How to Stop Fascism, page 2
I can remember vividly the first moment when I understood that fascism existed. It was in the mid-1960s and I was around five years old. The TV was on and a programme about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen started. My mum, the daughter of a Polish Jew, leapt to her feet and switched it off. ‘We’re not watching that,’ she shouted.
Born in 1935, she’d spent her childhood knowing that if the Nazis invaded Britain she would be killed. Later I realized that it wasn’t my eyes she was trying to protect from the pictures but her own. But she failed. For a few short moments we saw a bulldozer pushing a pile of emaciated bodies into a pit.14
It is now widely understood that, for the first decades after the war, both the memory of fascism and the desire to study it were suppressed. From the movies we learned that the Nazis had put people in barbed-wire camps, and sometimes killed them; but the victims in the movies I watched as a child were for the most part British prisoners of war, not Jews.15
Then came the thaw: in the 1970s, TV series like Holocaust and movies like Cabaret turned the popular image of the Nazis inside out.16 The people who’d perpetrated the horror were no longer depicted mainly as prison guards in jackboots; they were the ordinary people of Germany – the landlady, the cleaner, the bisexual cabaret host.
Finally came the long period – from the 1980s onward – in which fascism was commodified in popular culture. A generation that had nothing to fear, and harboured no post-traumatic stress, could happily consume movies, novels, drama series, comedies and even porn themed around the Nazis.
Meanwhile, the Auschwitz memorial expanded, and major global museums and monuments were erected to the Holocaust, replete with new evidence gathered from the archives of the Soviet Union, which had collapsed.
As a result, today we know more about what fascism did while in power than any previous generation. But many people are woefully ignorant about how it came to power. Despite the countless movies and drama series, we are almost never shown how millions of people were swept up in the thrill of murdering Jews, gypsies, gay people and socialists; how they had imagined doing it, even as they cast their votes for what seemed at the time like protest parties.
That is why, in this book, I focus not on regimes but on the process that brings fascism to power, asking: how did far-right parties break out of their isolation? What were the psychological traits they preyed on? And why did the left fail to stop them? If we can answer all this we can design strategies to stop it happening again.
To understand fascism requires a theory; a collection of facts won’t do. But with the re-emergence of today’s far right, almost every theory of fascism produced during the past sixty years needs revision.
Until the 1980s, you could justifiably argue that fascism was what happened in the 1930s, and the surviving far-right groups are hangovers from that. In the 1990s you could say: a new right-wing populism has emerged but it is not fascist. Today we are witnessing a real and serious fascist resurgence. And though its organizational forms and language are different, its philosophical roots are exactly the same.
‘Why did it happen once?’ is a very different question from ‘Why is it happening again?’ The latter begs the question: will we have to go on defeating fascism over and over until the capitalist system itself departs? I fear the answer is yes.
The most fragile theories of fascism are those that emerged straight after the Second World War, rooted in pre-existing disciplines. Psychiatrists explained fascism as mass psychosis; political science evolved the Cold War theory of ‘totalitarianism’ in which fascism and communism are essentially the same thing; moral philosophers explained it as ‘radical evil’; anthropologists categorized it as a ‘political religion’. There was no coherence, just a tangle of competing claims.
As for Marxism, at least in its orthodox form, its theory of fascism was wrong in the 1920s, half-baked in the 1930s and has been rendered incoherent in the past decade. Classic Marxism saw fascism as the agent of the financial elite, whose mission was to smash the highly organized labour movements of the interwar period in order to head off a revolution. Today there is no revolutionary proletariat, no mass unemployment, and no serious faction within high finance wants or needs fascism. And yet it’s back.
Since the 1970s, academic historians have created the discipline of ‘comparative fascist studies’, while social scientists have offered behavioural explanations. I will explore their insights critically in this book because, with the sudden resurgence of the threat, this is no longer an academic issue.
Our task is to piece together a new theory of fascism that builds on the work of academics but is ‘owned’ and maintained primarily by activists, based on experience as well as theory, and can respond to the threat in real time.
We need something more than a definition, because definitions are not explanations. A checklist of the features common to historic fascist parties won’t explain why one ends up as an irrelevant sect and another is able to conquer mainland Europe. Nor can a definition easily encapsulate a process by which individuals, parties and movements that were not fascist become fascist.
Nevertheless, since the demand for definitive statements is strong, here’s mine. Fascism is the fear of freedom, triggered by a glimpse of freedom.
It is the violent mobilization of people who do not want to be free, around the project of destroying freedom. It is, as the Italian anti-fascist Enzo Traverso wrote, ‘a revolution against the revolution’.17
Throughout history people have believed in the possibility of human self-emancipation. It was the subtext of all humanistic religions, the explicit project of the Enlightenment and the declared objective of Marxism. Fascism is an attempt to stop it happening.
The Nazis’ stated aim was to erase all progress since the French Revolution of 1789 and then to freeze historical time so completely that no new modernity, or Enlightenment or progress could ever emerge. That is what today’s far right wants too.
In the search for what makes people want to reject and prevent freedom, I will argue that we need to look much deeper than the contingent factors of economic crisis, or class antagonisms, which have been the traditional focus of the left.
Though there is no fascist party with a viable route to power at time of writing, that could change. From climate change to deglobalization, the mid-twenty-first century will generate pressures bigger than those that destroyed the fragile democracies of the twentieth century. On the upside, if we address these challenges bravely and collectively, we could be nearer to freedom than we think.
This book is structured around three themes: the ideology and practice of modern fascism; the process through which the original fascists formed their movements and seized power, and its similarities to today; and the search for effective ways of resisting them.
It is not a work of critical theory, nor of political science, nor of academic history. It will be of no use at dinner parties hosted by post-modernists, unless you want to throw it at someone. Nor will it provide a comprehensive guide to the far-right organizational landscape: that morphs and mutates so rapidly you will need to consult the websites of activists and monitoring groups to keep up to date.
The simplest way to stop fascism is to put your body – not your internet avatar – between fascists and their objective. I have done this, and can attest to how powerful it can be.
But physical resistance, which has been the core activity of anti-fascists since the 1920s, works only if it’s part of a wider political strategy. If they’re carrying guns, incited by the president and backed by the biggest news network in the country, you’re going to need something more powerful than your own courage – namely a theory, a strategy and a lot of like-minded people.
This book explains how we get from here to there.
Part One
* * *
IDEOLOGY
1
Symbolic Violence
What Do Twenty-first-century Fascists Want?
Let’s call him Hans, because the researcher doesn’t name him: the first Nazi convert in an Austrian village. Hans is an orphan, raised in a devout Catholic community in the alpine region of Vorarlberg. By the time he’s a teenager, in the mid-1920s, thanks to his lowly birth he’s the village outcast. He does menial jobs for the priest and is the butt of everyone’s jokes. ‘It’s a lot of work with no joy and the constant feeling of being in people’s debt,’ he says. He has no future and no way out.
In 1929, he meets a German tourist – an enthusiast for mountaineering and Nazism in equal measure. ‘All of a sudden, the scales fell from my eyes,’ says Hans. ‘I saw how they had abused me, and the uselessness of the morals they had taught me. I recognized my situation.’
Hans picks up National Socialism fast. He holds secret meetings with a few friends, then bigger ones in public. The priest disowns him, but now the villagers are keen to lend him money because they like what he is saying. He is, the researcher reports, ‘a passionate speaker when inspired by hate’.
Wall Street crashes, the economy slumps and Nazi ideology strengthens: ‘an atmosphere of expectation was created, of a thousand-year dream’, writes the researcher. Soon, only three out of thirty-eight families in the village are still devoutly Catholic; for the rest, their active religion is Nazism. For Hans, his conversion to fascism gave the world a new meaning:
He was no longer a pariah: he found his place within the community again … The new convert belonged to the great German people; he was a master just by participating. He was superior to the majority, he was chosen, initiated. Through political activism the face of the world was changed.1
We know about Hans because of Lucie Varga. In 1935, faced with the spread of Nazism in Austria, Varga – a Jewish historian from Vienna – went undercover to investigate. She adopted the techniques ethnographers use when studying unfamiliar cultures: take nothing at face value; listen for the nuances and unspoken meanings; decode the language, behaviour and imagery you encounter, but abandon your preconceptions.2
People in the alpine valleys, she wrote, operated with two broad concepts of time: ‘Before’ and ‘Now’. Before the Depression, life was good. Now it was intolerable. Before, people believed in Catholicism, the priest blessed the fields at harvest time and there was an eternal order. Now there was penury and disorder and total hostility to the Church; the ideological framework of people’s lives had collapsed. For people like Hans, Nazism had filled the void:
The optimistic, progressive people of the village; their millennial politics, their desperate bravery; all that is ready to change, from one moment to the next, into apathy, disgust at life, into fatalistic pessimism. The consequences? We observe; we are not prophets … 3
Varga did not live to see the consequences. She died in France in 1941, on the run from the Gestapo, because – with no money and a fake ID – she could not procure insulin to treat her diabetes. The family that sheltered her were sent to Auschwitz.
We, however, know how the story ends. More than 900,000 Austrians served in Hitler’s armies. One of them was Josef Vallaster, a farm labourer from the same valley Varga studied. He, like Hans, was recruited as a teenager and became a fanatical Nazi.
Files uncovered in 2007 revealed that Vallaster had been a ‘stoker’ at the Hartheim euthanasia facility, where he oversaw the gassing of 18,000 mentally and physically disabled people, before graduating to the same role at the Sobibor death camp, where he helped to murder 250,000 Jews. He was killed in an uprising by the prisoners in 1943 and had been listed as a ‘victim’ on the village war memorial (now removed).4
Some 108,000 Austrians – one in nine of those who served – were charged with war crimes by special courts installed by the occupying powers; 28,000 were brought to trial, of whom half were convicted. Because the tribunals were cancelled at the start of the Cold War in 1948, most of those charged were never tried. All those jailed were pardoned in the mid-1950s.5 By then, few people wanted to remember what a sudden collapse into ‘fatalistic pessimism’ can set in train.
We, too, have learned to divide historical time into ‘before’ and ‘now’. For the generation I grew up with in northern England, ‘before’ means before the coming of Margaret Thatcher in 1979: a time defined by prosperity, rising wages, decent jobs, a settled community and hope for the future. For Generation X and the Millennials, ‘before’ means before the financial crash of 2008, when it seemed that the upswing of digital technology, globalization and liberal attitudes would go on for ever. For today’s teenagers, ‘before’ might mean before Trump, before the Australian bushfires, before Covid-19.
Yet we all share the same ‘now’. As we enter the 2020s we’re living through a multi-layered disruption of normality, in which every new crisis adds to the disorientation triggered by the last.
In the midst of this situation, a new kind of fascism has emerged. Its organizational forms morph so fast that any book on the topic runs the risk of quickly becoming dated. In this chapter I will try to answer three questions. What does the modern far right typically do? What is it trying to achieve? And why should we fear the consequences?
Like Varga, I am interested not just in what far-right extremists say, but what they mean: the subtext of the videos they post, the memes they spread and the brands they wear. We need to understand the symbolic character of their violence to discover what they are trying to achieve.
Just as in Varga’s alpine valley, the most important function of extreme-right ideology today is as a replacement belief system, an active ideology built on the ruins of a passive one that has failed. In our case, it is the religion of the market that has failed – and with it some people’s belief in democracy.
Though fascist organizations today are small, the fascist ideology is much more widely accepted than many of us realize. Taking them together, you can read the actions of right-wing extremists not as a series of futile, disconnected gestures, but as improvisations around a common script. They are designed to tell the same story over and over again, rather than – at this stage – to take power.
Fascism, of course, is not the only challenge to liberal democracy. The global period of instability that began after 2008 has thrust right-wing populists into government. In Hungary, Poland, India, Brazil and Turkey, such parties have cemented their position in power through the erosion of democratic rights and judicial independence. In Italy, Slovakia, Switzerland and Austria, they have governed in coalition with conservatives.6 In other countries – Sweden, Finland, Germany, France and Spain, for example – right-wing populists enjoy double-digit support but are, at the time of writing, frozen out by mainstream party alliances. In Britain and the USA, right-wing populist movements (Vote Leave and the Trump movement) operate as ‘shadow parties’ within the Conservative and Republican parties, setting them on a collision course with the judiciary and constitutional law.
The extreme right believes that, as future instabilities emerge, it can move the populists further – from ‘illiberal democracy’ to full-blown ethno-nationalism. If we want to stop this happening, we need to look the practice of modern fascism squarely in the face. Let’s start with some snapshots from around the world in the year 2020, and study the pattern of action and intention that emerges from these interactions between fascism, populism and the state.
A POGROM IN INDIA
On 12 December 2019 the Indian parliament passed a law granting citizenship to all undocumented migrants – except Muslims. It was the first time in the country’s history that the law had formally discriminated against the 172 million-strong Muslim population. Many saw it as a signal that the ruling BJP, a Hindu nationalist party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was about to turn the world’s biggest democracy into an ethno-state.7
Protests erupted against the new law, with students demonstrating in at least fifty university campuses and local communities taking to the streets. Muslim women began peacefully occupying roads, blocking the traffic while reading out passages from India’s secular constitution.
One chant dominated: Hum kya chahte, Azadi! – ‘We want freedom!’. The Azadi! (‘Freedom!’) slogan originated in Kashmir, a 97 per cent Muslim region whose borders are disputed with Pakistan, and which India placed under severe martial law in August 2019. During the protests against the migrant citizenship law, the slogan morphed into a universal expression of resistance: a cry for freedom from religious intolerance, freedom from the caste system and, for some left-wing students, freedom from capitalism.
And that was the trigger for the far-right backlash. Pro-government channels and websites whipped up an anti-Azadi movement.8 BJP politicians called for the protesters to be shot and threatened to remove them in a ‘surgical strike’. On 23 February 2020 – with Donald Trump set to arrive for a presidential visit – Kapil Mishra, a prominent local leader of the BJP in Delhi, made a speech telling police that unless they cleared the protesters, his supporters would do it themselves.9 As videos of the speech spread via Facebook and WhatsApp, what followed was a pogrom.
Several large mobs, ranging from 100 to 1,000-strong, rampaged through north-east Delhi, killing at least fifty-three Muslims and hospitalizing more than 250. They torched twenty-two mosques and Muslim religious schools, hundreds of shops and homes, and numerous copies of the Quran. The targets were meticulously chosen: Hindu homes and shops were left unburned amid the wreckage. The rioting lasted three days. Numerous victims reported collusion and even participation by the police, in evidence submitted to human rights organizations.10
Calls to participate spread on WhatsApp groups run by members of the RSS, a century-old far-right Hindu nationalist movement with millions of members, originally founded by admirers of Mussolini.11 Though the RSS did not appear officially in their khaki uniforms, their chant Jai Sri Ram! (‘Glory to Lord Ram!’) was heard continually from the mouths of the attackers. ‘Brother, RSS people have come here in support,’ said one message in a WhatsApp group used to organize the massacre.12
