Chris Hedges: The Return of
Fascism
As in the 1930s,
a bankrupt liberalism, grotesque social
inequality and declining living standards are
empowering fascist movements in Europe and the
U.S.
By Chris Hedges
October 05, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "ScheerPost.com"
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Energy
and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught
of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation,
wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are
diverted by Western nations at a time of
economic crisis and staggering income inequality
to fund a proxy war in Ukraine.
The liberal class,
terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and
demagogues such as Donald Trump, have thrown in
their lot with discredited and reviled
establishment politicians who slavishly do the
bidding of the war industry, oligarchs and
corporations.
The bankruptcy of
the liberal class means that those who decry the
folly of permanent war and NATO expansion,
mercenary trade deals, exploitation of workers
by globalization, austerity and neoliberalism
come increasingly from the far-right.
This right-wing
rage,
dressed up
in the United States as Christian fascism, has
already made
huge gains in
Hungary,
Poland, Sweden,
Italy,
Bulgaria and
France and may
take power in
the Czech Republic, where inflation and
rising energy
costs have seen the number of Czechs
falling below the poverty line double.
By next spring,
following a punishing winter of rolling
blackouts and months when families struggle to
pay for food and heat, what is left of our
anemic western democracy could be largely
extinguished.
Extremism is the
political cost of pronounced social inequality
and political stagnation. Demagogues, who
promise moral and economic renewal, vengeance
against phantom enemies and a return to lost
glory, rise out of the morass. Hatred and
violence, already at the boiling point, are
legitimized. A reviled ruling class, and the
supposed civility and democratic norms it
espouses, are ridiculed.
US
Internationalized Fascism
It is not, as the
philosopher Gabriel Rockhill has points
out, as
if fascism ever went away. “The U.S. did not
defeat fascism in WWII,” he
writes, “it
discretely internationalized it.”
After World War II
the U.S., U.K. and other Western governments
collaborated
with hundreds of former Nazis and Japanese war
criminals, who they
integrated into
western intelligence services, as well as
fascist regimes such as those in Spain and
Portugal. They
supported right-wing
anti-communist forces in Greece during its civil
war in 1946 to 1949, and then
backed a
right-wing
military coup
in 1967.
NATO also had a
secret policy of operating fascist
terrorist groups. Operation Gladio, as the BBC
detailed in a now-forgotten investigative
series, created “secret
armies,” networks of illegal stay-behind
soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if
the Soviet Union made a military move into
Europe. In actuality, the “secret armies”
carried-out assassinations, bombings, massacres
and false flag terror attacks against leftists,
trade unionists and others throughout Europe.
See my interview
with Stephen Kinzer about the post-war
activities of the CIA, including its recruitment
of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and its
creation of black sites where former Nazis were
hired to interrogate, torture and murder
suspected leftists, labor leaders and
communists, detailed in
his book Poisoner in Chief: Sideny Gottlieb
and the CIA Search for Mind Control, here.
Meloni Triumphs in
Italy
Fascism, which has
always been with us, is again ascendant. The
far-right politician Giorgia
Meloni
won enough
votes in a coalition with two other far-right
parties, to become Italy’s first female prime
minister on Sunday.
Meloni got
her start in politics as
a 15-year-old
activist for the youth wing of the Italian
Social Movement, founded after the World War II
by supporters of Benito Mussolini. She calls EU
bureaucrats agents of “nihilistic global elites
driven by international finance.” She peddles the
“Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that
non-white immigrants are being permitted to
enter Western nations as part of a plot to
undermine or “replace” the political power and
culture of white people.
She has called on
the Italian navy to turn back boats with
immigrants, which the far-right Interior
Minister Matteo Salvini did in
2018. Her Fratelli d’Italia, Brothers of Italy,
party is a close
ally of
Hungary’s President, Viktor Orban. A European
Parliament resolution recently declared that
Hungary can no longer be defined as a democracy.
Meloni and Orban
are not alone. Sweden Democrats, which took over
20 percent of the vote in Sweden’s general
election last week to become the country’s
second largest political party, was formed in
1988 from a neo-Nazi group called B.S.S., or
Keep Sweden Swedish. It has deep fascist roots.
Of the party’s 30 founders, 18 had Nazi
affiliations, including several who served in
the Waffen SS, according
to Tony
Gustaffson a historian and former Sweden
Democrat member.
France’s Marine Le
Pen took over
41 percent of the vote in April against Emmanuel
Macron. In Spain, the hard-right Vox party is
the third
largest party
in Spain’s Parliament. The far-right German AfD
or Alternative for Germany party took
over 12 percent
in federal elections in 2017, making it the
third largest party, though it
lost a couple
percentage points in the 2021 elections.
The U.S. has its
own version of fascism embodied in a Republican
party that coalesces in cult-like fashion around
Donald Trump, embraces the magical thinking,
misogyny, homophobia and white supremacy of the
Christian Right and actively subverts the
election process.
Depression
Economic collapse
was indispensable to the Nazis’ rise to power.
In the 1928 elections in Germany, the Nazi
party received less
than 3 percent of the vote. Then came the global
financial crash of 1929. By early 1932, 40
percent of the German insured workforce, six
million people, were unemployed.
That same year, the Nazis became the
largest political party in the German
parliament.
The Weimar
government, tone deaf and hostage to the big
industrialists, prioritized paying bank loans
and austerity rather than feeding and employing
a desperate population. It foolishly imposed
severe restrictions on who was eligible for unemployment
insurance.
Millions of Germans went hungry. Desperation and
rage rippled through the population.
Mass rallies, led
by a collection of buffoonish Nazis in brown
uniforms who would have felt at home at Mar-a-Lago,
denounced Jews, Communists, intellectuals,
artists and the ruling class, as internal
enemies. Hate was their main currency. It sold
well.
The evisceration of
democratic procedures and institutions, however,
preceded the Nazis’ ascension to power in 1933.
The Reichstag, the German Parliament, was as
dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress.
The Socialist
leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919
until 1925, and later Heinrich Brüning,
chancellor from 1930 to 1932, relied
on Article
48 of the Weimar Constitution to largely rule
by decree to bypass the fractious Parliament.
Article 48, which granted the president the
right in an emergency to issue decrees, was “a
trapdoor through which Germany could fall into
dictatorship,” historian Benjamin
Carter Hett
writes.
Article 48 was the Weimar equivalent of the
executive orders liberally used by Barack Obama,
Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to bypass our own
legislative impasses. As in 1930s Germany, our
courts — especially the Supreme Court — have
been seized by extremists.
The press has bifurcated into antagonistic
tribes where lies and truth are
indistinguishable, and opposing sides are
demonized. There is little dialogue or
compromise, the twin pillars of a democratic
system.
Two Parties Serve Same Master
The two ruling
parties slavishly serve the dictates of the war
industry, global corporations and the oligarchy,
to which it has given huge tax cuts. It has
established the most pervasive and intrusive
system of government surveillance in human
history. It runs the largest prison system in
the world. It has militarized the police.
Democrats are as
culpable as Republicans. The Obama
administration interpreted the 2002
Authorization for Use of Military Force as
giving the executive branch the right to erase
due process and act as judge, jury and
executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens,
starting with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
Two weeks later, a U.S. drone strike killed Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son, who was
never linked to terrorism, along with 9 other
teenagers at a cafe in Yemen.
It was the Obama
administration that signed into
law Section
1021 of the
National Defense Authorization Act, overturning the
1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the
use of the military as a domestic police force.
It was the Obama administration that bailed out
Wall Street and abandoned Wall Street’s victims.
It was the Obama administration that repeatedly
used the Espionage
Act to
criminalize those, such as Chelsea Manning and
Edward Snowden, who exposed government lies,
crimes and fraud.
And it was the
Obama administration that massively expanded the
use of militarized drones.
Article 48
The Nazis responded
to the February 1933 burning of the Reichstag,
which they likely staged, by employing Article
48 to push
through the
Decree for the Protection of the People and the
State. The fascists instantly snuffed out the
pretense of Weimar democracy.
They legalized
imprisonment without trial for anyone considered
a national security threat. They abolished
independent labor unions, freedom of speech,
freedom of association and freedom of the press,
along with the privacy of postal and telephone
communications.
The step from
dysfunctional democracy to full blown fascism
was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred
for the ruling class, embodied by the
establishment Republican and Democratic parties,
which have merged into one ruling party, is
nearly universal.
The public, battling
inflation that
is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S.
household an
additional $717
a month in July alone, will increasingly see any
political figure or political party willing to
attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally.
The more crude,
irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the
disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are
true here and in Europe, where energy costs are
expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this
winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is
eating away at incomes.
The reconfiguration
of society under neoliberalism to exclusively
benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and
privatization of public services, including
schools, hospitals and utilities, along with
deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of
state funds and resources into the war industry,
at the expense of the nation’s infrastructure
and social services, and the building of the
world’s largest prison system and militarization
of police, have predictable results.
At the heart of the
problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms
of government and democratic solutions. Fascism
in the 1930s succeeded, as Peter Drucker
observed, not because people believed its
conspiracy theories and lies but in spite of the
fact that they saw through them.
Fascism thrived in
the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a
hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile
government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi
lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the
unattainability of their promises, and the
dangers and folly of their course.” He added,
“nobody would have been a Nazi if rational
belief in the Nazi promises had been a
prerequisite.”
As in the past,
these new fascist parties cater to emotional
yearnings. They give vent to the feelings of
abandonment, worthlessness, despair and
alienation. They promise unattainable miracles.
They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories
including QAnon. But most of all, they promise
vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed
the nation.
Hett defines the
Nazis as “a nationalist protest movement against
globalization.” The rise of the new fascism has
its roots in a similar exploitation by global
corporations and oligarchs. More than anything
else, people want to regain control over their
lives, if only to punish those blamed and
scapegoated for their misery.
We have seen this
movie before.
Chris Hedges
is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who
was a foreign correspondent for 15 years
for The New York Times, where
he served as the Middle East bureau chief
and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He
previously worked overseas for The
Dallas Morning News, The
Christian Science Monitor and NPR.
He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges
Report.”
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in this article are
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