Author's note: continuing our transfer of content from Facebook, hopefully before they ban me for being anti-fascist - check out my second "Homework Assignment" piece where we talking about why Americans struggle to identify fascism, why Trump doesn't have to be Adolf Hitler to be a fascist and I introduce readers to the brilliant work of anti-fascist scholar Umberto Eco. Please note: this post originally appeared on August 18th, 2020.
One of the most frustrating aspects of attempting to expose American fascism to well, Americans, is the fact that each and every single one of them has grown up in a colonialist, white supremacist, hyper-capitalist nation that has actively embraced fascist ideology since before fascism was a word. This absorption of fascist ideas and ideology has taken a number of guises over the course of America's history including the genocide of indigenous people under the policy of Manifest Destiny, chattel slavery and its closer than you think cousin Jim Crow, Christian fundamentalist influence in our laws and customs, eugenics under the label of progressive policy, colonialism under the Monroe Doctrine, the patriarchy disguised as public morality or family values, anti-communism in the Cold War and all the way up to modern examples like racialized mass incarceration for profit, oil-based dollar imperialism under the Carter Doctrine and the panopticon police state created by both George W Bush and Barack Obama under the pretense of fighting terrorism.
As such, most Americans have been taught to adopt an extremely narrow and false-literal definition of the word fascism; which is to say that ultimately no amount of obvious fascism short of being actually Hitler will typically be enough to convince many misguided people in our society that fascism is real and is happening in America – because if they knew what fascism actually was, you'd have a real hard time selling carpet-bombing brown people as a human rights intervention, for example. This is why of course when I say to some people that Donald Trump is a fascist, his administration and judiciary are fascist and a mindbogglingly large number of his supporters are also fascists, people look at me like I have three heads; after all Trump isn't wearing a swastika, he hasn't explicitly called for the mass murder of Jewish people and he has of yet to invade Poland.
Of course this position is ridiculous on its face because if you had applied it to yes, literally Hitler any time before about 1941, then the Nazi Party in Germany wouldn't have been real fascists either. Nazism and the fascist state in Germany under Hitler was a process that took more than a decade; it started with a bunch of right wing nutjobs, ex-soldiers and wealthy cranks peddling conspiracies about the establishment (and Jewish people) in German pubs in the 1920's and like the proverbial frog in boiling water, slowly but surely produced the deranged fever dream society that conducted the mass extermination of Jews, Slavs, the disabled and essentially anyone else the Aryan supremacist social order didn't particularly like. Only after a years-long process of erosion of civil liberties and democratic rights, violence and repression against political opposition and forced indoctrination of the German youth, did the final, horrible form of the Nazi state ultimately revealed itself in what we know today as the Holocaust – but there were certainly plenty of hints along the way, much as there are plenty of hints around you today in America.
More importantly however, the simple truth is that Hitler wasn't even the only fascist dictator on the Axis side in World War Two; Italy's Benito Mussolini certainly was never as powerful or dangerous as Hitler (although he was still plenty murderous in his own right) but only a fool would argue that Mussolini wasn't a fascist – after all, he invented the form of the fascist state that Hitler copied and “improved on” when fashioning the Nazi state. Franco wasn't Hitler, but he was certainly a fascist and there are numerous other examples of fascist leaders in more modern times from nations far too small to ever produce anything even remotely resembling the Nazi state; Pinochet in Chile, Syngman Rhee in South Korea, or Viktor Orbán in modern Hungary to name just a few examples.
Clearly it is thus possible for Trump (or Bolsonaro, or Erdogan, or Duterte, etc) to be a fascist without being literally, um, Hitler. Indeed, since fascism historically takes the fastest route to power and is invariably (and quite purposefully) crafted to match the existing contradictions, bias, and prejudices of the society that produced it, there is actually quite of lot of variance between fascist movements – both in the historical record of the war period and in modern expressions such as can be found in Modi's Indian Hindu Nationalist movement, or say Pig Empire client states like Colombia in Latin America – or of course and as I've been arguing for slightly over four years now, Donald Trump's America.
Ok then so if fascism can adopt as many forms as there are countries sick enough to produce a fascist movement and elevate it to power, then what is fascism and how can you recognize it? Back when Trump was first elected and it briefly became fashionable for the liberal intelligentsia in America to interpret Trump's statements literally and declare “he's a fascist” or “he's an authoritarian,” there were a great number of books and even some movies bandied about the discourse to help educate Americans about what fascism really is. Of course, as the liberal mainstream's actions (including funding his wall, fast-tracking his fascist judges and demobilizing antifascist protest against his fascist government officials) would later prove, they didn't really think Trump was a fascist and ironically enough, in this too they turned out to be wrong.
Perhaps that's why the vast majority of books recommended to readers by liberal thought leaders for the purposes of understanding fascism tended to fall into one of two categories; weighty tomes that pretty much talk about Nazi Germany well after Hitler had already established the Third Reich, or books that reinforced establishment propaganda seeking to conflate leftists with fascists under the all encompassing brand of “populism” - meaning of course, angry stupid mobs of labor class people who aren't smart enough to let the ruling class control society in peace. Even the intellectually honest books some of the better celebrity thinkers recommended were less than ideal; frankly Hannah Arendt's “On Origins of Totalitarianism” is a wonderful book and a monumental work of scholarship, but since it deals primarily with intricately studying the societies, processes and circumstances that produced specifically Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's reign in the Soviet Union, it's hardly an ideal way to help modern Americans recognize Trump's nascent and completely home grown fascism – after all, if Arendt's book has little to say about contemporary (to Hitler) fascists like Mussolini and Franco because neither Italy nor Spain ever rose to the level of a totalitarian state, how direct will the connection be for someone who doesn't understand fascism to begin with and is trying to comprehend Trump's modern day behavior?
Unfortunately I and a few (but shockingly limited number of) other observers who are not famous liberal thought leaders or random emo musicians, actually did know that Trump is indeed speaking quite literally most of the time and based on both his words and actions, he frankly could be nothing other than a fascist. Not a fascist dictator mind you; the dictator part was always going to be a question of whether or not the American system of government could hold against Trump's reactionary impulses for power, especially in light of the already quite awesome authority and immunity of the imperial presidency that existed before Trump was sworn into office. Spoiler, things are not exactly going well on that front – despite being impeached already, Trump is currently admitting on television that he's dismantling the Post Office to effectively rig the fall election; but I digress.
All of this is why I've spent much of the past four years wondering why more people (particularly so-called liberal influencers in the American discourse who actually have come to realize Trump is a very real fascist) don't tell folks to read Umberto Eco's truly groundbreaking 1995 essay from the New York Review of Books entitled “Ur-Fascism” or more plainly, Eternal Fascism. Do you want to know more about the differences between the Nazi state and Mussolini's Italy? Are you looking for a common cluster of ideas, beliefs and behaviors that can help you identify fascist leaders and fascist movements in any time period, including our own? Want to create a fourteen-point checklist that objectively proves Trump and the Trump movement are both fascist? Eco and his essay have got you covered in about twenty minutes, even if you read slowly and take notes – try reading “It Could Never Happen Here” in twenty minutes, I dare you.
And so now that you've read the journal, that's the homework I'd like to assign those of you bold enough to accept it – click on the link below to read Umberto Eco's “Eternal Fascism” and while you're doing so, ask yourself how many of the author's fourteen signs of fascism you can find in Trump's words, his actions or the words and actions of his administration. Please, I am practically begging those among you who remain skeptical to take up this assignment, because almost everything we're going to talk about in this ongoing discussion plan here on Facebook utterly depends on understanding that Trump is indeed an unhinged fascist – even if he's not Hitler, yet.
PS – for my “tankiest” of friends reading this; I'd just like to warn you in advance that Eco definitely comes from the Arendt school of totalitarian theory and as such, he certainly doesn't have many kind words for Stalin. You can decide for yourself whether or not that's a problem when reading his work but I personally couldn't really care less how an anti-fascist theorist felt about a dead guy in 1995. The fact is the essay is about fascism and recognizing its constantly mutating forms, which in my estimation is a far more important issue to examine here than some pithy lines showing out for empire by sniping at Stalin's Russia – as always your mileage may vary, and one way or another, the future is left.
- nina
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!
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