on their racial heritage, particularly targeting Jews, similar to the racial segregation of African Americans under Jim Crow. The American eugenics movement, which advocated for selective breeding and the promotion of "Aryan" purity, also influenced Nazi ideas on racial hygiene and the concept of a "master race."
The Nazi regime, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, used propaganda extensively to shape public opinion, confuse people and maintain control. They employed various techniques, including the dissemination of false information, manipulation of emotions, and the creation of a cult of personality around Hitler. By creating this sense of nationalistic pride and portraying the Nazi Party as the savior of Germany, they were able to garner support from a significant portion of the population. They demonized certain groups, particularly Jews, as scapegoats for Germany's problems, fueling hatred and division. The consistent repetition of these messages through posters, films, speeches, and other media channels made it challenging for many people to discern the truth from the propaganda, contributing to the confusion and the spread of Nazi ideology.
Newspapers were another essential channel for disseminating wartime propaganda. Headlines and articles were carefully curated to boost morale, demonize the enemy, and rally citizens behind their respective causes. Nazi authorities attempted to conceal the extent of their atrocities, using misinformation and secrecy to mask the horrors of concentration camps.
The aftermath of World War II saw the pursuit of justice against Nazi war criminals through various means, such as the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent hunt for those responsible for heinous crimes. A lesser-known aspect of post-war history involves the immigration of some former Nazis to Canada and the United States. While many high-ranking Nazis faced prosecution, a number managed to enter North America, securing prominent positions. Canada, like the United States, was primarily concerned with attracting skilled labor and did not thoroughly vet all immigrants for wartime activities.
One of the most well-documented cases of former Nazis finding refuge in the United States is Operation Paperclip. This covert CIA program aimed to recruit German scientists, engineers, and technicians, many of whom had worked on advanced military projects during the war. The goal was to harness their expertise for American interests, particularly in the context of the emerging Cold War.
As the old right-wing ideologies became discredited in Western Europe due to their associations with fascism and a struggling capitalist system, the CIA recognized the need to counter anti-NATO trade unionists and intellectuals by cultivating a Democratic Left, whether genuine or manufactured, to engage in ideological warfare. To achieve this, a dedicated CIA sector was established, navigating around potential right-wing Congressional opposition. The Democratic Left served as a tool to combat the radical left and to provide ideological support for U.S. hegemony in Europe. It's important to note that the ideology of the democratic left had no real influence over shaping U.S. strategic policies and interests; their role was primarily one of ideological reinforcement in service of U.S. objectives.
In the early 1950s, the CIA turned to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence for insights into the British Columbia shipping industry. Their interest in Canadian trade often stemmed from worries about transactions involving the Soviets, nations under Moscow's influence, and notable figures like Norman Bethune, who had ties to the USSR due to his fervent commitment to socialism and healthcare reform. Bethune's advocacy in 1935 for socialist ideals and his experiences in the USSR were closely monitored.
During the Cold War, the USA concealed or downplayed Soviet support for liberation movements by adopting a public stance emphasizing support for self-determination and independence, promoting non-alignment to prevent African nations from aligning with the Soviet bloc, covertly engaging in proxy conflicts framed as battles against Soviet expansionism, discrediting liberation movements as Soviet proxies, and favoring moderate leaders within these movements to shape their direction in ways that aligned with American interests. This complex strategy allowed the U.S. to navigate the Cold War dynamics in Africa while not openly opposing the broader goals of decolonization.
In the mid-20th century, McCarthyism and the formation of NATO were two significant events that shaped the political landscape of the era. McCarthyism, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was a period of intense anti-communist sentiment in the United States. McCarthy and his supporters conducted investigations and accused many individuals of being communist sympathizers without substantial evidence. This era of fear and suspicion had a profound impact on American society, leading to blacklists and the infringement of civil liberties. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949, primarily to combat socialism and to counter the expansion of Soviet influence in Europe during the Cold War. NATO's primary goal was the collective defense against external “socialist threats” in Europe.
There has been criticism of how broader issues concerning Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, mass murder, and genocide, including the Holocaust, have been kept under wraps in society by Ultranationalist Ukrainian diaspora groups, the Liberal government, and mainstream corporate media.
Nazis in Ukraine: Seeing through the fog of the information war
These cases, like that of Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal Foreign Minister, have brought attention to the historical narratives surrounding wartime collaboration and its impact on contemporary society. While these instances may not be unique, they highlight the importance of acknowledging historical facts, even when they involve close family members, to ensure a truthful understanding of the past.
https://agonas.substack.com/p/unmasking ... evisionism
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
POEM: Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen, Langston Hughes, 1943
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 29 Jan 2025
Langston Hughes’s 1943 poem against fascism is precise, droll, and eternal.
Some things need no introduction, no preface, no preamble, no explanatory note to provide context or history. These things speak to the moment with such clarity, and through such brevity, that to otherwise attempt to frame or explain them would take away from their inherent power. Langston Hughes’s poem “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen” is such a thing. It is as powerful now as it must have been when first published in 1943, written with the kind of precision and wit that is eternal — and that is quintessential Langston Hughes.
Read “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen” below.
Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen
Langston Hughes
You delight,
So it would seem,
At making mince-meat of my dream.
If you keep on,
Before you’re through,
I’ll make mince-meat
Out of you.
Langston Hughes, “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen,” Jim Crow’s Last Stand (New York: Negro Publication Society of America, 1943
https://blackagendareport.com/poem-note ... ughes-1943
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 29 Jan 2025
Langston Hughes’s 1943 poem against fascism is precise, droll, and eternal.
Some things need no introduction, no preface, no preamble, no explanatory note to provide context or history. These things speak to the moment with such clarity, and through such brevity, that to otherwise attempt to frame or explain them would take away from their inherent power. Langston Hughes’s poem “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen” is such a thing. It is as powerful now as it must have been when first published in 1943, written with the kind of precision and wit that is eternal — and that is quintessential Langston Hughes.
Read “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen” below.
Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen
Langston Hughes
You delight,
So it would seem,
At making mince-meat of my dream.
If you keep on,
Before you’re through,
I’ll make mince-meat
Out of you.
Langston Hughes, “Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen,” Jim Crow’s Last Stand (New York: Negro Publication Society of America, 1943
https://blackagendareport.com/poem-note ... ughes-1943
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
Liberals Choose Nazis Over Anti-Capitalists
Posted by Internationalist 360° on February 23, 2025
BettBeat Media
Tear gas for striking workers, billions for Neo-Nazis and Zionists while Universal Healthcare is ‘too expensive’. The mask is off: Liberals Prefer Nazis over Challenging Capitalism – Now They’re Back.
The ghosts of the 1930s are no longer mere shadows in history books. They walk among us, wearing suits instead of brown shirts, speaking of “immigration control” rather than racial purity, but their message remains fundamentally unchanged. In Germany, where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) now commands support from one in five voters, we see one of the most chilling examples of fascism’s resurgence in the heart of Europe.
The AfD’s rise mirrors a broader pattern across the Western world – a pattern that liberal democracy seems powerless to stop, or worse, actively enables. Just as the Weimar Republic’s center-left SPD compromised with conservative forces in a misguided attempt to maintain stability, today’s liberal parties across Europe and America are legitimizing far-right discourse under the guise of “pragmatic politics.”
Liberals Prefer Nazism over Anti-Capitalism
What remains unspoken in polite society, yet becomes glaringly obvious through historical analysis, is liberalism’s consistent preference for fascism over genuine social and racial equality. When faced with a choice between Nazi collaboration and communist resistance during World War II, many liberal democracies chose the former. Today, this pattern repeats itself with chilling precision.
Consider how quickly liberal media accommodate far-right talking points in the name of “balance,” while consistently demonizing even modest left-wing proposals for economic justice. The New York Times will run sympathetic profiles of neo-Nazis to “understand their perspective,” while dismissing socialists as dangerous radicals. This is not accident or oversight – it is policy.
The liberal establishment’s response to the AfD in Germany epitomizes a broader European pattern. While publicly denouncing the party’s most extreme statements, mainstream parties have steadily absorbed and legitimized its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. This phenomenon stretches across the continent – from the Netherlands, where mainstream parties echo Wilders’ anti-Muslim sentiment, to France, where Macron’s government increasingly mirrors Le Pen’s harsh stance on immigration. In Britain, the Conservative Party has embraced Brexit’s nativist undertones, while Belgium’s traditional parties adopt ever-stricter immigration policies to compete with the far-right Vlaams Belang.
Yet these same liberal establishments react with unified horror at any serious proposal for wealth redistribution or challenge to corporate power, dismissing such ideas as dangerous radicalism. The asymmetry is stark: while far-right movements have been allowed to fester and grow, even within police forces, for the past decades liberal governments have expended enormous resources and energy to systematically dismantle left-wing movements and unions, criminalize anti-capitalist thought, and marginalize voices calling for economic justice.
“The warning signs were there for those willing to see them. Hillary Clinton’s infamous gleeful laughter at the news of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal death – “We came, we saw, he died!” – revealed the true face behind the liberal mask.”
Racism is Negotiable; Economic Justice is Not
They have surveilled, infiltrated, and crushed left-wing organizations – the only historical counterweight to fascism – while turning a blind eye to the methodical growth of homegrown fascist networks. This deliberate choice is now bearing its predictable fruit across Europe and America, as fascist movements, having been granted the space to organize and normalize their ideology, surge into mainstream politics. The message could not be clearer: racism is negotiable; economic justice is not.
This preference extends beyond domestic politics. Western liberals readily support far-right regimes abroad when they serve corporate interests, while orchestrating coups against democratically elected leftist governments. They’ll wring their hands about “human rights” when it serves imperial interests, but remain silent about the mass graves their policies create in the Global South.
The greatest destruction of Palestine took place with full support of a liberal U.S. government.
The ongoing genocide in Palestine stands as the most damning testament to this liberal hypocrisy. While Republican administrations have historically backed Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, nothing compares to the breathtaking support for systematic extermination witnessed under Biden’s liberal administration. The same Democratic leaders who pontificate about democracy and human rights have provided unwavering diplomatic cover and military support for the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, the deliberate destruction of hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, and the engineered starvation of 2.3 million people in Gaza.
But the warning signs were there for those willing to see them. Hillary Clinton’s infamous gleeful laughter at the news of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal death – “We came, we saw, he died!” – revealed the true face behind the liberal mask. Libya, once Africa’s wealthiest nation with the continent’s highest standard of living, was reduced to a failed state with open-air slave markets. The destruction wasn’t an unfortunate byproduct – it was the point. Liberal interventionism, stripped of its humanitarian pretense, stands exposed as nothing more than imperialism with a progressive veneer.
Theatrical Resistance to Fascism
The fundamental truth is that liberals would rather see fascism triumph than witness the dismantling of capitalist hierarchy. Their performative opposition to the far right masks a deeper alignment: both groups are ultimately committed to preserving existing power structures. When push comes to shove, liberals — just like conservatives — will always choose order over justice, property over people, whiteness over equality.
This explains why liberal parties across Europe find it easier to collaborate with neo-fascists than with the left. It explains why mainstream media platforms love to give voice to far-right figures while marginalizing leftist perspectives. It explains why billions are spent on border militarization while social programs are gutted.
The liberal establishment’s supposed “resistance” to fascism is merely theatrical – designed to maintain their self-image as progressive while actively enabling the very forces they claim to oppose. Their real fear isn’t the rise of fascism, but the prospect of genuine popular democracy that might challenge the foundations of capitalist power.
“The corporate sector actively amplifies far-right narratives. They understand their function: to redirect working class anger away from the actual source of economic precarity – the capitalist class itself – toward vulnerable scapegoats like immigrants, people of color, and trans people.”
‘Sieg Heil’ is Hot Again
This dynamic was perfectly captured in the AfD’s evolution. Born from neoliberal economists opposing EU bailouts, it seamlessly transformed into a xenophobic party without losing its bourgeois support base. The same financial elites who claim to oppose racism are quite comfortable with it when it serves their class interests.
Former investment banker Alice Weidel presents herself as the polished face of the AfD, a lesbian woman living with her Sri Lankan partner while simultaneously advocating for “traditional values” and spreading replacement theory conspiracies. Behind her stands Björn Höcke, a man who called Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame” and whose writings under a pseudonym praised Nazi ideology and racial biology. The mask of respectability barely conceals the violence beneath.
This pattern repeats across Europe. In Italy, Georgia Meloni leads with a veneer of respectability while maintaining ties to neo-fascist movements. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán openly speaks of racial purity while receiving EU funds — the same Orbán who gets celebrated in many white anti-imperialist spaces as promising because he’s ‘good on Russia’. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders advances anti-Muslim rhetoric under the guise of protecting “Dutch values,” while prominently displaying Israeli flags across his party’s offices – a cynical strategy adopted by much of Europe’s far-right. Marine Le Pen in France has sanitized her father’s crude anti-Semitism while maintaining his core nationalist ideology.
The United Kingdom’s Tommy Robinson exemplifies this transformation of fascist ideology into mainstream acceptability. Once a street thug leading violent anti-Muslim protests, he has rebranded himself as a “journalist” and “activist,” finding eager amplification from the world’s wealthiest tech oligarchs. He’s become a particular favorite of Elon Musk, the Apartheid South Africa-born billionaire whose own trajectory from liberal tech icon to far-right propagandist mirrors the broader collapse of liberal pretenses. Musk, who recently gave a Nazi salute now sits comfortably in Trump’s inner circle, demonstrating how seamlessly corporate power adapts to fascist ideology.
In the United States, this alliance between oligarchic wealth and far-right movements finds its clearest expression in figures like Steve Bannon. While positioning himself as a populist champion of the working class, Bannon orchestrates a global network of nationalist movements while maintaining deep connections to Silicon Valley billionaires. Following Musk’s footsteps, Bannon too has now discarded his thin veneer of respectability, openly displaying a Nazi salute – the mask of respectability has been thrown off to show the true face beneath. These aren’t isolated incidents but rather public acknowledgments of what has always been obvious: the natural alignment between corporate power and fascist movements.
Steve Bannon (left) and Elon Musk doing Hitler salutes.
Perhaps most disturbing is the situation in Ukraine, where the complex reality of resistance against a Russian invasion has been used to whitewash far-right militias, creating a dangerous precedent for the legitimization of militant nationalism. The liberal establishment’s enthusiastic embrace of the Azov Battalion and similar ultra-nationalist formations mirrors the same fatal miscalculation that led to the arming of militant extremists in Afghanistan and Syria. Western governments, driven by geopolitical objectives, are once again funding and strengthening forces whose ideology is fundamentally at odds with democratic values.
Just as with ISIS, whose origins can be traced to the destabilization of Iraq and Western support for extremist elements in Syria, the West is creating a new monster whose eventual blowback will be devastating. These battle-hardened ultra-nationalist fighters, armed with sophisticated Western weapons and granted international legitimacy, are establishing networks across Europe and beyond. The techniques, tactics, and connections being forged in this conflict will inevitably find their way back to Western societies, where far-right movements are already gaining strength.
Azov Neo-Nazis.
But unlike previous instances of blowback, this time the threat is being cultivated right on Europe’s doorstep, in a context where fascist ideologies are already resurging across the continent. When this powder keg explodes – and history teaches us it will – the consequences will be terrible indeed.
Capitalism’s Favorite Foot soldiers
The capitalist class, just as it did in the 1930s, sees in these movements a useful tool against working-class solidarity. The liberal response has been worse than inadequate – it has been fully complicit. Mainstream parties adopt far-right positions on immigration and security, claiming this will prevent voters from turning to extremists. Instead, it legitimizes extremist positions and moves the entire political spectrum rightward.
The German Greens and Social Democrats exemplify this dangerous compromise. Despite their proclaimed anti-fascist values, they frame migration primarily as a security threat, reinforcing the same xenophobic narratives they claim to oppose. Their adoption of right-wing frameworks on domestic issues is matched by their foreign policy positions, where they uncritically align with U.S. imperial interests and Zionist dictates. In both cases, they provide ‘left’ cover for policies that fundamentally undermine international solidarity and strengthen the very forces they claim to resist.
This captures a crucial historical pattern that’s repeating itself: Economic crisis generates social unrest, which the bourgeoisie strategically redirects through nationalist and racist narratives. The liberal center, fundamentally constrained by its commitment to preserving capitalism, proves structurally incapable of offering real solutions to the underlying economic contradictions.
The far right then fills this political vacuum, promising national renewal and cultural restoration while actually serving corporate interests. The corporate sector – particularly the media conglomerates and tech platforms controlled by the wealthy – actively amplifies these far-right narratives. They understand their function: to redirect working class anger away from the actual source of economic precarity – the capitalist class itself – toward vulnerable scapegoats like immigrants, people of color, and trans people.
This redirection serves a dual purpose: it not only diverts attention from the real culprits – the wealthy elites who benefit from and control this system – but it also fractures any possibility of unified working class resistance by turning different segments of the population against each other. The very forces generating the crisis thus work to ensure that the response to it strengthens rather than threatens their position.
The wealthy owners of media and tech platforms aren’t neutral observers of this process – they’re active participants in engineering this misdirection of popular anger away from themselves and toward society’s most vulnerable members.
The Problem is International
What makes today’s situation particularly dangerous is the global nature of the crisis. Climate change, economic inequality, and endless wars create waves of refugees, which the far right uses to stoke fears of “replacement.” Meanwhile, social media algorithms amplify extremist voices, creating echo chambers of hate and conspiracy theories.
The solution won’t come from the liberal center, which remains trapped in its own contradictions. As Antonio Gramsci understood, fascism emerges when the dominant ideology fails to pacify the working class through peaceful means – and when no emancipatory movement exists to channel that rage toward liberation. Today’s liberals, committed to maintaining the capitalist order at all costs, are repeating the fatal mistakes of their predecessors.
The urgency of organizing effective resistance cannot be overstated. The fascist movement is already serving its purpose – defending capital against demands for real change – without needing to take full state power. The current liberal-capitalist order, with its endless wars, environmental destruction, and growing inequality, provides fertile ground for fascist movements to grow.
The choice we face isn’t between liberal democracy and fascism – it’s between building genuine alternatives to capitalism or watching as society descends into barbarism — again. The ghosts of the 1930s are here to remind us: we’ve seen this before, and we know how it ends. The question is whether we’ll finally learn from history or be condemned to repeat it.
– Karim
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/02/ ... pitalists/
The 'corporate sector' is on board with whoever has the power. Consider that not that long ago said sector was all gung-ho about DEI/yadda yadda. They switched teams seamlessly as the parties exchanged power. While they represent the ultimate power in capitalist society, wealth, they do not like friction with political power over policy which is not their primary priority, gaining wealth and the power to keep it. So-called values got nuttin' to do with it.
Posted by Internationalist 360° on February 23, 2025
BettBeat Media
Tear gas for striking workers, billions for Neo-Nazis and Zionists while Universal Healthcare is ‘too expensive’. The mask is off: Liberals Prefer Nazis over Challenging Capitalism – Now They’re Back.
The ghosts of the 1930s are no longer mere shadows in history books. They walk among us, wearing suits instead of brown shirts, speaking of “immigration control” rather than racial purity, but their message remains fundamentally unchanged. In Germany, where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) now commands support from one in five voters, we see one of the most chilling examples of fascism’s resurgence in the heart of Europe.
The AfD’s rise mirrors a broader pattern across the Western world – a pattern that liberal democracy seems powerless to stop, or worse, actively enables. Just as the Weimar Republic’s center-left SPD compromised with conservative forces in a misguided attempt to maintain stability, today’s liberal parties across Europe and America are legitimizing far-right discourse under the guise of “pragmatic politics.”
Liberals Prefer Nazism over Anti-Capitalism
What remains unspoken in polite society, yet becomes glaringly obvious through historical analysis, is liberalism’s consistent preference for fascism over genuine social and racial equality. When faced with a choice between Nazi collaboration and communist resistance during World War II, many liberal democracies chose the former. Today, this pattern repeats itself with chilling precision.
Consider how quickly liberal media accommodate far-right talking points in the name of “balance,” while consistently demonizing even modest left-wing proposals for economic justice. The New York Times will run sympathetic profiles of neo-Nazis to “understand their perspective,” while dismissing socialists as dangerous radicals. This is not accident or oversight – it is policy.
The liberal establishment’s response to the AfD in Germany epitomizes a broader European pattern. While publicly denouncing the party’s most extreme statements, mainstream parties have steadily absorbed and legitimized its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. This phenomenon stretches across the continent – from the Netherlands, where mainstream parties echo Wilders’ anti-Muslim sentiment, to France, where Macron’s government increasingly mirrors Le Pen’s harsh stance on immigration. In Britain, the Conservative Party has embraced Brexit’s nativist undertones, while Belgium’s traditional parties adopt ever-stricter immigration policies to compete with the far-right Vlaams Belang.
Yet these same liberal establishments react with unified horror at any serious proposal for wealth redistribution or challenge to corporate power, dismissing such ideas as dangerous radicalism. The asymmetry is stark: while far-right movements have been allowed to fester and grow, even within police forces, for the past decades liberal governments have expended enormous resources and energy to systematically dismantle left-wing movements and unions, criminalize anti-capitalist thought, and marginalize voices calling for economic justice.
“The warning signs were there for those willing to see them. Hillary Clinton’s infamous gleeful laughter at the news of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal death – “We came, we saw, he died!” – revealed the true face behind the liberal mask.”
Racism is Negotiable; Economic Justice is Not
They have surveilled, infiltrated, and crushed left-wing organizations – the only historical counterweight to fascism – while turning a blind eye to the methodical growth of homegrown fascist networks. This deliberate choice is now bearing its predictable fruit across Europe and America, as fascist movements, having been granted the space to organize and normalize their ideology, surge into mainstream politics. The message could not be clearer: racism is negotiable; economic justice is not.
This preference extends beyond domestic politics. Western liberals readily support far-right regimes abroad when they serve corporate interests, while orchestrating coups against democratically elected leftist governments. They’ll wring their hands about “human rights” when it serves imperial interests, but remain silent about the mass graves their policies create in the Global South.
The greatest destruction of Palestine took place with full support of a liberal U.S. government.
The ongoing genocide in Palestine stands as the most damning testament to this liberal hypocrisy. While Republican administrations have historically backed Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, nothing compares to the breathtaking support for systematic extermination witnessed under Biden’s liberal administration. The same Democratic leaders who pontificate about democracy and human rights have provided unwavering diplomatic cover and military support for the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, the deliberate destruction of hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, and the engineered starvation of 2.3 million people in Gaza.
But the warning signs were there for those willing to see them. Hillary Clinton’s infamous gleeful laughter at the news of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal death – “We came, we saw, he died!” – revealed the true face behind the liberal mask. Libya, once Africa’s wealthiest nation with the continent’s highest standard of living, was reduced to a failed state with open-air slave markets. The destruction wasn’t an unfortunate byproduct – it was the point. Liberal interventionism, stripped of its humanitarian pretense, stands exposed as nothing more than imperialism with a progressive veneer.
Theatrical Resistance to Fascism
The fundamental truth is that liberals would rather see fascism triumph than witness the dismantling of capitalist hierarchy. Their performative opposition to the far right masks a deeper alignment: both groups are ultimately committed to preserving existing power structures. When push comes to shove, liberals — just like conservatives — will always choose order over justice, property over people, whiteness over equality.
This explains why liberal parties across Europe find it easier to collaborate with neo-fascists than with the left. It explains why mainstream media platforms love to give voice to far-right figures while marginalizing leftist perspectives. It explains why billions are spent on border militarization while social programs are gutted.
The liberal establishment’s supposed “resistance” to fascism is merely theatrical – designed to maintain their self-image as progressive while actively enabling the very forces they claim to oppose. Their real fear isn’t the rise of fascism, but the prospect of genuine popular democracy that might challenge the foundations of capitalist power.
“The corporate sector actively amplifies far-right narratives. They understand their function: to redirect working class anger away from the actual source of economic precarity – the capitalist class itself – toward vulnerable scapegoats like immigrants, people of color, and trans people.”
‘Sieg Heil’ is Hot Again
This dynamic was perfectly captured in the AfD’s evolution. Born from neoliberal economists opposing EU bailouts, it seamlessly transformed into a xenophobic party without losing its bourgeois support base. The same financial elites who claim to oppose racism are quite comfortable with it when it serves their class interests.
Former investment banker Alice Weidel presents herself as the polished face of the AfD, a lesbian woman living with her Sri Lankan partner while simultaneously advocating for “traditional values” and spreading replacement theory conspiracies. Behind her stands Björn Höcke, a man who called Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame” and whose writings under a pseudonym praised Nazi ideology and racial biology. The mask of respectability barely conceals the violence beneath.
This pattern repeats across Europe. In Italy, Georgia Meloni leads with a veneer of respectability while maintaining ties to neo-fascist movements. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán openly speaks of racial purity while receiving EU funds — the same Orbán who gets celebrated in many white anti-imperialist spaces as promising because he’s ‘good on Russia’. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders advances anti-Muslim rhetoric under the guise of protecting “Dutch values,” while prominently displaying Israeli flags across his party’s offices – a cynical strategy adopted by much of Europe’s far-right. Marine Le Pen in France has sanitized her father’s crude anti-Semitism while maintaining his core nationalist ideology.
The United Kingdom’s Tommy Robinson exemplifies this transformation of fascist ideology into mainstream acceptability. Once a street thug leading violent anti-Muslim protests, he has rebranded himself as a “journalist” and “activist,” finding eager amplification from the world’s wealthiest tech oligarchs. He’s become a particular favorite of Elon Musk, the Apartheid South Africa-born billionaire whose own trajectory from liberal tech icon to far-right propagandist mirrors the broader collapse of liberal pretenses. Musk, who recently gave a Nazi salute now sits comfortably in Trump’s inner circle, demonstrating how seamlessly corporate power adapts to fascist ideology.
In the United States, this alliance between oligarchic wealth and far-right movements finds its clearest expression in figures like Steve Bannon. While positioning himself as a populist champion of the working class, Bannon orchestrates a global network of nationalist movements while maintaining deep connections to Silicon Valley billionaires. Following Musk’s footsteps, Bannon too has now discarded his thin veneer of respectability, openly displaying a Nazi salute – the mask of respectability has been thrown off to show the true face beneath. These aren’t isolated incidents but rather public acknowledgments of what has always been obvious: the natural alignment between corporate power and fascist movements.
Steve Bannon (left) and Elon Musk doing Hitler salutes.
Perhaps most disturbing is the situation in Ukraine, where the complex reality of resistance against a Russian invasion has been used to whitewash far-right militias, creating a dangerous precedent for the legitimization of militant nationalism. The liberal establishment’s enthusiastic embrace of the Azov Battalion and similar ultra-nationalist formations mirrors the same fatal miscalculation that led to the arming of militant extremists in Afghanistan and Syria. Western governments, driven by geopolitical objectives, are once again funding and strengthening forces whose ideology is fundamentally at odds with democratic values.
Just as with ISIS, whose origins can be traced to the destabilization of Iraq and Western support for extremist elements in Syria, the West is creating a new monster whose eventual blowback will be devastating. These battle-hardened ultra-nationalist fighters, armed with sophisticated Western weapons and granted international legitimacy, are establishing networks across Europe and beyond. The techniques, tactics, and connections being forged in this conflict will inevitably find their way back to Western societies, where far-right movements are already gaining strength.
Azov Neo-Nazis.
But unlike previous instances of blowback, this time the threat is being cultivated right on Europe’s doorstep, in a context where fascist ideologies are already resurging across the continent. When this powder keg explodes – and history teaches us it will – the consequences will be terrible indeed.
Capitalism’s Favorite Foot soldiers
The capitalist class, just as it did in the 1930s, sees in these movements a useful tool against working-class solidarity. The liberal response has been worse than inadequate – it has been fully complicit. Mainstream parties adopt far-right positions on immigration and security, claiming this will prevent voters from turning to extremists. Instead, it legitimizes extremist positions and moves the entire political spectrum rightward.
The German Greens and Social Democrats exemplify this dangerous compromise. Despite their proclaimed anti-fascist values, they frame migration primarily as a security threat, reinforcing the same xenophobic narratives they claim to oppose. Their adoption of right-wing frameworks on domestic issues is matched by their foreign policy positions, where they uncritically align with U.S. imperial interests and Zionist dictates. In both cases, they provide ‘left’ cover for policies that fundamentally undermine international solidarity and strengthen the very forces they claim to resist.
This captures a crucial historical pattern that’s repeating itself: Economic crisis generates social unrest, which the bourgeoisie strategically redirects through nationalist and racist narratives. The liberal center, fundamentally constrained by its commitment to preserving capitalism, proves structurally incapable of offering real solutions to the underlying economic contradictions.
The far right then fills this political vacuum, promising national renewal and cultural restoration while actually serving corporate interests. The corporate sector – particularly the media conglomerates and tech platforms controlled by the wealthy – actively amplifies these far-right narratives. They understand their function: to redirect working class anger away from the actual source of economic precarity – the capitalist class itself – toward vulnerable scapegoats like immigrants, people of color, and trans people.
This redirection serves a dual purpose: it not only diverts attention from the real culprits – the wealthy elites who benefit from and control this system – but it also fractures any possibility of unified working class resistance by turning different segments of the population against each other. The very forces generating the crisis thus work to ensure that the response to it strengthens rather than threatens their position.
The wealthy owners of media and tech platforms aren’t neutral observers of this process – they’re active participants in engineering this misdirection of popular anger away from themselves and toward society’s most vulnerable members.
The Problem is International
What makes today’s situation particularly dangerous is the global nature of the crisis. Climate change, economic inequality, and endless wars create waves of refugees, which the far right uses to stoke fears of “replacement.” Meanwhile, social media algorithms amplify extremist voices, creating echo chambers of hate and conspiracy theories.
The solution won’t come from the liberal center, which remains trapped in its own contradictions. As Antonio Gramsci understood, fascism emerges when the dominant ideology fails to pacify the working class through peaceful means – and when no emancipatory movement exists to channel that rage toward liberation. Today’s liberals, committed to maintaining the capitalist order at all costs, are repeating the fatal mistakes of their predecessors.
The urgency of organizing effective resistance cannot be overstated. The fascist movement is already serving its purpose – defending capital against demands for real change – without needing to take full state power. The current liberal-capitalist order, with its endless wars, environmental destruction, and growing inequality, provides fertile ground for fascist movements to grow.
The choice we face isn’t between liberal democracy and fascism – it’s between building genuine alternatives to capitalism or watching as society descends into barbarism — again. The ghosts of the 1930s are here to remind us: we’ve seen this before, and we know how it ends. The question is whether we’ll finally learn from history or be condemned to repeat it.
– Karim
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/02/ ... pitalists/
The 'corporate sector' is on board with whoever has the power. Consider that not that long ago said sector was all gung-ho about DEI/yadda yadda. They switched teams seamlessly as the parties exchanged power. While they represent the ultimate power in capitalist society, wealth, they do not like friction with political power over policy which is not their primary priority, gaining wealth and the power to keep it. So-called values got nuttin' to do with it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
The Buchenwald Concentration Camp Was Liberated by Communist Prisoners: The Fifteenth Newsletter (2025)
Eight decades ago, communist prisoners organised and liberated the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, where they were held. As the far right of a special type rises across Europe, these heroic victories of anti-fascist resistance are under attack.
10 April 2025
Boris Taslitzky (France), Insurrection à Buchenwald 11 avril 1945 (Insurrection at Buchenwald 11 April 1945), 1964.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Eighty years ago, on 11 April 1945, units of General George S. Patton’s 4th Armoured Division of the US armed forces drove toward the city of Weimar, Germany, where the Buchenwald concentration camp was located. Patton’s troops eventually took control of the camp, but soldiers’ statements, which were collected later by historians, suggest that the US tanks were not what liberated Buchenwald: the camp had already been seized by the organisation and courage of the prisoners who took advantage of the flight of German soldiers in the face of the Allied advance.
Political prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp had formed themselves into combat groups (Kampfgruppen), which used their hidden cache of arms to foment an uprising within the camp, disarm the Nazi guards, and seize the tower at the camp’s entrance. The prisoners flew a white flag from the tower and formed a ring around the camp to inform the US troops that they had already liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. ‘Das Lager hatte sich selbst befreit’, they said; ‘the camp liberated itself’.
It was not only at Buchenwald that the prisoners rebelled. In August 1943, Treblinka prisoners rose up in an armed rebellion and, despite being gunned down, forced the Nazis to shut down this repulsive extermination camp (the Nazis murdered almost a million Jews in this camp alone).
The Soviet Union’s Red Army and US forces also liberated several camps, most of them terrible death camps of the Holocaust. US troops liberated Dachau in April 1945, but it was the Red Army that opened the doors to most of the worst camps, such as Majdanek (July 1944), Auschwitz (January 1945) in Poland and Sachsenhausen (April 1945) and Ravensbrück (April 1945) in Germany.
Dominik Černý (Czechoslovakia), K.L. Dora: Bydlení ve štole (K. L. Dora: Living in the Tunnel), 1953.
In July 1937, the Nazi regime brought prisoners from Sachsenhausen to an area near Weimar (home to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller as well as the site where the 1919 German Constitution was signed). The prisoners cleared nearly 400 acres of forest to build a concentration camp to hold 8,000 people, who Nazi camp commander Hermann Pister (1942–1945) used for medical experimentation and forced labour. By the camp’s closure eight years later, it held almost 280,000 prisoners (mostly Communists, Social Democrats, Roma and Sinti, Jews, and Christian dissidents). In late 1943, the Nazis shot to death nearly 8,500 Soviet prisoners of war in the camp and killed many Communists and Social Democrats. The Nazis killed an estimated total of 56,000 prisoners in this camp, including Communist Party of Germany (KPD) leader Ernst Thälmann, who was shot to death on 18 August 1944 after eleven years in solitary confinement. But Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Majdanek and Auschwitz. It was not directly part of Adolf Hitler’s hideous ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ (Endlösung der Judenfrage).
Within Buchenwald, the Communists and Social Democrats set up the International Camp Committee to organise their lives in the camp and to conduct acts of sabotage and rebellion (including, remarkably, against the nearby armament factories). Eventually, the organisation matured into the Popular Front Committee, set up in 1944, with four leaders: Hermann Brill (German People’s Front), Werner Hilpert (Christian Democrats), Ernst Thape (Social Democrats), and Walter Wolf (Communist Party of Germany). What was remarkable about this initiative was that despite being prisoners, the committee had already begun to discuss the possible future of a new Germany that had been de-Nazified from top to bottom and would be based on a cooperative economy. While in Buchenwald, Wolf wrote A Critique of Unreason: On the Analysis of National Socialist Pseudo-Philosophy.
Nachum Bandel (Ukraine), Block 51. Buchenwald. Small Camp, 1947.
A week after the prisoners liberated Buchenwald, they placed a wooden sculpture near the camp as a symbol of their anti-fascist resistance. They wanted to remember the camp not for the killings, but for their resilience during their incarceration and in their self-liberation. In 1945, the prisoners had already shaped the Buchenwald Oath, which became their credo: ‘We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations. The absolute destruction of Nazism, down to its roots, is our device. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal’.
The camp, then in the German Democratic Republic (DDR or East Germany), was converted into a prison for Nazis who awaited their trials. Some Nazis were shot for their crimes, including Weimar’s mayor, Karl Otto Koch, who had organised the arrest of Jews in the city in 1941. Meanwhile, across the Iron Curtain, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) rapidly incorporated former Nazis into the state bureaucracy, with two thirds of the senior staff of the Bundeskriminalamt (the federal criminal police) made up of former Nazis. As the process of trials and punishment for the Nazis came to an end, the remnants of Buchenwald became part of the project of public memorialisation in the DDR.
Ilse Häfner-Mode (Germany), Portrait of a Woman in Front of a Wooden Door, n.d.
In 1958, Otto Grotewohl, a social democrat who was the first prime minister of the DDR, opened the camp to hundreds of thousands of workers and school children to visit the buildings, listen to the stories of both the atrocities and the resistance, and commit themselves to anti-fascism. That same year, former prisoner Bruno Apitz published Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves), which told the story of how the resistance movement in the camp hid a little boy at great risk to the movement itself, and then how the movement captured the camp in 1945. The novel was made into a film in the DDR by Frank Beyer in 1963. The story was based on the actual account of Stefan Jerzy Zweig, a boy who was hidden by the prisoners in order to spare him from being sent to Auschwitz. Zweig survived the ordeal and died at the age of 81 in Vienna in 2024.
The DDR shaped its national culture around the theme of anti-fascism. In 1949, the Ministry of People’s Education urged schools to build a calendar of events that highlighted the anti-fascist struggle rather than religious holidays, such as World Peace Day instead of Fasching (Mardi Gras). The old Jugendweihe (youth initiation ceremony) was reshaped from being merely a rite of passage to an affirmation for young people to commit themselves to anti-fascism. Schools would take their students on field trips to visit Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen to learn about the hideousness of fascism and to cultivate humanist and socialist values. This was a powerful exercise in social transformation for a culture that had been swept into Nazism.
Herbert Sandberg (Germany), We Didn’t Know, 1964.
When West Germany annexed the east in 1990, a process began to undermine the advances of anti-fascism developed in the DDR. Buchenwald was ground zero for this exercise. First, leadership at Buchenwald became a controversy. Dr. Irmgard Seidel, who took over from former KPD prisoner Klaus Trostorff in 1988, found out that she had been sacked through a newspaper article (by investigating SS records, Dr. Seidel had discovered that there were 28,000 women prisoners at Buchenwald who worked as slave labourers, largely in the armaments factories). She was replaced by Ulrich Schneider, who was then removed when it was revealed that he had been a member of the communist party in West Germany. Schneider was followed by Thomas Hofmann, who was sufficiently anti-communist to please the new political leaders. Second, the anti-fascist orientation of public memory had to be altered to encourage anti-communism, such as by downplaying the memorial to Thälmann. A new emphasis was placed on the Soviets’ use of Buchenwald to imprison the Nazis.
Historians from Germany’s west began to write accounts saying that it was Patton’s soldiers, not the prisoners, who liberated the camp (this was the interpretation, for instance, of Manfred Overesch’s influential Buchenwald und die DDR. Oder die Suche nach Selbstlegitimation [Buchenwald and the DDR. Or, the Search for Self-Legitimisation], 1995). In June 1991, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl presided over a ceremony to install six large crosses for the victims of ‘the communist terror dictatorship’ and spoke of the Nazi crimes as if they were identical to the actions of the Soviet Union. Between 1991 and 1992, the German historian Eberhard Jäckel led a commission to rewrite the history of Buchenwald, including accusing the communist prisoners of collaborating with the Nazis and commemorating the ‘victims’ of the anti-fascist prison. This was an official reordering of historical facts to elevate fascists and undermine the antifascists. Such historical revisionism has reached new heights in recent years. Diplomatic representatives from Russia and Belarus – two former Soviet Republics – have been uninvited from the annual commemoration events. In speeches held at the memorial, speakers have equated Nazi concentration camps with Soviet work camps. And while Israeli flags have been openly displayed in Buchenwald, visitors wearing the keffiyeh have been banned from the premises and any mention of the genocide in Palestine has been reprimanded.
Hilde Kolbe takes her class of Vietnamese students from the Dorothea Christiane Erxleben Medical School in Quedlinburg, DDR, to Buchenwald, 15 April 1976.
In the 1950s, communist artists joined together to build a set of memorials at Buchenwald commemorating the fight against fascism. Sculptors René Graetz, Waldemar Grzimek, and Hans Kies created relief steles with a poem by the DDR’s first culture minister Johannes R. Becher etched on the back:
Thälmann saw what happened one day:
They dug up the weapons that had been hidden away
From the grave the doomed men rose
See their arms stretched out wide
See a memorial in many a guise
Evoking our struggles present and past
The dead admonish: Remember Buchenwald!
In this newsletter, the paintings are by former Buchenwald prisoners and the photograph depicts ‘Revolt of the Prisoners’, a large bronze sculpture of the prisoners liberating themselves made by Fritz Cremer, who joined the KPD in 1929.
Warmly,
Vijay
PS: in June, the Zetkin Forum for Social Research will convene a conference against fascism in Berlin, to which you are all invited.
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -camp-ww2/
Eight decades ago, communist prisoners organised and liberated the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, where they were held. As the far right of a special type rises across Europe, these heroic victories of anti-fascist resistance are under attack.
10 April 2025
Boris Taslitzky (France), Insurrection à Buchenwald 11 avril 1945 (Insurrection at Buchenwald 11 April 1945), 1964.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Eighty years ago, on 11 April 1945, units of General George S. Patton’s 4th Armoured Division of the US armed forces drove toward the city of Weimar, Germany, where the Buchenwald concentration camp was located. Patton’s troops eventually took control of the camp, but soldiers’ statements, which were collected later by historians, suggest that the US tanks were not what liberated Buchenwald: the camp had already been seized by the organisation and courage of the prisoners who took advantage of the flight of German soldiers in the face of the Allied advance.
Political prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp had formed themselves into combat groups (Kampfgruppen), which used their hidden cache of arms to foment an uprising within the camp, disarm the Nazi guards, and seize the tower at the camp’s entrance. The prisoners flew a white flag from the tower and formed a ring around the camp to inform the US troops that they had already liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. ‘Das Lager hatte sich selbst befreit’, they said; ‘the camp liberated itself’.
It was not only at Buchenwald that the prisoners rebelled. In August 1943, Treblinka prisoners rose up in an armed rebellion and, despite being gunned down, forced the Nazis to shut down this repulsive extermination camp (the Nazis murdered almost a million Jews in this camp alone).
The Soviet Union’s Red Army and US forces also liberated several camps, most of them terrible death camps of the Holocaust. US troops liberated Dachau in April 1945, but it was the Red Army that opened the doors to most of the worst camps, such as Majdanek (July 1944), Auschwitz (January 1945) in Poland and Sachsenhausen (April 1945) and Ravensbrück (April 1945) in Germany.
Dominik Černý (Czechoslovakia), K.L. Dora: Bydlení ve štole (K. L. Dora: Living in the Tunnel), 1953.
In July 1937, the Nazi regime brought prisoners from Sachsenhausen to an area near Weimar (home to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller as well as the site where the 1919 German Constitution was signed). The prisoners cleared nearly 400 acres of forest to build a concentration camp to hold 8,000 people, who Nazi camp commander Hermann Pister (1942–1945) used for medical experimentation and forced labour. By the camp’s closure eight years later, it held almost 280,000 prisoners (mostly Communists, Social Democrats, Roma and Sinti, Jews, and Christian dissidents). In late 1943, the Nazis shot to death nearly 8,500 Soviet prisoners of war in the camp and killed many Communists and Social Democrats. The Nazis killed an estimated total of 56,000 prisoners in this camp, including Communist Party of Germany (KPD) leader Ernst Thälmann, who was shot to death on 18 August 1944 after eleven years in solitary confinement. But Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Majdanek and Auschwitz. It was not directly part of Adolf Hitler’s hideous ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ (Endlösung der Judenfrage).
Within Buchenwald, the Communists and Social Democrats set up the International Camp Committee to organise their lives in the camp and to conduct acts of sabotage and rebellion (including, remarkably, against the nearby armament factories). Eventually, the organisation matured into the Popular Front Committee, set up in 1944, with four leaders: Hermann Brill (German People’s Front), Werner Hilpert (Christian Democrats), Ernst Thape (Social Democrats), and Walter Wolf (Communist Party of Germany). What was remarkable about this initiative was that despite being prisoners, the committee had already begun to discuss the possible future of a new Germany that had been de-Nazified from top to bottom and would be based on a cooperative economy. While in Buchenwald, Wolf wrote A Critique of Unreason: On the Analysis of National Socialist Pseudo-Philosophy.
Nachum Bandel (Ukraine), Block 51. Buchenwald. Small Camp, 1947.
A week after the prisoners liberated Buchenwald, they placed a wooden sculpture near the camp as a symbol of their anti-fascist resistance. They wanted to remember the camp not for the killings, but for their resilience during their incarceration and in their self-liberation. In 1945, the prisoners had already shaped the Buchenwald Oath, which became their credo: ‘We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations. The absolute destruction of Nazism, down to its roots, is our device. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal’.
The camp, then in the German Democratic Republic (DDR or East Germany), was converted into a prison for Nazis who awaited their trials. Some Nazis were shot for their crimes, including Weimar’s mayor, Karl Otto Koch, who had organised the arrest of Jews in the city in 1941. Meanwhile, across the Iron Curtain, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) rapidly incorporated former Nazis into the state bureaucracy, with two thirds of the senior staff of the Bundeskriminalamt (the federal criminal police) made up of former Nazis. As the process of trials and punishment for the Nazis came to an end, the remnants of Buchenwald became part of the project of public memorialisation in the DDR.
Ilse Häfner-Mode (Germany), Portrait of a Woman in Front of a Wooden Door, n.d.
In 1958, Otto Grotewohl, a social democrat who was the first prime minister of the DDR, opened the camp to hundreds of thousands of workers and school children to visit the buildings, listen to the stories of both the atrocities and the resistance, and commit themselves to anti-fascism. That same year, former prisoner Bruno Apitz published Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves), which told the story of how the resistance movement in the camp hid a little boy at great risk to the movement itself, and then how the movement captured the camp in 1945. The novel was made into a film in the DDR by Frank Beyer in 1963. The story was based on the actual account of Stefan Jerzy Zweig, a boy who was hidden by the prisoners in order to spare him from being sent to Auschwitz. Zweig survived the ordeal and died at the age of 81 in Vienna in 2024.
The DDR shaped its national culture around the theme of anti-fascism. In 1949, the Ministry of People’s Education urged schools to build a calendar of events that highlighted the anti-fascist struggle rather than religious holidays, such as World Peace Day instead of Fasching (Mardi Gras). The old Jugendweihe (youth initiation ceremony) was reshaped from being merely a rite of passage to an affirmation for young people to commit themselves to anti-fascism. Schools would take their students on field trips to visit Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen to learn about the hideousness of fascism and to cultivate humanist and socialist values. This was a powerful exercise in social transformation for a culture that had been swept into Nazism.
Herbert Sandberg (Germany), We Didn’t Know, 1964.
When West Germany annexed the east in 1990, a process began to undermine the advances of anti-fascism developed in the DDR. Buchenwald was ground zero for this exercise. First, leadership at Buchenwald became a controversy. Dr. Irmgard Seidel, who took over from former KPD prisoner Klaus Trostorff in 1988, found out that she had been sacked through a newspaper article (by investigating SS records, Dr. Seidel had discovered that there were 28,000 women prisoners at Buchenwald who worked as slave labourers, largely in the armaments factories). She was replaced by Ulrich Schneider, who was then removed when it was revealed that he had been a member of the communist party in West Germany. Schneider was followed by Thomas Hofmann, who was sufficiently anti-communist to please the new political leaders. Second, the anti-fascist orientation of public memory had to be altered to encourage anti-communism, such as by downplaying the memorial to Thälmann. A new emphasis was placed on the Soviets’ use of Buchenwald to imprison the Nazis.
Historians from Germany’s west began to write accounts saying that it was Patton’s soldiers, not the prisoners, who liberated the camp (this was the interpretation, for instance, of Manfred Overesch’s influential Buchenwald und die DDR. Oder die Suche nach Selbstlegitimation [Buchenwald and the DDR. Or, the Search for Self-Legitimisation], 1995). In June 1991, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl presided over a ceremony to install six large crosses for the victims of ‘the communist terror dictatorship’ and spoke of the Nazi crimes as if they were identical to the actions of the Soviet Union. Between 1991 and 1992, the German historian Eberhard Jäckel led a commission to rewrite the history of Buchenwald, including accusing the communist prisoners of collaborating with the Nazis and commemorating the ‘victims’ of the anti-fascist prison. This was an official reordering of historical facts to elevate fascists and undermine the antifascists. Such historical revisionism has reached new heights in recent years. Diplomatic representatives from Russia and Belarus – two former Soviet Republics – have been uninvited from the annual commemoration events. In speeches held at the memorial, speakers have equated Nazi concentration camps with Soviet work camps. And while Israeli flags have been openly displayed in Buchenwald, visitors wearing the keffiyeh have been banned from the premises and any mention of the genocide in Palestine has been reprimanded.
Hilde Kolbe takes her class of Vietnamese students from the Dorothea Christiane Erxleben Medical School in Quedlinburg, DDR, to Buchenwald, 15 April 1976.
In the 1950s, communist artists joined together to build a set of memorials at Buchenwald commemorating the fight against fascism. Sculptors René Graetz, Waldemar Grzimek, and Hans Kies created relief steles with a poem by the DDR’s first culture minister Johannes R. Becher etched on the back:
Thälmann saw what happened one day:
They dug up the weapons that had been hidden away
From the grave the doomed men rose
See their arms stretched out wide
See a memorial in many a guise
Evoking our struggles present and past
The dead admonish: Remember Buchenwald!
In this newsletter, the paintings are by former Buchenwald prisoners and the photograph depicts ‘Revolt of the Prisoners’, a large bronze sculpture of the prisoners liberating themselves made by Fritz Cremer, who joined the KPD in 1929.
Warmly,
Vijay
PS: in June, the Zetkin Forum for Social Research will convene a conference against fascism in Berlin, to which you are all invited.
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -camp-ww2/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
Everybody's talking about fascists...
For example:
******
The USA Is a Fascist Dictatorship
Posted by Internationalist 360° on May 7, 2025
Joe Emersberger
There are crimes that expose not only what people are but what they’ve always been. The U.S.-sponsored Holocaust in Gaza is arguably the worst crime in human history. It has shown that the USA is a fascist dictatorship, and always has been.
A live streamed Holocaust
Of course, in absolute numbers, the Holocaust in Gaza can never equal the one perpetrated by Nazi Germany, not even if the Israelis murdered every one of Gaza’s two million inhabitants. But absolute numbers are not the only way to judge the severity of a crime. The Nazis, as Raul Hilberg explained in his widely acclaimed study, put considerable effort into hiding the Holocaust from the German people, especially German Jews and other European Jews, to make it easier to carry out. That doesn’t mean the German public could not have known what was happening, or should be excused for supporting the Nazis. But it was much easier to hide crimes during the 1940s than it is today, when anyone with a cellphone can watch Palestinians being murdered and starved every single day.
The USA owes its very existence to genocide, just like “Israel”. After slavery was abolished, the USA remained an obvious racial apartheid state well into the 1960s. And since the 1960s the USA directly perpetrated or otherwise sponsored atrocities all over the world. But I still balked at calling the post-civil rights era USA a dictatorship until very recently. Why?
First, I thought that despite grave and glaring limitations, the USA’s democratic rituals and tolerance for protest imposed very inadequate but still important constraints on the government’s brutality.
Second, closely related to that, I thought that calling the USA a dictatorship discouraged leftists from growing political parties that were serious about using whatever openings existed, however small, to challenge power.
All empires are dictatorships
I fell into the trap of assessing whether or not the USA was a dictatorship by looking at it internally – by how much impact US citizens have on its government. That’s no way to judge an empire that exerts a murderous authority over hundreds of millions of people in Latin America alone- and billions worldwide. Calling the USA a democracy is like calling the Zionist monstrosity in “Israel” a democracy by ignoring Palestinians.
And now, Gaza has put all the concessions the US elite ever made to their own people – every limited freedom and social program – into a clearer perspective. When demoralization and apathy are not enough to keep people quiet, when marginalization of dissident views in mass media no longer works, we see what the US government does within its own borders. For now, the most blatant criminalization of anti-genocide speech inside the US is aimed at non-citizens, but terrorizing non-citizens is what empires are all about. The geographic location of an empire’s brutality doesn’t matter for the purposes of assessing it as an empire (i.e. a dictatorship).
Fascism was always with US
In 1939, a young John F Kennedy wrote in his diary that fascism was right for Germany and Italy. President Harry Truman, who dropped atomic bombs on Japan, had once signed up to be a Klu Klux Klan member. In 1971, then California governor Ronald Reagan in a telephone conversation referred to “monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”. Jimmy Carter, while governor of Georgia, declared a “American Fighting Man’s Day” in the state to counter the conviction of William Calley, the perpetrator of the My Lai massacre.
(More at link.)
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/05/ ... tatorship/
*****
And this:
Fascism is capitalism in crisis: Socialist author urges revolutionary readiness at LA book talk
May 10, 2025 Gregory E. Williams
On May 3, the Struggle for Socialism Party Los Angeles branch discussed the new book, “Against fascism: reclaiming populism’s legacy for today’s class struggle, compiled by Louisiana socialist Gregory Williams. Following is the opening presentation for the class series.
BUY NOW | FREE PDF
John Parker: This is a time when the attacks of fascism are so clear, so blatant. We work with a group called the Community Self-Defense Coalition, doing daily patrols. Over 60 organizations are part of it. If you see ICE, there’s a number you can call to bring the patrol out.
This work helps empower the community to fight back and chase out these ICE forces when they try to kidnap folks. You know, let folks know you’ve got to have a signed warrant before you can go in.
I was on patrol yesterday, and I guess I’m making the point about why that’s so important for this class. Often people think about the issues, and what can be done about them, and they just think, “It’s a damn shame they’re doing this to these people.” But when you see it happening to you and your neighbors, and your children — all the time so blatantly — you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to get involved.
But to understand how to get involved, you’ve got to know what the situation is. What is it that’s causing this? What’s fundamentally creating this problem?
How can we get ahead of it? If we understand what’s going on, we can try to get ahead of it. Gregory Williams analyzed a lot of the stuff in the class struggle, from a Marxist point of view, on what’s going on now with Trump. This book is going to give us a heads up and the tools to be able to fight back. We’re so glad to have the author here today.
Gregory Williams: Thanks, John. What you said dovetails into what I’m planning to say. Thank you for having me here.
We’ve published this new book through Struggle – La Lucha, the magazine we put together through the Struggle for Socialism Party. Since this is class one, I’ll give an overview of the book, or try. It’s challenging because it’s a compilation dealing with people’s struggles in multiple periods. It’s going from the late 19th century all the way to now, or the beginning of this year, and Trump’s second term.
But when we look at these periods, side by side, common themes emerge. And they’re things our movement needs to understand in the fight against capitalism and fascism. So even though the book goes into a lot of history, it’s really about strategizing in our current moment.
From the back cover summary:
“Fascist movements are on the rise worldwide, attacking working-class and oppressed people. The authors of this collection argue that capitalism’s inherent dynamics are the cause, as with fascism in the 20th century. Fascism is the capitalist class’s response to a system in crisis.
“They use racism and misogyny, transphobia and homophobia to try to beat back the diverse working class while amassing more wealth for themselves. But the workers beat back fascism before, and we can do it again.
“Workers have the power to eliminate the root cause of fascism by transforming society with socialist revolution, and this book is about getting us there. All the pieces in the book come from fighters in the revolutionary struggle, and most have already been published in Struggle – La Lucha.
“Topics include populism, a progressive farmer’s movement of the 1890s; the contemporary trans struggle; the Silicon Valley MAGA connection; the legacy of the Jena Six; the abortion rights movement in the South; the real motives of right-wing governors; and the fight against KKK leader David Duke.”
(More at link.)
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... book-talk/
*****
Fascism is a term often over-used and misused. I've seen the Right use it to attack Dems.
I think it diminishes the argument, the liberal will use it to differentiate between it and liberal democracy, and there is a difference, but that line of argument leaves capitalism standing unopposed. Just as 'hyphenated capitalisms' imply that there is a good or better capitalism so by fixating on fascism we leave it's masters unmolested. Like The Old Man said, we do not disguise our intentions, it is Capitalism in it's entirety which we must bring down, nothing else will suffice.
In the meantime we go to the source:
Georgi Dimitrov
The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism
Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International
THE CLASS CHARACTER OF FASCISM
Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
The most reactionary variety of fascism is the German type of fascism. It has the effrontery to call itself National Socialism, though it has nothing in common with socialism. German fascism is not only bourgeois nationalism, it is fiendish chauvinism. It is a government system of political gangsterism, a system of provocation and torture practised upon the working class and the revolutionary elements of the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. It is medieval barbarity and bestiality, it is unbridled aggression in relation to other nations.
German fascism is acting as the spearhead of international counter-revolution, as the chief instigator of imperialist war, as the initiator of a crusade against the Soviet Union, the great fatherland of the working people of the whole world.
Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.
This, the true character of fascism, must be particularly stressed because in a number of countries, under cover of social demagogy, fascism has managed to gain the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat. These would never have supported fascism if they had understood its real character and its true nature.
The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country. In certain countries, principally those in which fascism has no broad mass basis and in which the struggle of the various groups within the camp of the fascist bourgeoisie itself is rather acute, fascism does not immediately venture to abolish parliament, but allows the other bourgeois parties, as well as the Social-Democratic Parties, to retain a modicum of legality. In other countries, where the ruling bourgeoisie fears an early outbreak of revolution, fascism establishes its unrestricted political monopoly, either immediately or by intensifying its reign of terror against and persecution of all rival parties and groups. This does not prevent fascism, when its position becomes particularly acute, from trying to extend its basis and, without altering its class nature, trying to combine open terrorist dictatorship with a crude sham of parliamentarism.
The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie -- bourgeois democracy -- by another form -- open terrorist dictatorship. It would be a serious mistake to ignore this distinction, a mistake liable to prevent the revolutionary proletariat from mobilizing the widest strata of the working people of town and country for the struggle against the menace of the seizure of power by the fascists, and from taking advantage of the contradictions which exist in the camp of the bourgeoisie itself. But it is a mistake, no less serious and dangerous, to underrate the importance, for the establishment of fascist dictatorship, of the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie at present increasingly developing in bourgeois-democratic countries -- measures which suppress the democratic liberties of the working people, falsify and curtail the rights of parliament and intensify the repression of the revolutionary movement.
Comrades, the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties, in the course of a struggle even within the fascist camp itself -- a struggle which at times leads to armed clashes, as we have witnessed in the case of Germany, Austria and other countries. All this, however, does not make less important the fact that, before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.
The Social-Democratic leaders glossed over and concealed from the masses the true class nature of fascism, and did not call them to the struggle against the increasingly reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie. They bear great historical responsibility for the fact that, at the decisive moment of the fascist offensive, a large section of the working people of Germany and of a number of other fascist countries failed to recognize in fascism the most bloodthirsty monster of finance capital, their most vicious enemy, and that these masses were not prepared to resist it.
What is the source of the influence of fascism over the masses? Fascism is able to attract the masses because it demagogically appeals to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions. Why do the German fascists, those lackeys of the bourgeoisie and mortal enemies of socialism, represent themselves to the masses as "Socialists," and depict their accession to power as a "revolution"? Because they try to exploit the faith in revolution and the urge towards socialism that lives in the hearts of the mass of working people in Germany.
Fascism acts in the interests of the extreme imperialists, but it presents itself to the masses in the guise of champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments, as German fascism did, for instance, when it won the support of the masses of the petty bourgeoisie by the slogan "Down with the Versailles Treaty."
Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses but it approaches them with the most artful anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, trusts and financial magnates, and advancing those slogans which at the given moment are most alluring to the politically immature masses. In Germany -- "The general welfare is higher than the welfare of the individual," in Italy -- "Our state is not a capitalist, but a corporate state," in Japan -- "For Japan without exploitation," in the United States -- "Share the wealth," and so forth.
Fascism delivers up the people to be devoured by the most corrupt and venal elements, but comes before them with the demand for "an honest and incorruptible government." Speculating on the profound disillusionment of the masses in bourgeois-democratic governments, fascism hypocritically denounces corruption.
It is in the interests of the most reactionary circles of the bourgeoisie that fascism intercepts the disappointed masses who desert the old bourgeois parties. But it impresses these masses by the vehemence of its attacks on the bourgeois governments and its irreconcilable attitude to the old bourgeois parties.
Surpassing in its cynicism and hypocrisy all other varieties of bourgeois reaction, fascism adapts its demagogy to the national peculiarities of each country, and even to the peculiarities of the various social strata in one and the same country. And the mass of the petty bourgeoisie and even a section of the workers, reduced to despair by want, unemployment and the insecurity of their existence, fall victim to the social and chauvinist demagogy of fascism.
Fascism comes to power as a party of attack on the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, on the mass of the people who are in a state of unrest; yet it stages its accession to power as a "revolutionary" movement against the bourgeoisie on behalf of "the whole nation" and for the "salvation" of the nation. One recalls Mussolini's "march" on Rome, Pilsudski's "march" on Warsaw, Hitler's National-Socialist "revolution" in Germany, and so forth.
But whatever the masks that fascism adopts, whatever the forms in which it presents itself, whatever the ways by which it comes to power
Fascism is a most ferocious attack by capital on the mass of the working people;
Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war;
Fascism is rabid reaction and counter-revolution;
Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people.
WHAT DOES FASCIST VICTORY BRING TO THE MASSES?
Fascism promised the workers "a fair wage," but actually it has brought them an even lower, a pauper, standard of living. It promised work for the unemployed, but actually it has brought them even more painful torments of starvation and forced servile labor. In practice it converts the workers and unemployed into pariahs of capitalist society stripped of rights; destroys their trade unions; deprives them of the right to strike and to have their working-class press, forces them into fascist organizations, plunders their social insurance funds and transforms the mills and factories into barracks where the unbridled arbitrary rule of the capitalist reigns.
Fascism promised the working youth a broad highway to a brilliant future. But actually it has brought wholesale dismissals of young workers, labor camps and incessant military drilling for a war of conquest.
Fascism promised to guarantee office workers, petty officials and intellectuals security of existence, to destroy the omnipotence of the trusts and wipe out profiteering by bank capital. But actually it has brought them an ever greater degree of despair and uncertainty as to the morrow; it is subjecting them to a new bureaucracy made up of the most submissive of its followers, it is setting up an intolerable dictatorship of the trusts and spreading corruption and degeneration to an unprecedented extent.
Fascism promised the ruined and impoverished peasants to put an end to debt bondage, to abolish rent and even to expropriate the landed estates without compensation, in the interests of the landless and ruined peasants. But actually it is placing the laboring peasants in a state of unprecedented servitude to the trusts and the fascist state apparatus, and pushes to the utmost limit the exploitation of the great mass of the peasantry by the big landowners, the banks and the usurers.
"Germany will be a peasant country, or will not be at all," Hitler solemnly declared. And what did the peasants of Germany get under Hitler? The moratorium, 1) which has already been cancelled? Or the law on the inheritance of peasant property, which leads to millions of sons and daughters of peasants being squeezed out of the villages and reduced to paupers? Farm laborers have been transformed into semi-serfs, deprived even of the elementary right of free movement. The working peasants have been deprived of the opportunity of selling the produce of their farms in the market.
And in Poland?
The Polish peasant, says the Polish newspaper Czas, employs methods and means Which were used perhaps only in the Middle Ages; he nurses the fire in his stove and lends it to his neighbor; he splits matches into several parts; he lends dirty soapwater to others; he boils herring barrels in order to obtain salt water. This is not a fable, but the actual state of affairs in the countryside, of the truth of which anybody may convince himself.
And it is not Communists who write this, Comrades, but a Polish reactionary newspaper.
But this is by no means all.
Every day, in the concentration camps of fascist Germany, in the cellars of the Gestapo (German secret police), in the torture chambers of Poland, in the cells of the Bulgarian and Finnish secret police, in the Glavnyacha in Belgrade, in the Rumanian Siguranza and on the Italian islands, the best sons of the working class, revolutionary peasants, fighters for the splendid future of mankind, are being subjected to revolting tortures and indignities, before which pale the most abominable acts of the tsarist Okhranka2). The blackguardly German fascists beat husbands to a bloody pulp in the presence of their wives, and send the ashes of murdered sons by parcel post to their mothers. Sterilization has been made a method of political warfare. In the torture chambers, imprisoned anti-fascists are given injections of poison, their arms are broken, their eyes gouged out; they are strung up and have water pumped into them; the fascist swastika is carved in their living flesh.
I have before me a statistical summary drawn up by the International Red Aid [international organization of that time for aid to revolutionary fighters] regarding the number of killed, wounded, arrested, maimed and tortured to death in Germany, Poland, Italy, Austria, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In Germany alone, since the National-Socialists came to power, over 4,200 anti-fascist workers, peasants, employees, intellectuals -- Communists, Social Democrats and members of opposition Christian organizations -- have been murdered, 317,800 arrested, 218,600 injured and subjected to torture. In Austria, since the battles of February last year the "Christian" fascist government has murdered 1,900 revolutionary workers, maimed and injured 10,000 and arrested 40,000. And this summary, comrades is far from complete.
Words fail me in describing the indignation which seizes us at the thought of the torments which the working people are now undergoing in a number of fascist countries. The facts and figures we quote do not reflect one hundredth part of the true picture of the exploitation and tortures inflicted by the White terror and forming part of the daily life of the working class in many capitalist countries. Volumes cannot give a just picture of the countless brutalities inflicted by fascism on the working people.
With feelings of profound emotion and hatred for the fascist butchers, we dip the banners of the Communist International before the unforgettable memory of John Scheer, Fiete Schulze and Luttgens in Germany, Koloman Wallisch and Munichreiter in Austria, Sallai and Furst in Hungary, Kofardjiev, Lyutibrodski and Voykov in Bulgaria -- before the memory of thousands and thousands of Communists, Social-Democrats and non-party workers, peasants and representatives of the progressive intelligentsia who have laid down their lives in the struggle against fascism.
From this platform we greet the leader of the German proletariat and the honorary chairman of our Congress -- Comrade Thaelmann. We greet Comrades Rakosi, Gramsci, Antikainen. We greet Tom Mooney, who has been languishing in prison for eighteen years, and the thousands of other prisoners of capitalism and fascism, and we say to them: "Brothers in the fight, brothers in arms, you are not forgotten. We are with you. We shall give every hour of our lives, every drop of our blood, for your liberation, and for the liberation of all working people from the shameful regime of fascism."
Comrades, it was Lenin who warned us that the bourgeoisie may succeed in overwhelming the working people by savage terror, in checking the growing forces of revolution for brief periods of time, but that, nevertheless, this would not save it from its doom.
Life will assert itself -- Lenin wrote -- Let the bourgeoisie rave, work itself into a frenzy, overdo things, commit stupidities, take vengeance on the Bolsheviks in advance and endeavour to kill off (in India, Hungary, Germany, etc.) hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands more of yesterday's and tomorrow's Bolsheviks. Acting thus, the bourgeoisie acts as all classes doomed by history have acted. Communists should know that the future, at any rate, belongs to them; therefore we can and must combine the most intense passion in the great revolutionary struggle with the coolest and most sober evaluation of the mad ravings of the bourgeoisie. [V. I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, New York (1949), pp. 81-82; Collected Works 31:101]
Ay, if we and the proletariat of the whole world firmly follow the path indicated by Lenin, the bourgeoisie will perish in spite of everything.
IS THE VICTORY OF FASCISM INEVITABLE?
Why was it that fascism could triumph, and how? Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and working people, who constitute nine-tenths of the German people, nine-tenths of the Austrian people, nine-tenths of the people in other fascist countries. How, in what way, could this vicious enemy triumph?
Fascism was able to come to power primarily because the working class, owing to the policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie pursued by the Social-Democratic leaders, proved to be split, politically and organizationally disarmed, in face of the onslaught of the bourgeoisie. And the Communist Parties, on the other hand, apart from and in opposition to the Social-Democrats, were not strong enough to rouse the masses and to lead them in a decisive struggle against fascism.
And, indeed, let the millions of Social-Democratic workers, who together with their Communist brothers are now experiencing the horrors of fascist barbarism, seriously reflect on the following: If, in 1918, when revolution broke out in Germany and Austria, the Austrian and German proletariat had not followed the Social Democratic leadership of Otto Bauer, Friedrich Adler and Karl Renner in Austria and Ebert and Scheidemann in Germany, but had followed the road of the Russian Bolsheviks, the road of Lenin, there would now be no fascism in Austria or Germany, in Italy or Hungary, in Poland or in the Balkans. Not the bourgeoisie, but the working class would long ago have been the master of the situation in Europe.
Take, for example, the Austrian Social-Democratic Party. The revolution of 1918 raised it to a tremendous height. It held the power in its hands, it held strong positions in the army and in the state apparatus. Relying on these positions, it could have nipped fascism in the bud. But it surrendered one position of the working class after another without resistance. It allowed the bourgeoisie to strengthen its power, annul the constitution, purge the state apparatus, army and police force of Social-Democratic functionaries, and take the arsenals away from the workers. It allowed the fascist bandits to murder Social-Democratic workers with impunity and accepted the terms of the Hüttenberg Pact 3), which gave the fascist elements entry to the factories. At the same time the Social-Democratic leaders fooled the workers with the Linz program 4), which contained the alternative possibility of using armed force against the bourgeoisie and establishing the proletarian dictatorship, assuring them that in the event of the ruling class using force against the working class, the Party would reply by a call for general strike and for armed struggle. As though the whole policy of preparation for a fascist attack on the working class were not one chain of acts of violence against the working class masked by constitutional forms. Even on the eve and in the course of the February battles the Austrian Social Democratic leaders left the heroically fighting Schutzbund 5) isolated from the broad masses, and doomed the Austrian proletariat to defeat.
Was the victory of fascism inevitable in Germany? No, the German working class could have prevented it.
But in order to do so, it should have achieved a united anti-fascist proletarian front, and forced the Social-Democratic leaders to discontinue their campaign against the Communists and to accept the repeated proposals of the Communist Party for united action against fascism.
When fascism was on the offensive and the bourgeois-democratic liberties were being progressively abolished by the bourgeoisie, it should not have contented itself with the verbal resolutions of the Social-Democrats, but should have replied by a genuine mass struggle, which would have made the fulfilment of the fascist plans of the German bourgeoisie more difficult.
It should not have allowed the prohibition of the League of Red Front Fighters by the government of Braun and Severing 6), and should have established fighting contact between the League and the Reichsbanner 7), with its nearly one million members, and should have compelled Braun and Severing to arm both these organizations in order to resist and smash the fascist bands.
It should have compelled the Social-Democratic leaders who headed the Prussian government to adopt measures of defence against fascism, arrest the fascist leaders, close down their press, confiscate their material resources and the resources of the capitalists who were financing the fascist movement, dissolve the fascist organizations, deprive them of their weapons, and so forth.
Furthermore, it should have secured the re-establishment and extension of all forms of social assistance and the introduction of a moratorium and crisis benefits for the peasants -- who were being ruined under the impact of crisis -- by taxing the banks and the trusts, in this way winning the support of the working peasants. It was the fault of the Social-Democrats of Germany that this was not done, and that is why fascism was able to triumph.
Was it inevitable that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy should have triumphed in Spain, a country where the forces of proletarian revolt are so advantageously combined with a peasant war?
The Spanish Socialists were in the government from the first days of the revolution. Did they establish fighting contact between the working class organizations of every political opinion, including the Communists and the Anarchists, and did they weld the working class into a united trade union organization? Did they demand the confiscation of all lands of the landlords, the church and the monasteries in favor of the peasants in order to win over the latter to the side of the revolution? Did they attempt to fight for national self-determination for the Catalonians and the Basques, and for the liberation of Morocco? Did they purge the army of monarchist and fascist elements and prepare it for passing over to the side of the workers and peasants? Did they dissolve the Civil Guard, so detested by the people, the executioner of every movement of the people? Did they strike at the fascist party of Gil Robles and at the might of the Catholic church? No, they did none of these things. They rejected the frequent proposals of the Communists for united action against the offensive of the bourgeois-landlord reaction and fascism; they passed election laws which enabled the reactionaries to gain a majority in the Cortes (parliament), laws which penalized the popular movement, laws under which the heroic miners of Asturias are now being tried. They had peasants who were fighting for land shot by the Civil Guard, and so on.
This is the way in which the Social-Democrats, by disorganizing and splitting the ranks of the working class, cleared the path to power for fascism in Germany, Austria and Spain.
Comrades, fascism also attained power for the reason that the proletariat found itself isolated from its natural allies. Fascism attained power because it was able to win over large masses of the peasantry, owing to the fact that the Social-Democrats in the name of the working class pursued what was in fact an anti-peasant policy. The peasant saw in power a number of Social-Democratic governments, which in his eyes were an embodiment of the power of the working class; but not one of them put an end to peasant want, none of them gave land to the peasantry. In Germany, the Social-Democrats did not touch the landlords; they combated the strikes of the farm laborers, with the result that long before Hitler came to power the farm laborers of Germany were deserting the reformist trade unions and in the majority of cases were going over to the Stahlhelm and to the National Socialists.
Fascism also attained power for the reason that it was able to penetrate into the ranks of the youth, whereas the Social-Democrats diverted the working class youth from the class struggle, while the revolutionary proletariat did not develop the necessary educational work among the youth and did not pay enough attention to the struggle for its specific interests and demands. Fascism grasped the very acute need of the youth for militant activity, and enticed a considerable section of the youth into its fighting detachments. The new generation of young men and women has not experienced the horrors of war. They have felt the full weight of the economic crisis, unemployment and the disintegration of bourgeois democracy. But, seeing no prospects for the future, large sections of the youth proved to be particularly receptive to fascist demagogy, which depicted for them an alluring future should fascism succeed.
In this connection, we cannot avoid referring also to a number of mistakes made by the Communist Parties, mistakes that hampered our struggle against fascism.
In our ranks there was an impermissible underestimation of the fascist danger, a tendency which to this day has not everywhere been overcome. A case in point is the opinion formerly to be met with in our Parties that "Germany is not Italy," meaning that fascism may have succeeded in Italy, but that its success in Germany was out of the question, because the latter is an industrially and culturally highly developed country, with forty years of traditions of the working-class movement, in which fascism was impossible. Or the kind of opinion which is to be met with nowadays, to the effect that in countries of "classical" bourgeois democracy the soil for fascism does not exist. Such opinions have served and may serve to relax vigilance towards the fascist danger, and to render the mobilization of the proletariat in the struggle against fascism more difficult.
One might also cite quite a few instances where Communists were taken unawares by the fascist coup. Remember Bulgaria, where the leadership of our Party, took up a "neutral," but in fact opportunist, position with regard to the coup d'état of June 9, 1923; Poland, where in May 1926 the leadership of the Communist Party, making a wrong estimate of the motive forces of the Polish revolution, did not realize the fascist nature of Pilsudski's coup, and trailed in the rear of events; Finland, where our Party based itself on a false conception of slow and gradual fascization and overlooked the fascist coup which was being prepared by the leading group of the bourgeoisie and which took the Party and the working class unawares.
When National Socialism had already become a menacing mass movement in Germany, there were comrades who regarded the Bruening government as already a government of fascist dictatorship, and who boastfully declared: "If Hitler's Third Reich ever comes about, it will be six feet underground, and above it will be the victorious power of the workers."
Our comrades in Germany for a long time failed to fully reckon with the wounded national sentiments and the indignation of the masses against the Versailles Treaty; they treated as of little account the waverings of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie; they were late in drawing up their program of social and national emancipation, and when they did put it forward they were unable to adapt it to the concrete demands and to the level of the masses. They were even unable to popularize it widely among the masses.
In a number of countries, the necessary development of a mass fight against fascism was replaced by barren debates on the nature of fascism "in general" and by a narrow sectarian attitude in formulating and solving the immediate political tasks of the Party.
Comrades, it is not simply because we want to dig up the past that we speak of the causes of the victory of fascism, that we point to the historical responsibility of the Social Democrats for the defeat of the working class, and that we also point out our own mistakes in the fight against fascism. We are not historians divorced from living reality; we, active fighters of the working class, are obliged to answer the question that is tormenting millions of workers: Can the victory of fascism be prevented, and how? And we reply to these millions of workers: Yes, comrades, the road to fascism can be blocked. It is quite possible. It depends on ourselves--on the workers, the peasants and all working people.
Whether the victory of fascism can be prevented depends first and foremost on the militant activity of the working class itself, on whether its forces are welded into a single militant army combating the offensive of capitalism and fascism. By establishing its fighting unity, the proletariat would paralyze the influence of fascism over the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the youth and the intelligentsia, and would be able to neutralize one section of them and win over the other section.
Second, it depends on the existence of a strong revolutionary party, correctly leading the struggle of the working people against fascism. A party which systematically calls on the workers to retreat in the face of fascism and permits the fascist bourgeoisie to strengthen its positions is doomed to lead the workers to defeat.
Third, it depends on a correct policy of the working class towards the peasantry and the petty-bourgeois masses of the towns. These masses must be taken as they are, and not as we should like to have them. It is in the process of the struggle that they will overcome their doubts and waverings. It is only by a patient attitude towards their inevitable waverings, it is only by the political help of the proletariat, that they will be able to rise to a higher level of revolutionary consciousness and activity.
Fourth, it depends on the vigilance and timely action of the revolutionary proletariat. The latter must not allow fascism to take it unawares, it must not surrender the initiative to fascism, but must inflict decisive blows on it before it can gather its forces, it must not allow fascism to consolidate its position, it must repel fascism wherever and whenever it rears its head, it must not allow fascism to gain new positions. This is what the French proletariat is so successfully trying to do.
These are the main conditions for preventing the growth of fascism and its accession to power.
FASCISM -- A FEROCIOUS BUT UNSTABLE POWER
The fascist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is a ferocious power, but an unstable one.
What are the chief causes of the instability of fascist dictatorship?
Fascism undertakes to overcome the differences and antagonisms within the bourgeois camp, but it makes these antagonisms even more acute.
Fascism tries to establish its political monopoly by violently destroying other political parties. But the existence of the capitalist system, the existence of various classes and the accentuation of class contradictions inevitably tend to undermine and explode the political monopoly of fascism. In a fascist country the party of the fascists cannot set itself the aim of abolishing classes and class contradictions. It puts an end to the legal existence of bourgeois parties. But a number of them continue to maintain an illegal existence, while the Communist Party even in conditions of illegality continues to make progress, becomes steeled and tempered and leads the struggle of the proletariat against the fascist dictatorship. Hence, under the blows of class contradictions, the political monopoly of fascism is bound to explode.
Another reason for the instability of the fascist dictatorship is that the contrast between the anti-capitalist demagogy of fascism and its policy of enriching the monopolist bourgeoisie in the most piratical fashion makes it easier to expose the class nature of fascism and tends to shake and narrow its mass basis.
Furthermore, the victory of fascism arouses the deep hatred and indignation of the masses, helps to revolutionize them, and provides a powerful stimulus for a united front of the proletariat against fascism.
By conducting a policy of economic nationalism (autarchy) and by seizing the greater part of the national income for the purpose of preparing for war, fascism undermines the whole economic life of the country and accentuates the economic war between the capitalist states. To the conflicts that arise among the bourgeoisie it lends the character of sharp and at times bloody collisions that undermine the stability of the fascist state power in the eyes of the people. A government which murders its own followers, as happened in Germany on June 30 8) of last year, a fascist government against which another section of the fascist bourgeoisie is conducting an armed fight (the National-Socialist putsch in Austria and the violent attacks of individual fascist groups on the fascist government in Poland, Bulgaria, Finland and other countries) -- a government of this character cannot for long maintain its authority in the eyes of the broad mass of the petty bourgeoisie.
The working class must be able to take advantage of the antagonisms and conflicts within the bourgeois camp, but it must not cherish the illusion that fascism will exhaust itself of its own accord. Fascism will not collapse automatically. Only the revolutionary activity of the working class can help to take advantage of the conflicts which inevitably arise within the bourgeois camp in order to undermine the fascist dictatorship and to overthrow it.
By destroying the relics of bourgeois democracy, by elevating open violence to a system of government, fascism shakes democratic illusions and undermines the authority of the law in the eyes of the working people. This is particularly true in countries such as Austria and Spain, where the workers have taken up arms against fascism. In Austria, the heroic struggle of the Schutzbund and the Communists in spite of its defeat, shook the stability of the fascist dictatorship from the very outset.
In Spain, the bourgeoisie did not succeed in putting the fascist muzzle on the working people. The armed struggles in Austria and Spain have resulted in ever wider masses of the working class coming to realize the necessity for a revolutionary class struggle.
Only such monstrous philistines, such lackeys of the bourgeoisie, as the superannuated theoretician of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, are capable of casting reproaches at the workers, to the effect that they should not have taken up arms in Austria and Spain. What would the working class movement in Austria and Spain look like today if the working class of these countries were guided by the treacherous counsels of the Kautskys? The working class would be experiencing profound demoralization in its ranks.
The school of civil war -- Lenin says -- does not leave the people unaffected. It is a harsh school, and its complete curriculum inevitably includes the victories of the counterrevolution, the debaucheries of enraged reactionaries, savage punishments meted out by the old governments to the rebels, etc. But only downright pedants and mentally decrepit mummies can grieve over the fact that nations are entering this painful school; this school teaches the oppressed classes how to conduct civil war; it teaches how to bring about a victorious revolution; it concentrates in the masses of present-day slaves that hatred which is always harboured by the downtrodden, dull, ignorant slaves, and which leads those slaves who have become conscious of the shame of their slavery to the greatest historic exploits.
[V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 15:183]
The triumph of fascism in Germany has, as we know, been followed by a new wave of the fascist offensive, which in Austria led to the provocation by Dollfuss, in Spain to the new onslaughts of counter-revolution on the revolutionary conquests of the masses, in Poland to the fascist reform of the constitution, while in France it spurred the armed detachments of the fascists to attempt a coup d'état in February 1934. But this victory, and the frenzy of the fascist dictatorship, called forth a countermovement for a united proletarian front against fascism on an international scale.
The burning of the Reichstag, which served as a signal for the general attack of fascism on the working class, the seizure and spoliation of the trade unions and the other working class organizations, the groans of the tortured anti-fascists rising from the vaults of the fascist barracks and concentration camps, are making clear to the masses what has been the outcome of the reactionary, disruptive role played by the German Social-Democratic leaders, who rejected the proposal made by the Communists for a joint struggle against advancing fascism. These things are convincing the masses of the necessity of uniting all forces of the working class for the overthrow of fascism.
Hitler's victory also provided a decisive stimulus for the creation of a united front of the working class against fascism in France. Hitler's victory not only aroused in the workers a fear of the fate that befell the German workers, not only kindled hatred for the executioners of their German class brothers, but also strengthened in them the determination never in any circumstances to allow in their country what happened to the working class in Germany.
The powerful urge towards a united front in all the capitalist countries shows that the lessons of defeat have not been in vain. The working class is beginning to act in a new way. The initiative shown by the Communist Parties in the organization of a united front and the supreme self-sacrifice displayed by the Communists, by the revolutionary workers in the struggle against fascism, have resulted in an unprecedented increase in the prestige of the Communist International. At the same time, the Second International is undergoing a profound crisis, a crisis which is particularly noticeable and has particularly accentuated since the bankruptcy of German Social-Democracy. With ever greater ease the Social-Democratic workers are able to convince themselves that fascist Germany, with all its horrors and barbarities, is in the final analysis the result of the Social-Democratic policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. These masses are coming ever more clearly to realize that the path along which the German Social-Democratic leaders led the proletariat must not be traversed again. Never has there been such ideological dissension in the camp of the Second International as at the present time. A process of differentiation is taking place in all Social-Democratic Parties. Within their ranks two principal camps are forming: side by side with the existing camp of reactionary elements, who are trying in every way to preserve the bloc between the Social-Democrats and the bourgeoisie, and who rabidly reject a united front with the Communists, there is beginning to emerge a camp of revolutionary elements who entertain doubts as to the correctness of the policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, who are in favor of the creation of a united front with the Communists, and who are increasingly coming to adopt the position of the revolutionary class struggle.
Thus fascism, which appeared as the result of the decline of the capitalist system, in the long run acts as a factor in its further disintegration. Thus fascism, which has undertaken to bury Marxism, the revolutionary movement of the working class, is, as a result of the dialectics of life and the class struggle, itself leading to the further development of the forces that are bound to serve as its grave-diggers, the grave-diggers of capitalism.
(Much more at link, finest kind.)
https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... _02.htm#s2
For example:
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The USA Is a Fascist Dictatorship
Posted by Internationalist 360° on May 7, 2025
Joe Emersberger
There are crimes that expose not only what people are but what they’ve always been. The U.S.-sponsored Holocaust in Gaza is arguably the worst crime in human history. It has shown that the USA is a fascist dictatorship, and always has been.
A live streamed Holocaust
Of course, in absolute numbers, the Holocaust in Gaza can never equal the one perpetrated by Nazi Germany, not even if the Israelis murdered every one of Gaza’s two million inhabitants. But absolute numbers are not the only way to judge the severity of a crime. The Nazis, as Raul Hilberg explained in his widely acclaimed study, put considerable effort into hiding the Holocaust from the German people, especially German Jews and other European Jews, to make it easier to carry out. That doesn’t mean the German public could not have known what was happening, or should be excused for supporting the Nazis. But it was much easier to hide crimes during the 1940s than it is today, when anyone with a cellphone can watch Palestinians being murdered and starved every single day.
The USA owes its very existence to genocide, just like “Israel”. After slavery was abolished, the USA remained an obvious racial apartheid state well into the 1960s. And since the 1960s the USA directly perpetrated or otherwise sponsored atrocities all over the world. But I still balked at calling the post-civil rights era USA a dictatorship until very recently. Why?
First, I thought that despite grave and glaring limitations, the USA’s democratic rituals and tolerance for protest imposed very inadequate but still important constraints on the government’s brutality.
Second, closely related to that, I thought that calling the USA a dictatorship discouraged leftists from growing political parties that were serious about using whatever openings existed, however small, to challenge power.
All empires are dictatorships
I fell into the trap of assessing whether or not the USA was a dictatorship by looking at it internally – by how much impact US citizens have on its government. That’s no way to judge an empire that exerts a murderous authority over hundreds of millions of people in Latin America alone- and billions worldwide. Calling the USA a democracy is like calling the Zionist monstrosity in “Israel” a democracy by ignoring Palestinians.
And now, Gaza has put all the concessions the US elite ever made to their own people – every limited freedom and social program – into a clearer perspective. When demoralization and apathy are not enough to keep people quiet, when marginalization of dissident views in mass media no longer works, we see what the US government does within its own borders. For now, the most blatant criminalization of anti-genocide speech inside the US is aimed at non-citizens, but terrorizing non-citizens is what empires are all about. The geographic location of an empire’s brutality doesn’t matter for the purposes of assessing it as an empire (i.e. a dictatorship).
Fascism was always with US
In 1939, a young John F Kennedy wrote in his diary that fascism was right for Germany and Italy. President Harry Truman, who dropped atomic bombs on Japan, had once signed up to be a Klu Klux Klan member. In 1971, then California governor Ronald Reagan in a telephone conversation referred to “monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”. Jimmy Carter, while governor of Georgia, declared a “American Fighting Man’s Day” in the state to counter the conviction of William Calley, the perpetrator of the My Lai massacre.
(More at link.)
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/05/ ... tatorship/
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And this:
Fascism is capitalism in crisis: Socialist author urges revolutionary readiness at LA book talk
May 10, 2025 Gregory E. Williams
On May 3, the Struggle for Socialism Party Los Angeles branch discussed the new book, “Against fascism: reclaiming populism’s legacy for today’s class struggle, compiled by Louisiana socialist Gregory Williams. Following is the opening presentation for the class series.
BUY NOW | FREE PDF
John Parker: This is a time when the attacks of fascism are so clear, so blatant. We work with a group called the Community Self-Defense Coalition, doing daily patrols. Over 60 organizations are part of it. If you see ICE, there’s a number you can call to bring the patrol out.
This work helps empower the community to fight back and chase out these ICE forces when they try to kidnap folks. You know, let folks know you’ve got to have a signed warrant before you can go in.
I was on patrol yesterday, and I guess I’m making the point about why that’s so important for this class. Often people think about the issues, and what can be done about them, and they just think, “It’s a damn shame they’re doing this to these people.” But when you see it happening to you and your neighbors, and your children — all the time so blatantly — you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to get involved.
But to understand how to get involved, you’ve got to know what the situation is. What is it that’s causing this? What’s fundamentally creating this problem?
How can we get ahead of it? If we understand what’s going on, we can try to get ahead of it. Gregory Williams analyzed a lot of the stuff in the class struggle, from a Marxist point of view, on what’s going on now with Trump. This book is going to give us a heads up and the tools to be able to fight back. We’re so glad to have the author here today.
Gregory Williams: Thanks, John. What you said dovetails into what I’m planning to say. Thank you for having me here.
We’ve published this new book through Struggle – La Lucha, the magazine we put together through the Struggle for Socialism Party. Since this is class one, I’ll give an overview of the book, or try. It’s challenging because it’s a compilation dealing with people’s struggles in multiple periods. It’s going from the late 19th century all the way to now, or the beginning of this year, and Trump’s second term.
But when we look at these periods, side by side, common themes emerge. And they’re things our movement needs to understand in the fight against capitalism and fascism. So even though the book goes into a lot of history, it’s really about strategizing in our current moment.
From the back cover summary:
“Fascist movements are on the rise worldwide, attacking working-class and oppressed people. The authors of this collection argue that capitalism’s inherent dynamics are the cause, as with fascism in the 20th century. Fascism is the capitalist class’s response to a system in crisis.
“They use racism and misogyny, transphobia and homophobia to try to beat back the diverse working class while amassing more wealth for themselves. But the workers beat back fascism before, and we can do it again.
“Workers have the power to eliminate the root cause of fascism by transforming society with socialist revolution, and this book is about getting us there. All the pieces in the book come from fighters in the revolutionary struggle, and most have already been published in Struggle – La Lucha.
“Topics include populism, a progressive farmer’s movement of the 1890s; the contemporary trans struggle; the Silicon Valley MAGA connection; the legacy of the Jena Six; the abortion rights movement in the South; the real motives of right-wing governors; and the fight against KKK leader David Duke.”
(More at link.)
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... book-talk/
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Fascism is a term often over-used and misused. I've seen the Right use it to attack Dems.
I think it diminishes the argument, the liberal will use it to differentiate between it and liberal democracy, and there is a difference, but that line of argument leaves capitalism standing unopposed. Just as 'hyphenated capitalisms' imply that there is a good or better capitalism so by fixating on fascism we leave it's masters unmolested. Like The Old Man said, we do not disguise our intentions, it is Capitalism in it's entirety which we must bring down, nothing else will suffice.
In the meantime we go to the source:
Georgi Dimitrov
The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism
Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International
THE CLASS CHARACTER OF FASCISM
Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
The most reactionary variety of fascism is the German type of fascism. It has the effrontery to call itself National Socialism, though it has nothing in common with socialism. German fascism is not only bourgeois nationalism, it is fiendish chauvinism. It is a government system of political gangsterism, a system of provocation and torture practised upon the working class and the revolutionary elements of the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. It is medieval barbarity and bestiality, it is unbridled aggression in relation to other nations.
German fascism is acting as the spearhead of international counter-revolution, as the chief instigator of imperialist war, as the initiator of a crusade against the Soviet Union, the great fatherland of the working people of the whole world.
Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.
This, the true character of fascism, must be particularly stressed because in a number of countries, under cover of social demagogy, fascism has managed to gain the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat. These would never have supported fascism if they had understood its real character and its true nature.
The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country. In certain countries, principally those in which fascism has no broad mass basis and in which the struggle of the various groups within the camp of the fascist bourgeoisie itself is rather acute, fascism does not immediately venture to abolish parliament, but allows the other bourgeois parties, as well as the Social-Democratic Parties, to retain a modicum of legality. In other countries, where the ruling bourgeoisie fears an early outbreak of revolution, fascism establishes its unrestricted political monopoly, either immediately or by intensifying its reign of terror against and persecution of all rival parties and groups. This does not prevent fascism, when its position becomes particularly acute, from trying to extend its basis and, without altering its class nature, trying to combine open terrorist dictatorship with a crude sham of parliamentarism.
The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie -- bourgeois democracy -- by another form -- open terrorist dictatorship. It would be a serious mistake to ignore this distinction, a mistake liable to prevent the revolutionary proletariat from mobilizing the widest strata of the working people of town and country for the struggle against the menace of the seizure of power by the fascists, and from taking advantage of the contradictions which exist in the camp of the bourgeoisie itself. But it is a mistake, no less serious and dangerous, to underrate the importance, for the establishment of fascist dictatorship, of the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie at present increasingly developing in bourgeois-democratic countries -- measures which suppress the democratic liberties of the working people, falsify and curtail the rights of parliament and intensify the repression of the revolutionary movement.
Comrades, the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties, in the course of a struggle even within the fascist camp itself -- a struggle which at times leads to armed clashes, as we have witnessed in the case of Germany, Austria and other countries. All this, however, does not make less important the fact that, before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.
The Social-Democratic leaders glossed over and concealed from the masses the true class nature of fascism, and did not call them to the struggle against the increasingly reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie. They bear great historical responsibility for the fact that, at the decisive moment of the fascist offensive, a large section of the working people of Germany and of a number of other fascist countries failed to recognize in fascism the most bloodthirsty monster of finance capital, their most vicious enemy, and that these masses were not prepared to resist it.
What is the source of the influence of fascism over the masses? Fascism is able to attract the masses because it demagogically appeals to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions. Why do the German fascists, those lackeys of the bourgeoisie and mortal enemies of socialism, represent themselves to the masses as "Socialists," and depict their accession to power as a "revolution"? Because they try to exploit the faith in revolution and the urge towards socialism that lives in the hearts of the mass of working people in Germany.
Fascism acts in the interests of the extreme imperialists, but it presents itself to the masses in the guise of champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments, as German fascism did, for instance, when it won the support of the masses of the petty bourgeoisie by the slogan "Down with the Versailles Treaty."
Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses but it approaches them with the most artful anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, trusts and financial magnates, and advancing those slogans which at the given moment are most alluring to the politically immature masses. In Germany -- "The general welfare is higher than the welfare of the individual," in Italy -- "Our state is not a capitalist, but a corporate state," in Japan -- "For Japan without exploitation," in the United States -- "Share the wealth," and so forth.
Fascism delivers up the people to be devoured by the most corrupt and venal elements, but comes before them with the demand for "an honest and incorruptible government." Speculating on the profound disillusionment of the masses in bourgeois-democratic governments, fascism hypocritically denounces corruption.
It is in the interests of the most reactionary circles of the bourgeoisie that fascism intercepts the disappointed masses who desert the old bourgeois parties. But it impresses these masses by the vehemence of its attacks on the bourgeois governments and its irreconcilable attitude to the old bourgeois parties.
Surpassing in its cynicism and hypocrisy all other varieties of bourgeois reaction, fascism adapts its demagogy to the national peculiarities of each country, and even to the peculiarities of the various social strata in one and the same country. And the mass of the petty bourgeoisie and even a section of the workers, reduced to despair by want, unemployment and the insecurity of their existence, fall victim to the social and chauvinist demagogy of fascism.
Fascism comes to power as a party of attack on the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, on the mass of the people who are in a state of unrest; yet it stages its accession to power as a "revolutionary" movement against the bourgeoisie on behalf of "the whole nation" and for the "salvation" of the nation. One recalls Mussolini's "march" on Rome, Pilsudski's "march" on Warsaw, Hitler's National-Socialist "revolution" in Germany, and so forth.
But whatever the masks that fascism adopts, whatever the forms in which it presents itself, whatever the ways by which it comes to power
Fascism is a most ferocious attack by capital on the mass of the working people;
Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war;
Fascism is rabid reaction and counter-revolution;
Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people.
WHAT DOES FASCIST VICTORY BRING TO THE MASSES?
Fascism promised the workers "a fair wage," but actually it has brought them an even lower, a pauper, standard of living. It promised work for the unemployed, but actually it has brought them even more painful torments of starvation and forced servile labor. In practice it converts the workers and unemployed into pariahs of capitalist society stripped of rights; destroys their trade unions; deprives them of the right to strike and to have their working-class press, forces them into fascist organizations, plunders their social insurance funds and transforms the mills and factories into barracks where the unbridled arbitrary rule of the capitalist reigns.
Fascism promised the working youth a broad highway to a brilliant future. But actually it has brought wholesale dismissals of young workers, labor camps and incessant military drilling for a war of conquest.
Fascism promised to guarantee office workers, petty officials and intellectuals security of existence, to destroy the omnipotence of the trusts and wipe out profiteering by bank capital. But actually it has brought them an ever greater degree of despair and uncertainty as to the morrow; it is subjecting them to a new bureaucracy made up of the most submissive of its followers, it is setting up an intolerable dictatorship of the trusts and spreading corruption and degeneration to an unprecedented extent.
Fascism promised the ruined and impoverished peasants to put an end to debt bondage, to abolish rent and even to expropriate the landed estates without compensation, in the interests of the landless and ruined peasants. But actually it is placing the laboring peasants in a state of unprecedented servitude to the trusts and the fascist state apparatus, and pushes to the utmost limit the exploitation of the great mass of the peasantry by the big landowners, the banks and the usurers.
"Germany will be a peasant country, or will not be at all," Hitler solemnly declared. And what did the peasants of Germany get under Hitler? The moratorium, 1) which has already been cancelled? Or the law on the inheritance of peasant property, which leads to millions of sons and daughters of peasants being squeezed out of the villages and reduced to paupers? Farm laborers have been transformed into semi-serfs, deprived even of the elementary right of free movement. The working peasants have been deprived of the opportunity of selling the produce of their farms in the market.
And in Poland?
The Polish peasant, says the Polish newspaper Czas, employs methods and means Which were used perhaps only in the Middle Ages; he nurses the fire in his stove and lends it to his neighbor; he splits matches into several parts; he lends dirty soapwater to others; he boils herring barrels in order to obtain salt water. This is not a fable, but the actual state of affairs in the countryside, of the truth of which anybody may convince himself.
And it is not Communists who write this, Comrades, but a Polish reactionary newspaper.
But this is by no means all.
Every day, in the concentration camps of fascist Germany, in the cellars of the Gestapo (German secret police), in the torture chambers of Poland, in the cells of the Bulgarian and Finnish secret police, in the Glavnyacha in Belgrade, in the Rumanian Siguranza and on the Italian islands, the best sons of the working class, revolutionary peasants, fighters for the splendid future of mankind, are being subjected to revolting tortures and indignities, before which pale the most abominable acts of the tsarist Okhranka2). The blackguardly German fascists beat husbands to a bloody pulp in the presence of their wives, and send the ashes of murdered sons by parcel post to their mothers. Sterilization has been made a method of political warfare. In the torture chambers, imprisoned anti-fascists are given injections of poison, their arms are broken, their eyes gouged out; they are strung up and have water pumped into them; the fascist swastika is carved in their living flesh.
I have before me a statistical summary drawn up by the International Red Aid [international organization of that time for aid to revolutionary fighters] regarding the number of killed, wounded, arrested, maimed and tortured to death in Germany, Poland, Italy, Austria, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In Germany alone, since the National-Socialists came to power, over 4,200 anti-fascist workers, peasants, employees, intellectuals -- Communists, Social Democrats and members of opposition Christian organizations -- have been murdered, 317,800 arrested, 218,600 injured and subjected to torture. In Austria, since the battles of February last year the "Christian" fascist government has murdered 1,900 revolutionary workers, maimed and injured 10,000 and arrested 40,000. And this summary, comrades is far from complete.
Words fail me in describing the indignation which seizes us at the thought of the torments which the working people are now undergoing in a number of fascist countries. The facts and figures we quote do not reflect one hundredth part of the true picture of the exploitation and tortures inflicted by the White terror and forming part of the daily life of the working class in many capitalist countries. Volumes cannot give a just picture of the countless brutalities inflicted by fascism on the working people.
With feelings of profound emotion and hatred for the fascist butchers, we dip the banners of the Communist International before the unforgettable memory of John Scheer, Fiete Schulze and Luttgens in Germany, Koloman Wallisch and Munichreiter in Austria, Sallai and Furst in Hungary, Kofardjiev, Lyutibrodski and Voykov in Bulgaria -- before the memory of thousands and thousands of Communists, Social-Democrats and non-party workers, peasants and representatives of the progressive intelligentsia who have laid down their lives in the struggle against fascism.
From this platform we greet the leader of the German proletariat and the honorary chairman of our Congress -- Comrade Thaelmann. We greet Comrades Rakosi, Gramsci, Antikainen. We greet Tom Mooney, who has been languishing in prison for eighteen years, and the thousands of other prisoners of capitalism and fascism, and we say to them: "Brothers in the fight, brothers in arms, you are not forgotten. We are with you. We shall give every hour of our lives, every drop of our blood, for your liberation, and for the liberation of all working people from the shameful regime of fascism."
Comrades, it was Lenin who warned us that the bourgeoisie may succeed in overwhelming the working people by savage terror, in checking the growing forces of revolution for brief periods of time, but that, nevertheless, this would not save it from its doom.
Life will assert itself -- Lenin wrote -- Let the bourgeoisie rave, work itself into a frenzy, overdo things, commit stupidities, take vengeance on the Bolsheviks in advance and endeavour to kill off (in India, Hungary, Germany, etc.) hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands more of yesterday's and tomorrow's Bolsheviks. Acting thus, the bourgeoisie acts as all classes doomed by history have acted. Communists should know that the future, at any rate, belongs to them; therefore we can and must combine the most intense passion in the great revolutionary struggle with the coolest and most sober evaluation of the mad ravings of the bourgeoisie. [V. I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, New York (1949), pp. 81-82; Collected Works 31:101]
Ay, if we and the proletariat of the whole world firmly follow the path indicated by Lenin, the bourgeoisie will perish in spite of everything.
IS THE VICTORY OF FASCISM INEVITABLE?
Why was it that fascism could triumph, and how? Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and working people, who constitute nine-tenths of the German people, nine-tenths of the Austrian people, nine-tenths of the people in other fascist countries. How, in what way, could this vicious enemy triumph?
Fascism was able to come to power primarily because the working class, owing to the policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie pursued by the Social-Democratic leaders, proved to be split, politically and organizationally disarmed, in face of the onslaught of the bourgeoisie. And the Communist Parties, on the other hand, apart from and in opposition to the Social-Democrats, were not strong enough to rouse the masses and to lead them in a decisive struggle against fascism.
And, indeed, let the millions of Social-Democratic workers, who together with their Communist brothers are now experiencing the horrors of fascist barbarism, seriously reflect on the following: If, in 1918, when revolution broke out in Germany and Austria, the Austrian and German proletariat had not followed the Social Democratic leadership of Otto Bauer, Friedrich Adler and Karl Renner in Austria and Ebert and Scheidemann in Germany, but had followed the road of the Russian Bolsheviks, the road of Lenin, there would now be no fascism in Austria or Germany, in Italy or Hungary, in Poland or in the Balkans. Not the bourgeoisie, but the working class would long ago have been the master of the situation in Europe.
Take, for example, the Austrian Social-Democratic Party. The revolution of 1918 raised it to a tremendous height. It held the power in its hands, it held strong positions in the army and in the state apparatus. Relying on these positions, it could have nipped fascism in the bud. But it surrendered one position of the working class after another without resistance. It allowed the bourgeoisie to strengthen its power, annul the constitution, purge the state apparatus, army and police force of Social-Democratic functionaries, and take the arsenals away from the workers. It allowed the fascist bandits to murder Social-Democratic workers with impunity and accepted the terms of the Hüttenberg Pact 3), which gave the fascist elements entry to the factories. At the same time the Social-Democratic leaders fooled the workers with the Linz program 4), which contained the alternative possibility of using armed force against the bourgeoisie and establishing the proletarian dictatorship, assuring them that in the event of the ruling class using force against the working class, the Party would reply by a call for general strike and for armed struggle. As though the whole policy of preparation for a fascist attack on the working class were not one chain of acts of violence against the working class masked by constitutional forms. Even on the eve and in the course of the February battles the Austrian Social Democratic leaders left the heroically fighting Schutzbund 5) isolated from the broad masses, and doomed the Austrian proletariat to defeat.
Was the victory of fascism inevitable in Germany? No, the German working class could have prevented it.
But in order to do so, it should have achieved a united anti-fascist proletarian front, and forced the Social-Democratic leaders to discontinue their campaign against the Communists and to accept the repeated proposals of the Communist Party for united action against fascism.
When fascism was on the offensive and the bourgeois-democratic liberties were being progressively abolished by the bourgeoisie, it should not have contented itself with the verbal resolutions of the Social-Democrats, but should have replied by a genuine mass struggle, which would have made the fulfilment of the fascist plans of the German bourgeoisie more difficult.
It should not have allowed the prohibition of the League of Red Front Fighters by the government of Braun and Severing 6), and should have established fighting contact between the League and the Reichsbanner 7), with its nearly one million members, and should have compelled Braun and Severing to arm both these organizations in order to resist and smash the fascist bands.
It should have compelled the Social-Democratic leaders who headed the Prussian government to adopt measures of defence against fascism, arrest the fascist leaders, close down their press, confiscate their material resources and the resources of the capitalists who were financing the fascist movement, dissolve the fascist organizations, deprive them of their weapons, and so forth.
Furthermore, it should have secured the re-establishment and extension of all forms of social assistance and the introduction of a moratorium and crisis benefits for the peasants -- who were being ruined under the impact of crisis -- by taxing the banks and the trusts, in this way winning the support of the working peasants. It was the fault of the Social-Democrats of Germany that this was not done, and that is why fascism was able to triumph.
Was it inevitable that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy should have triumphed in Spain, a country where the forces of proletarian revolt are so advantageously combined with a peasant war?
The Spanish Socialists were in the government from the first days of the revolution. Did they establish fighting contact between the working class organizations of every political opinion, including the Communists and the Anarchists, and did they weld the working class into a united trade union organization? Did they demand the confiscation of all lands of the landlords, the church and the monasteries in favor of the peasants in order to win over the latter to the side of the revolution? Did they attempt to fight for national self-determination for the Catalonians and the Basques, and for the liberation of Morocco? Did they purge the army of monarchist and fascist elements and prepare it for passing over to the side of the workers and peasants? Did they dissolve the Civil Guard, so detested by the people, the executioner of every movement of the people? Did they strike at the fascist party of Gil Robles and at the might of the Catholic church? No, they did none of these things. They rejected the frequent proposals of the Communists for united action against the offensive of the bourgeois-landlord reaction and fascism; they passed election laws which enabled the reactionaries to gain a majority in the Cortes (parliament), laws which penalized the popular movement, laws under which the heroic miners of Asturias are now being tried. They had peasants who were fighting for land shot by the Civil Guard, and so on.
This is the way in which the Social-Democrats, by disorganizing and splitting the ranks of the working class, cleared the path to power for fascism in Germany, Austria and Spain.
Comrades, fascism also attained power for the reason that the proletariat found itself isolated from its natural allies. Fascism attained power because it was able to win over large masses of the peasantry, owing to the fact that the Social-Democrats in the name of the working class pursued what was in fact an anti-peasant policy. The peasant saw in power a number of Social-Democratic governments, which in his eyes were an embodiment of the power of the working class; but not one of them put an end to peasant want, none of them gave land to the peasantry. In Germany, the Social-Democrats did not touch the landlords; they combated the strikes of the farm laborers, with the result that long before Hitler came to power the farm laborers of Germany were deserting the reformist trade unions and in the majority of cases were going over to the Stahlhelm and to the National Socialists.
Fascism also attained power for the reason that it was able to penetrate into the ranks of the youth, whereas the Social-Democrats diverted the working class youth from the class struggle, while the revolutionary proletariat did not develop the necessary educational work among the youth and did not pay enough attention to the struggle for its specific interests and demands. Fascism grasped the very acute need of the youth for militant activity, and enticed a considerable section of the youth into its fighting detachments. The new generation of young men and women has not experienced the horrors of war. They have felt the full weight of the economic crisis, unemployment and the disintegration of bourgeois democracy. But, seeing no prospects for the future, large sections of the youth proved to be particularly receptive to fascist demagogy, which depicted for them an alluring future should fascism succeed.
In this connection, we cannot avoid referring also to a number of mistakes made by the Communist Parties, mistakes that hampered our struggle against fascism.
In our ranks there was an impermissible underestimation of the fascist danger, a tendency which to this day has not everywhere been overcome. A case in point is the opinion formerly to be met with in our Parties that "Germany is not Italy," meaning that fascism may have succeeded in Italy, but that its success in Germany was out of the question, because the latter is an industrially and culturally highly developed country, with forty years of traditions of the working-class movement, in which fascism was impossible. Or the kind of opinion which is to be met with nowadays, to the effect that in countries of "classical" bourgeois democracy the soil for fascism does not exist. Such opinions have served and may serve to relax vigilance towards the fascist danger, and to render the mobilization of the proletariat in the struggle against fascism more difficult.
One might also cite quite a few instances where Communists were taken unawares by the fascist coup. Remember Bulgaria, where the leadership of our Party, took up a "neutral," but in fact opportunist, position with regard to the coup d'état of June 9, 1923; Poland, where in May 1926 the leadership of the Communist Party, making a wrong estimate of the motive forces of the Polish revolution, did not realize the fascist nature of Pilsudski's coup, and trailed in the rear of events; Finland, where our Party based itself on a false conception of slow and gradual fascization and overlooked the fascist coup which was being prepared by the leading group of the bourgeoisie and which took the Party and the working class unawares.
When National Socialism had already become a menacing mass movement in Germany, there were comrades who regarded the Bruening government as already a government of fascist dictatorship, and who boastfully declared: "If Hitler's Third Reich ever comes about, it will be six feet underground, and above it will be the victorious power of the workers."
Our comrades in Germany for a long time failed to fully reckon with the wounded national sentiments and the indignation of the masses against the Versailles Treaty; they treated as of little account the waverings of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie; they were late in drawing up their program of social and national emancipation, and when they did put it forward they were unable to adapt it to the concrete demands and to the level of the masses. They were even unable to popularize it widely among the masses.
In a number of countries, the necessary development of a mass fight against fascism was replaced by barren debates on the nature of fascism "in general" and by a narrow sectarian attitude in formulating and solving the immediate political tasks of the Party.
Comrades, it is not simply because we want to dig up the past that we speak of the causes of the victory of fascism, that we point to the historical responsibility of the Social Democrats for the defeat of the working class, and that we also point out our own mistakes in the fight against fascism. We are not historians divorced from living reality; we, active fighters of the working class, are obliged to answer the question that is tormenting millions of workers: Can the victory of fascism be prevented, and how? And we reply to these millions of workers: Yes, comrades, the road to fascism can be blocked. It is quite possible. It depends on ourselves--on the workers, the peasants and all working people.
Whether the victory of fascism can be prevented depends first and foremost on the militant activity of the working class itself, on whether its forces are welded into a single militant army combating the offensive of capitalism and fascism. By establishing its fighting unity, the proletariat would paralyze the influence of fascism over the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the youth and the intelligentsia, and would be able to neutralize one section of them and win over the other section.
Second, it depends on the existence of a strong revolutionary party, correctly leading the struggle of the working people against fascism. A party which systematically calls on the workers to retreat in the face of fascism and permits the fascist bourgeoisie to strengthen its positions is doomed to lead the workers to defeat.
Third, it depends on a correct policy of the working class towards the peasantry and the petty-bourgeois masses of the towns. These masses must be taken as they are, and not as we should like to have them. It is in the process of the struggle that they will overcome their doubts and waverings. It is only by a patient attitude towards their inevitable waverings, it is only by the political help of the proletariat, that they will be able to rise to a higher level of revolutionary consciousness and activity.
Fourth, it depends on the vigilance and timely action of the revolutionary proletariat. The latter must not allow fascism to take it unawares, it must not surrender the initiative to fascism, but must inflict decisive blows on it before it can gather its forces, it must not allow fascism to consolidate its position, it must repel fascism wherever and whenever it rears its head, it must not allow fascism to gain new positions. This is what the French proletariat is so successfully trying to do.
These are the main conditions for preventing the growth of fascism and its accession to power.
FASCISM -- A FEROCIOUS BUT UNSTABLE POWER
The fascist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is a ferocious power, but an unstable one.
What are the chief causes of the instability of fascist dictatorship?
Fascism undertakes to overcome the differences and antagonisms within the bourgeois camp, but it makes these antagonisms even more acute.
Fascism tries to establish its political monopoly by violently destroying other political parties. But the existence of the capitalist system, the existence of various classes and the accentuation of class contradictions inevitably tend to undermine and explode the political monopoly of fascism. In a fascist country the party of the fascists cannot set itself the aim of abolishing classes and class contradictions. It puts an end to the legal existence of bourgeois parties. But a number of them continue to maintain an illegal existence, while the Communist Party even in conditions of illegality continues to make progress, becomes steeled and tempered and leads the struggle of the proletariat against the fascist dictatorship. Hence, under the blows of class contradictions, the political monopoly of fascism is bound to explode.
Another reason for the instability of the fascist dictatorship is that the contrast between the anti-capitalist demagogy of fascism and its policy of enriching the monopolist bourgeoisie in the most piratical fashion makes it easier to expose the class nature of fascism and tends to shake and narrow its mass basis.
Furthermore, the victory of fascism arouses the deep hatred and indignation of the masses, helps to revolutionize them, and provides a powerful stimulus for a united front of the proletariat against fascism.
By conducting a policy of economic nationalism (autarchy) and by seizing the greater part of the national income for the purpose of preparing for war, fascism undermines the whole economic life of the country and accentuates the economic war between the capitalist states. To the conflicts that arise among the bourgeoisie it lends the character of sharp and at times bloody collisions that undermine the stability of the fascist state power in the eyes of the people. A government which murders its own followers, as happened in Germany on June 30 8) of last year, a fascist government against which another section of the fascist bourgeoisie is conducting an armed fight (the National-Socialist putsch in Austria and the violent attacks of individual fascist groups on the fascist government in Poland, Bulgaria, Finland and other countries) -- a government of this character cannot for long maintain its authority in the eyes of the broad mass of the petty bourgeoisie.
The working class must be able to take advantage of the antagonisms and conflicts within the bourgeois camp, but it must not cherish the illusion that fascism will exhaust itself of its own accord. Fascism will not collapse automatically. Only the revolutionary activity of the working class can help to take advantage of the conflicts which inevitably arise within the bourgeois camp in order to undermine the fascist dictatorship and to overthrow it.
By destroying the relics of bourgeois democracy, by elevating open violence to a system of government, fascism shakes democratic illusions and undermines the authority of the law in the eyes of the working people. This is particularly true in countries such as Austria and Spain, where the workers have taken up arms against fascism. In Austria, the heroic struggle of the Schutzbund and the Communists in spite of its defeat, shook the stability of the fascist dictatorship from the very outset.
In Spain, the bourgeoisie did not succeed in putting the fascist muzzle on the working people. The armed struggles in Austria and Spain have resulted in ever wider masses of the working class coming to realize the necessity for a revolutionary class struggle.
Only such monstrous philistines, such lackeys of the bourgeoisie, as the superannuated theoretician of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, are capable of casting reproaches at the workers, to the effect that they should not have taken up arms in Austria and Spain. What would the working class movement in Austria and Spain look like today if the working class of these countries were guided by the treacherous counsels of the Kautskys? The working class would be experiencing profound demoralization in its ranks.
The school of civil war -- Lenin says -- does not leave the people unaffected. It is a harsh school, and its complete curriculum inevitably includes the victories of the counterrevolution, the debaucheries of enraged reactionaries, savage punishments meted out by the old governments to the rebels, etc. But only downright pedants and mentally decrepit mummies can grieve over the fact that nations are entering this painful school; this school teaches the oppressed classes how to conduct civil war; it teaches how to bring about a victorious revolution; it concentrates in the masses of present-day slaves that hatred which is always harboured by the downtrodden, dull, ignorant slaves, and which leads those slaves who have become conscious of the shame of their slavery to the greatest historic exploits.
[V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 15:183]
The triumph of fascism in Germany has, as we know, been followed by a new wave of the fascist offensive, which in Austria led to the provocation by Dollfuss, in Spain to the new onslaughts of counter-revolution on the revolutionary conquests of the masses, in Poland to the fascist reform of the constitution, while in France it spurred the armed detachments of the fascists to attempt a coup d'état in February 1934. But this victory, and the frenzy of the fascist dictatorship, called forth a countermovement for a united proletarian front against fascism on an international scale.
The burning of the Reichstag, which served as a signal for the general attack of fascism on the working class, the seizure and spoliation of the trade unions and the other working class organizations, the groans of the tortured anti-fascists rising from the vaults of the fascist barracks and concentration camps, are making clear to the masses what has been the outcome of the reactionary, disruptive role played by the German Social-Democratic leaders, who rejected the proposal made by the Communists for a joint struggle against advancing fascism. These things are convincing the masses of the necessity of uniting all forces of the working class for the overthrow of fascism.
Hitler's victory also provided a decisive stimulus for the creation of a united front of the working class against fascism in France. Hitler's victory not only aroused in the workers a fear of the fate that befell the German workers, not only kindled hatred for the executioners of their German class brothers, but also strengthened in them the determination never in any circumstances to allow in their country what happened to the working class in Germany.
The powerful urge towards a united front in all the capitalist countries shows that the lessons of defeat have not been in vain. The working class is beginning to act in a new way. The initiative shown by the Communist Parties in the organization of a united front and the supreme self-sacrifice displayed by the Communists, by the revolutionary workers in the struggle against fascism, have resulted in an unprecedented increase in the prestige of the Communist International. At the same time, the Second International is undergoing a profound crisis, a crisis which is particularly noticeable and has particularly accentuated since the bankruptcy of German Social-Democracy. With ever greater ease the Social-Democratic workers are able to convince themselves that fascist Germany, with all its horrors and barbarities, is in the final analysis the result of the Social-Democratic policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. These masses are coming ever more clearly to realize that the path along which the German Social-Democratic leaders led the proletariat must not be traversed again. Never has there been such ideological dissension in the camp of the Second International as at the present time. A process of differentiation is taking place in all Social-Democratic Parties. Within their ranks two principal camps are forming: side by side with the existing camp of reactionary elements, who are trying in every way to preserve the bloc between the Social-Democrats and the bourgeoisie, and who rabidly reject a united front with the Communists, there is beginning to emerge a camp of revolutionary elements who entertain doubts as to the correctness of the policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, who are in favor of the creation of a united front with the Communists, and who are increasingly coming to adopt the position of the revolutionary class struggle.
Thus fascism, which appeared as the result of the decline of the capitalist system, in the long run acts as a factor in its further disintegration. Thus fascism, which has undertaken to bury Marxism, the revolutionary movement of the working class, is, as a result of the dialectics of life and the class struggle, itself leading to the further development of the forces that are bound to serve as its grave-diggers, the grave-diggers of capitalism.
(Much more at link, finest kind.)
https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... _02.htm#s2
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Fascism
Bourgeois democracy and fascism
The march towards authoritarian dictatorship can be countered with by a party imbued with revolutionary optimism.
Proletarian writers
Wednesday 30 April 2025
When British workers turned out in huge numbers to prevent fascists from marching through the East End of London in 1936, the police intervened on the side of Oswald Moseley’s blackshirts, arresting and beating antifascist protestors, attempting to clear away their barricades and trying to force a way through. Ultimately, however, the state lost what became known as ‘The Battle of Cable Street’ to the communist organised defenders.
The following resolution was passed unanimously by the tenth party congress of the CPGB-ML.
*****
Congress notes that we live in a class society, under a dictatorship of capital, controlled by a handful of extraordinary wealthy monopoly capitalists. In essence, we live in a democracy that exists only for the rich. This congress recognises that we are living through the final and highest phase of the capitalist system: namely that of capitalist-imperialism. The imperialist system finds itself in perpetual crisis facing the looming prospect of its disintegration. The crisis affects all aspects of capitalism, both economic and political.
On the economic front, imperialism is seeing the centre of the world economy shifting towards China and Russia and other developing economies such as India and South Africa. More and more countries are breaking out of imperialist domination and are taking the path of sovereignty and independence.
On the political front, there is growing instability in the centres of imperialism. The social peace at home, ensured by imperialist plunder of the rest of the world, can no longer be maintained. Year on year, working people in the imperialist core are finding their material conditions getting worse, resulting in huge dissatisfaction and the potential for social unrest. These two maturing crises of imperialism are intertwined and are bound, ultimately, to bring about a revolutionary crisis.
Monopoly capitalism has the very simple aim of maintaining its system of exploitation at home and abroad. Having no way out of this crisis, imperialism will look for its salvation by increasing its repressive tendencies, attempting to capture new markets abroad by force and increasing repression at home to try to crush the resistance of the masses.
The dictatorship of capital has two possible forms: bourgeois democracy and fascism. Today in Britain, we are still living (just) in conditions of a bourgeois democracy. Under these conditions we have the formal equality of all citizens before the law, we can participate in elections, voting for our preferred bourgeois representative, and have the freedom to ‘choose’ our own method of exploitation.
This sham democracy gives the masses of people the illusion that they are participants and stakeholders in the capitalist system. But these freedoms do not alter the essential fact that capitalist democracy is a democracy only for the rich and that capitalist democracy is a veiled dictatorship of the exploiters, whose system creates ever widening material and economic inequality between the class of wage-workers (proletarians) and the class of capitalists (bourgeois).
Finding itself in crisis because of the contradictions that are inherent to the capitalist mode of anarchic production for profit, the ruling class is heading towards the point where bourgeois democracy will no longer be able to maintain social peace and the exploitative relations in the imperialist core. Bourgeois democracy is experiencing a crisis of legitimacyKeir Starmer, who is universally loathed, was handed a massive parliamentary majority last year despite a comparatively low proportion of the popular vote. In fact, non-voters made up the largest share of the voting electorate. The illusion of democracy is slipping and many workers are realising that they have no real stake in the system; that their ‘democratic rights’ are merely an illusion.
Bourgeois democracy is capitalism’s preferred method of dictatorship in the imperialist heartlands. The ignorance of working people regarding their oppression is a valuable tool for the maintenance of social peace. However, as contradictions in the capitalist system intensify and the crisis of overproduction deepens, the dictatorship of capital needs to find new ways of maintaining the system while increasing the level of exploitation at home and abroad through evermore coercive and authoritarian measures. Since the masses are already restive, this inevitably means a turn towards a more openly terroristic dictatorship, in the form of fascism.
Fascism has two main features:
In the imperialist core: the suppression of civil liberties for the masses and the intensification of their exploitation.
Abroad: wars of spoilation and conquest. The abandonment of any illusion of moral principle, and the quest for the total enslavement of any and all sovereign nations, regardless of the price in blood.
Although it would be incorrect to say that we are living today under conditions of fascist dictatorship, we can see clearly that the seeds are being planted and the current trajectory is towards a growing authoritarianism.
As Comrade Georgi Dimitrov stated: “The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country.” (The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, 2 August 1935)
In Britain today we can see the gradual implementation of the first feature of fascism. The velvet glove is being replaced by the iron fist; the suppression of our right to protest and our freedom of expression are advancing along with the intensification of exploitation.
The most obvious example is the state’s response to the widespread revulsion and horror of the British people towards the genocide of the Palestinians. Imperialism seeks to control the middle east and its precious natural resources, viewing it as part of its life-and-death struggle to maintain the global imperialist system of exploitation. The Palestine movement having engaged the broad masses of working people in a way not seen since the Iraq war threatens this aim. The ruling class’s primary concern is that the working class may succeed in putting up effective resistance to its genocidal war machine. The second, broader concern, is regarding the ramifications of a well-organised and class-conscious working class asserting its power in Britain.
These concerns have led to a frenzied crackdown against the Palestine movement. If you happen to be effective at providing a concrete and instructive education to the masses, you now face the risk of arrest, prosecution and criminal conviction. When the bourgeoisie find that their laws are not yet strong enough to achieve a criminal conviction, they satisfy themselves with the destruction of the targeted individual’s life instead. Doxing and harassment, loss of employment, loss of reputation and threats to family life are increasingly being used as tools by the state and its semi-detached zionist political police.
Our own comrades have been on the receiving end of such treatment, along with tens of high-profile academics, journalists and activists, and many less-known individuals, who have all found themselves facing the wrath of the state. The heroic activists of Palestine Action have found themselves languishing in prison for months on end under the harshest of conditions whilst they await trial. The fate of the previously velvet-gloved environmental direct activists of Just Stop Oil was a showcase for the kind of harsh sentences for mild acts of civil disobedience that the government wants to direct towards the rest of the working class.
The clear message is that if you resist, you will be destroyed. The bourgeoisie wants those who are already radicalised off the streets, and they want to intimidate anyone who may be thinking of participating in some form of struggle to stop before they even start.
The other element of this crackdown has been intensification of racism and chauvinism through the state and its unofficial channels in the media to sow division amongst the working class. It is no coincidence that during a period when large numbers of the working class found a common ground around the Palestine movement, there was an attempt to characterise the protests as “supporting terror” and “hate marches”.
The ruling class and its Labour government are ramping up efforts to create mass contempt and hatred within the white working class towards people with different skin colour, ethnic background or religion, and one result of their endless provocations were last summer’s riots, during which racist thugs called on the poor white working class to target minorities and specifically asylum seekers.
The second feature of fascism can also be seen to be maturing and intensifying, the most obvious example being the proxy war currently being waged by Nato against Russia in Ukraine. The imperialist powers are determined to fight their war to the last Ukrainian, no matter what the cost to the people they claim to be “standing with”.
Besides this, in the past year alone we have seen the frenzied prosecution of a genocidal war against the Palestinians and its extension into Lebanon and Yemen; the overthrow of the secular and sovereign Syrian Arab Republic by imperialist-backed islamic fundamentalists, and a string of heinous provocations against Iran. Not to mention continued brazen interference in the internal affairs of many of the countries in eastern Europe, including Romania, Georgia and Moldova, and endless provocations against China in Taiwan and the DPRK in south Korea.
Despite the fact that the war against Russia that our party signposted a decade ago seems to be coming to a close, the imperialists are still desperate to destroy Russia, and just as desperate to find a way to bring down China, too. The intensification of trade wars, the arming of Taiwan are all contributing to reaching that point. Alongside Russia and China, imperialism has also set its sights firmly on course for conflict with Iran, and of course the DPRK. In other words, the most reliable bulwarks against imperialism now find themselves in a life-or-death struggle, the outcome of which will determine the fate of the whole world.
In these conditions of deepening economic and political turmoil, this congress declares that now is not the time to fall into despondency or cynicism. Congress therefore resolves that the correct response to the present situation is to:
1.Redouble our efforts to bring a Marxist analysis to the working class, which alone can explain both the root causes of society’s problems and the only real way out.
2.Imbue all our work with revolutionary optimism, understanding that the turmoil we are experiencing is the sign that conditions for a revolutionary upheaval are ripening fast.
3.Work harder than ever to find and train advanced workers, building our party and firmly connecting it to the masses, so that when the revolutionary situation finally matures, the British working class has the theoretical and organisational ability to succeed in its mission of overthrowing the dictatorship of capital and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/04/30/ne ... d-fascism/
The march towards authoritarian dictatorship can be countered with by a party imbued with revolutionary optimism.
Proletarian writers
Wednesday 30 April 2025
When British workers turned out in huge numbers to prevent fascists from marching through the East End of London in 1936, the police intervened on the side of Oswald Moseley’s blackshirts, arresting and beating antifascist protestors, attempting to clear away their barricades and trying to force a way through. Ultimately, however, the state lost what became known as ‘The Battle of Cable Street’ to the communist organised defenders.
The following resolution was passed unanimously by the tenth party congress of the CPGB-ML.
*****
Congress notes that we live in a class society, under a dictatorship of capital, controlled by a handful of extraordinary wealthy monopoly capitalists. In essence, we live in a democracy that exists only for the rich. This congress recognises that we are living through the final and highest phase of the capitalist system: namely that of capitalist-imperialism. The imperialist system finds itself in perpetual crisis facing the looming prospect of its disintegration. The crisis affects all aspects of capitalism, both economic and political.
On the economic front, imperialism is seeing the centre of the world economy shifting towards China and Russia and other developing economies such as India and South Africa. More and more countries are breaking out of imperialist domination and are taking the path of sovereignty and independence.
On the political front, there is growing instability in the centres of imperialism. The social peace at home, ensured by imperialist plunder of the rest of the world, can no longer be maintained. Year on year, working people in the imperialist core are finding their material conditions getting worse, resulting in huge dissatisfaction and the potential for social unrest. These two maturing crises of imperialism are intertwined and are bound, ultimately, to bring about a revolutionary crisis.
Monopoly capitalism has the very simple aim of maintaining its system of exploitation at home and abroad. Having no way out of this crisis, imperialism will look for its salvation by increasing its repressive tendencies, attempting to capture new markets abroad by force and increasing repression at home to try to crush the resistance of the masses.
The dictatorship of capital has two possible forms: bourgeois democracy and fascism. Today in Britain, we are still living (just) in conditions of a bourgeois democracy. Under these conditions we have the formal equality of all citizens before the law, we can participate in elections, voting for our preferred bourgeois representative, and have the freedom to ‘choose’ our own method of exploitation.
This sham democracy gives the masses of people the illusion that they are participants and stakeholders in the capitalist system. But these freedoms do not alter the essential fact that capitalist democracy is a democracy only for the rich and that capitalist democracy is a veiled dictatorship of the exploiters, whose system creates ever widening material and economic inequality between the class of wage-workers (proletarians) and the class of capitalists (bourgeois).
Finding itself in crisis because of the contradictions that are inherent to the capitalist mode of anarchic production for profit, the ruling class is heading towards the point where bourgeois democracy will no longer be able to maintain social peace and the exploitative relations in the imperialist core. Bourgeois democracy is experiencing a crisis of legitimacyKeir Starmer, who is universally loathed, was handed a massive parliamentary majority last year despite a comparatively low proportion of the popular vote. In fact, non-voters made up the largest share of the voting electorate. The illusion of democracy is slipping and many workers are realising that they have no real stake in the system; that their ‘democratic rights’ are merely an illusion.
Bourgeois democracy is capitalism’s preferred method of dictatorship in the imperialist heartlands. The ignorance of working people regarding their oppression is a valuable tool for the maintenance of social peace. However, as contradictions in the capitalist system intensify and the crisis of overproduction deepens, the dictatorship of capital needs to find new ways of maintaining the system while increasing the level of exploitation at home and abroad through evermore coercive and authoritarian measures. Since the masses are already restive, this inevitably means a turn towards a more openly terroristic dictatorship, in the form of fascism.
Fascism has two main features:
In the imperialist core: the suppression of civil liberties for the masses and the intensification of their exploitation.
Abroad: wars of spoilation and conquest. The abandonment of any illusion of moral principle, and the quest for the total enslavement of any and all sovereign nations, regardless of the price in blood.
Although it would be incorrect to say that we are living today under conditions of fascist dictatorship, we can see clearly that the seeds are being planted and the current trajectory is towards a growing authoritarianism.
As Comrade Georgi Dimitrov stated: “The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country.” (The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, 2 August 1935)
In Britain today we can see the gradual implementation of the first feature of fascism. The velvet glove is being replaced by the iron fist; the suppression of our right to protest and our freedom of expression are advancing along with the intensification of exploitation.
The most obvious example is the state’s response to the widespread revulsion and horror of the British people towards the genocide of the Palestinians. Imperialism seeks to control the middle east and its precious natural resources, viewing it as part of its life-and-death struggle to maintain the global imperialist system of exploitation. The Palestine movement having engaged the broad masses of working people in a way not seen since the Iraq war threatens this aim. The ruling class’s primary concern is that the working class may succeed in putting up effective resistance to its genocidal war machine. The second, broader concern, is regarding the ramifications of a well-organised and class-conscious working class asserting its power in Britain.
These concerns have led to a frenzied crackdown against the Palestine movement. If you happen to be effective at providing a concrete and instructive education to the masses, you now face the risk of arrest, prosecution and criminal conviction. When the bourgeoisie find that their laws are not yet strong enough to achieve a criminal conviction, they satisfy themselves with the destruction of the targeted individual’s life instead. Doxing and harassment, loss of employment, loss of reputation and threats to family life are increasingly being used as tools by the state and its semi-detached zionist political police.
Our own comrades have been on the receiving end of such treatment, along with tens of high-profile academics, journalists and activists, and many less-known individuals, who have all found themselves facing the wrath of the state. The heroic activists of Palestine Action have found themselves languishing in prison for months on end under the harshest of conditions whilst they await trial. The fate of the previously velvet-gloved environmental direct activists of Just Stop Oil was a showcase for the kind of harsh sentences for mild acts of civil disobedience that the government wants to direct towards the rest of the working class.
The clear message is that if you resist, you will be destroyed. The bourgeoisie wants those who are already radicalised off the streets, and they want to intimidate anyone who may be thinking of participating in some form of struggle to stop before they even start.
The other element of this crackdown has been intensification of racism and chauvinism through the state and its unofficial channels in the media to sow division amongst the working class. It is no coincidence that during a period when large numbers of the working class found a common ground around the Palestine movement, there was an attempt to characterise the protests as “supporting terror” and “hate marches”.
The ruling class and its Labour government are ramping up efforts to create mass contempt and hatred within the white working class towards people with different skin colour, ethnic background or religion, and one result of their endless provocations were last summer’s riots, during which racist thugs called on the poor white working class to target minorities and specifically asylum seekers.
The second feature of fascism can also be seen to be maturing and intensifying, the most obvious example being the proxy war currently being waged by Nato against Russia in Ukraine. The imperialist powers are determined to fight their war to the last Ukrainian, no matter what the cost to the people they claim to be “standing with”.
Besides this, in the past year alone we have seen the frenzied prosecution of a genocidal war against the Palestinians and its extension into Lebanon and Yemen; the overthrow of the secular and sovereign Syrian Arab Republic by imperialist-backed islamic fundamentalists, and a string of heinous provocations against Iran. Not to mention continued brazen interference in the internal affairs of many of the countries in eastern Europe, including Romania, Georgia and Moldova, and endless provocations against China in Taiwan and the DPRK in south Korea.
Despite the fact that the war against Russia that our party signposted a decade ago seems to be coming to a close, the imperialists are still desperate to destroy Russia, and just as desperate to find a way to bring down China, too. The intensification of trade wars, the arming of Taiwan are all contributing to reaching that point. Alongside Russia and China, imperialism has also set its sights firmly on course for conflict with Iran, and of course the DPRK. In other words, the most reliable bulwarks against imperialism now find themselves in a life-or-death struggle, the outcome of which will determine the fate of the whole world.
In these conditions of deepening economic and political turmoil, this congress declares that now is not the time to fall into despondency or cynicism. Congress therefore resolves that the correct response to the present situation is to:
1.Redouble our efforts to bring a Marxist analysis to the working class, which alone can explain both the root causes of society’s problems and the only real way out.
2.Imbue all our work with revolutionary optimism, understanding that the turmoil we are experiencing is the sign that conditions for a revolutionary upheaval are ripening fast.
3.Work harder than ever to find and train advanced workers, building our party and firmly connecting it to the masses, so that when the revolutionary situation finally matures, the British working class has the theoretical and organisational ability to succeed in its mission of overthrowing the dictatorship of capital and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/04/30/ne ... d-fascism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."