Here in France, we had all expected the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally)—or the RN—to outperform in the European elections earlier this month. At 8 p.m. on June 9, the results confirmed the polls and our fears.

But we never expected the bombshell that President Emmanuel Macron dropped on us a mere hour later.

Sober, dressed appropriately for the dramatic moment in a black suit and tie, Macron announced that he would dissolve the lower house of France’s parliament, the National Assembly. With the far-right RN and Reconquête! parties winning nearly 37% of the votes in the European elections, Macron’s centrist party’s relative majority in France, already under strain, had lost credibility. He called for snap parliamentary elections, with the first round scheduled for this Sunday, June 30.

Le Monde, channeling the president’s allies and supporters, called his decision “an egotistical and solitary flight forward, reckless and risky, with potentially very serious consequences: an absolute majority for the National Rally or an ungovernable National Assembly; cohabitation or paralysis of the system.” People called Macron narcissistic, megalomaniacal, Jupiterian, Napoleonic.

In Paris, where the extreme right did not win in any neighborhood, the city is preparing for the onslaught of the 2024 Summer Olympics, which begin on July 26. Everywhere in France, school is nearly out, and people are getting ready for their holidays. Yet now we’re faced with a political whirlwind spinning faster than we can absorb. Its potential outcome is very serious indeed, and yet neither the people nor political parties have time to reflect calmly.

France’s National Assembly is comprised of 577 MPs, who are elected to five-year terms. In the last parliamentary elections, in June 2022, Macron’s Renaissance Party won only 245 seats, losing its absolute majority. The RN won 89 seats and became the largest single-party opposition group in parliament, behind the now defunct left-wing alliance NUPES, with 151 seats.

As in the rest of Europe, far-right ideas and parties have been on the rise in France—although here, following a short period of disgrace after World War II, extremist far-right militants and nationalistic populists have always hovered in the background. The RN is the former Front National (FN), founded in 1972 by Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, who brought together groups with varying extremist ideologies to create a political party—including fascists, and members of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), a paramilitary terrorist group famous for attempting to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle in 1962. In 1986 then center-right President Jacques Chirac put in place a “cordon sanitaire” blocking off the extreme right to dissuade political alliances. But politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy blurred the lines between left and right, political scientist and sociologist Philippe Corcuff has observed—and since Le Pen took over from her father in 2011, renaming the party and working hard to make it more “socially acceptable,” the RN has steadily gained.

The party—and the right in general—have been further helped by Vincent Bolloré, a conservative Catholic billionaire media mogul accused by Reporters Without Borders in 2021 of intimidating and bullying journalists. And since Macron became president in 2017, he too has moved further to the right. His goal is to bring those drifting to the far-right back into the fold to preserve his majority. But the strategy has consistently failed, as we saw in the European election results.

Now, with the playing field upended, parties are scrambling to create alliances, and members are shedding allegiances. Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal, a prominent member of Reconquête!, left the party after a potential electoral pact between it and RN broke down. Eric Ciotti, head of the traditional right-wing party Les Républicains, announced he wanted to form an allegiance with the RN, taking his own party by surprise. (The party then voted to exclude him.) Jewish celebrity philosopher Alain Finkielkraut suggested he would vote for the RN—despite its origins being founded in antisemitic and racist ideologies—as did Nazi hunters Serge Klarsfeld and his son Arno, citing fear of immigrants from Muslim countries as a reason.

As retired diplomat Anis Nacrour put it, “It’s like billiard balls gone crazy, zigzagging and hitting all sides of the table.”

The various left-wing parties managed to pull together a coalition and program in record time to form a bloc, the Nouveau Front Populaire, or New Popular Front. But the hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is disliked by many for his confrontational and disruptive style.

We can only speculate why Macron thought calling snap elections was a good idea. Ever since the Renaissance Party lost its absolute majority in parliament during his second term, Macron has forced through several controversial laws. He relied on a constitutional gambit to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, bypassing a vote in the Assembly. He also has planned unpopular budget cuts for the fall. Perhaps Macron thought he would have to dissolve the National Assembly then anyway.

But forcing the French to choose sooner rather than later seems to be a terrible gamble. In French national parliamentary elections, there are two rounds of voting, and a party must win an absolute majority in the second round to rise to power. Even if the RN wins 37% in the first round on June 30, echoing the right-wing parties’ EU elections success, it will need many more votes in the second round, scheduled for July 7. In the week between the two votes, parties will scramble to form political alliances, and two frontrunner parties will emerge. The uncertainty of the outcome, with populism and charges of antisemitism versus anti-Zionism blurring the lines between left and right, gives us a feeling of being in a political maelstrom in which none of our choices feel true—except voting against the far-right. Earlier this week, on June 24, Macron wrote a letter to the French people urging us to vote and to choose the central bloc rather than the left-wing coalition or the far-right, of course. “This is our election and yours to make,” he ended the letter. This was disingenuous. It was Macron, after all, who had called for the vote.

In Paris, like other cities, we live in a bubble that is not representative of the rest of France. Most regions voted for the RN. This seems inconceivable to me when I see how people co-exist in my ethnically mixed neighborhood of Belleville. In the large nearby park, the Buttes Chaumont, older tattooed Kabyle women sit on benches, Chinese women hold group dance classes, a multi-ethnic and multi-generational crowd practice Tai Chi, and schoolchildren of every color babble as they skip across the park after a nature walk.

When French people are asked what they worry about most, they say purchasing power and the environment. But immigration tops the agenda for right and far-right parties and permeates the political discourse—even if the number of immigrants to France is average for Europe, and behind Germany or Spain. And, while most everyone I know agrees that it has problems, we strongly feel part of the European community. The RN’s nationalism and xenophobia are unacceptable.  In the 2022 presidential elections, Parisians breathed a sigh of relief when Macron edged out Marine Le Pen. Last week, an IPSOS poll showed that 62% of French people intend to vote on June 30 with the RN still leading at 31.5% with the New Popular Front not far behind at 29.5%. We can only hope that across France people will realize just how critical this juncture is.

The post What Was Macron Thinking? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I grew up in East Germany, in the former German Democratic Republic, and I am still here today.

In the fall of 1989, we liberated ourselves from dictatorial conditions through a peaceful revolution. That was a beginning. Freedom “from something,” however, must lead to freedom “for something.” We discussed how we wanted to develop our country. The possibilities seemed endless.

Then the Wall fell. People oriented themselves towards the West. It promised prosperity, which had a stronger allure than taking our own uncertain path.

So, I became a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany. But for decades, I felt like a stranger. For East Germans, everything—really, everything—had changed with the accession to the Federal Republic of Germany. For West Germans, the only thing that changed was their postal code.

Then, in 2015, on the news thousands of refugees appeared walking on highways in Austria and Hungary, seeking a new home. Germany took them in—over a million people. When Angela Merkel said, “We can do it,” I felt a sense of belonging for the first time. My country—I finally saw it that way—felt like a welcoming society that took responsibility for its actions in the world.

But soon, the welcome turned into backlash against migrants. German politics shifted from focusing on migrants’ reasons for fleeing to dwelling on reducing the number of refugees reaching the country. Today, refugees are pushed back, beaten, and robbed at the Polish-Belarusian and Croatian-Bosnian borders—the outer borders of the European Union. Pushbacks are illegal and criminal, but they are condoned by the European Commission.

Most vocal in this backlash is the AfD, or Alternative for Germany party. In July 2023, a politician from the AfD declared to the audience during a television report from the party congress: “Dear friends, what we need are pushbacks, no matter what the European Court of Justice says.” She was placed on the party’s list for the European elections, ranking ninth. Currently, the AfD has nine seats in the European Parliament, and is likely to increase that number in the June 2024 elections.

This was disturbing for me. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights just turned 75. The declaration formulated an ideal that is still not achieved, but serves as orientation toward a goal of justice. Losing that orientation means losing ourselves. We can’t be indifferent. It does matter whether we respect human rights or not.

The AfD is indifferent to human rights. The party has just been classified as “right-wing extremist” by Germany’s domestic spy agency and offices protecting the constitution.

The AfD’s ascent is partially due to the way that the difficulties and disruptions of life since the country’s reunification have become deeply ingrained in East German identity. In the economic transition that came with reunification, the West treated the East as a market to be discovered and an “outdated” economy to be dismantled.

In that shift, many East Germans ended up unemployed and found themselves shame-stricken at the employment office looking for work or fear-laden at the tax office. This felt like a loss of control—over their country and their own lives.

The AfD plays its fatal melodies on this piano.

Even though the majority of Germans do not support AfD, the overall mood is changing. Before, fascist attitudes fomented under the surface of society’s skin. Now they are breaking out. On the streets, it seems as if nothing is sacred to some people anymore. In a city in the state of Thuringia, a group of disabled people was harassed by a man with derogatory remarks. When confronted, he said, “Hopefully the AfD will come to power soon. Then you’ll all be gone.” He was endorsing eugenics, one of the crimes of the Nazi era that most of us thought had long been universally condemned.

In 2024, three states in the former East Germany will see parliamentary elections: Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia, the last of which I call home. According to polls, the AfD could win up to 35%. That would give it a blocking minority in the parliaments: All decisions requiring a qualified two-thirds majority would have to be negotiated with the AfD. Even without governing, the AfD could advance its program of racism and revocation of rights.

Björn Höcke, the state chairman of the AfD in Thuringia and the leader of his party in parliament, is considered the mastermind of the AfD throughout Germany. In 2019, a court decided he could be publicly called a “fascist.”

In December, he published a plan for what he hopes to achieve upon joining state government. He would massively deport refugees and abolish programs to strengthen democracy and civil society—a move that would specifically affect initiatives trying to establish counterbalances to right-wing populism within the population. The intelligence agencies would be reoriented to conduct surveillance only of the left. The public broadcasting system would be overhauled. And all climate protection measures would be terminated, as the AfD denies human-made climate change.

The AfD stands against everything that I have fought for in my life: the expansion of civil rights for all people, a strong civil society, refugee protection, addressing the causes of migration, effective nature and climate protection. The polling numbers scare me. The cluelessness and ignorance of the other parties, shifting into campaign mode instead of focusing on saving the aspects of democracy that can be saved, also worry me.

This is still my country, and it cannot simply be handed over to the AfD.

On my street, half of the families are involved in a neighborhood association. We take care of a soccer field for children and teenagers, rake leaves, and generally clean up. We also maintain a small forest and create bee pastures. After our workdays, we sit around the grill with a beer and talk, sensibly. Does one out of every three of them vote right-wing extremist? That seems hard to believe.

But it’s very likely that many of my neighbors are disappointed with the existing politics. Soon, we won’t be able to avoid the AfD issue anymore just to keep the neighborhood peace. The AfD constructs emergencies and grievances, only to present itself as the last resort—it lights a fuse and then claims to be the only way to extinguish it. Learning to distinguish these invented grievances from actual grievances is crucial to keeping the AfD at bay. We have to face these conversations, consciously address the party’s dangers, and name our ethical boundaries—in our families, our neighborhoods, at work, and in all political engagement.

This essay was written for Zócalo in German, and translated.

The post Can a Third of My Neighbors Really Be Far-Right Extremists? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The numbers—70,000 detained, 35,000 tortured, 3,200 killed—represent the victims of President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr.’s era of martial law, from 1972 to 1986. They serve as a reminder of one of the darkest periods in the Philippines’ history.

That darkness is enveloping the nation and its diaspora once again. In May 2022, 38 years after his family was exiled from the Philippines in the People Power Revolution, Bongbong Marcos Jr. was elected to a six-year presidential term alongside vice president Sara Duterte, daughter of former president and authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte.

Marcos and Duterte supporters romanticize martial law as a “golden age,” but many Filipinos—including diasporic Filipino Americans like us—question or outright reject this distortion of history. This past year’s developments in the Philippines urge Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike to preserve and reinforce our historical memories of dictatorship. Indeed, the fight to preserve our historical memory goes hand in hand with the fight against fascism. Many Filipino activists reference the popular aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Only through a transnational movement of truth-based remembering and community organizing can we confront the present-day threat of the Marcos-Duterte administration.

When Marcos Sr. rose to power democratically in 1965, he posed as a populist—but made unpopular decisions. He supported the U.S. war in Vietnam, which allowed for the increased use of U.S. military bases in the Philippines; he devalued the peso relative to the U.S. dollar, increasing prices of basic goods and services for working Filipinos; and he violently put down student protesters who opposed his plans to run for a third term.

In 1972, under a questionable interpretation of the Philippine Constitution (ratified when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony), Marcos declared martial law to bypass the two-term presidential limit. Alongside the growing communist movement, opposition grew from multiple sectors of Philippine society exercising their right to political dissent: workers and peasants, youth and students, women, and Indigenous peoples.

Because martial law outlawed protests, activists organized underground to fight for social and political change. Their demands ranged from the restoration of civil liberties to winning a socialist revolution, but they all wanted to end the Marcos dictatorship, and they worked to end human rights abuses, such as political detention and torture, and to halt economic plunder, some of which came in the form of public works projects that violated Indigenous sovereignty.

Mass arrests, especially in the first years of martial law, caused many activists to flee the country and settle in major cities like Los Angeles. There they met like-minded Filipino Americans who were politicized by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the labor activism of Filipino farm workers who migrated as U.S. colonial subjects in the 1920s and ’30s.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Filipinos in the U.S. and their allies formed organizations such as the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino, National Committee for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in Philippines, Movement for a Free Philippines, and Friends of the Filipino People. They educated the broader U.S. public on the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship, lobbied Congress to cut military assistance to Marcos, and raised funds to free political prisoners. Our activism grows out of this tradition.

U.S. presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan supported Marcos; as part of the Mutual Defense Treaty, Marcos helped the U.S. maintain its security interests in Southeast Asia, and in return, Marcos received military aid. But eventually he became too great a liability. In 1986 hundreds of thousands of Filipinos joined the People Power Revolution, flooding the streets of EDSA Boulevard in Manila to protest Marcos’ attempt to steal the election from Corazon Aquino. Outflanked, the Marcoses fled to Hawai‘i via a U.S. Air Force transport plane.  

Now, in a blatant act of historical revisionism, President Bongbong Marcos Jr. claims that the Philippines made economic and social progress under his father. But the data shows that Marcos Sr. left the Philippine economy in shambles. Over the years since, through subsequent presidents and large-scale land and agrarian reforms, widespread distrust in government combined with widening class divisions created the perfect conditions for the return of a fascist government via Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.

Duterte took pleasure in using violence to consolidate power. During his presidency, from 2016 to 2022, he urged civilians, law enforcement, and military alike to kill an estimated 30,000 Filipinos as part of a so-called Drug War, which he alarmingly likened to the Holocaust. Victims of the Drug War are still waiting for the Philippine government to cooperate with the International Criminal Court and hold Duterte accountable, while current president Marcos has promised to continue his predecessor’s campaign of terror.

Duterte also declared martial law for 60 days in Muslim-majority Mindanao, a historically resource-rich and war-torn region with the highest rates of poverty in the Philippines and a 400-year history of resisting colonial forces. Philippine presidents continue to receive support from foreign powers for these militaristic ventures. The U.S. gave the Philippines $600 million in military aid during Duterte’s presidency.

Activists at Unidad Park in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown standing in front of the “Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana (A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy)” mural by Eliseo Art Silva.

Faced with another era of fascist rule, activists with organizations such as Bayan USA and Malaya Movement USA channel the spirit of People Power. On September 20th (September 21st in the Philippines), we held a rally at L.A.’s Unidad Park in Historic Filipinotown to mark the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law—to remember the activists killed under Marcos and Duterte, to decry historical revisionism and Marcos Jr.’s visit to the United Nations that very day, and to encourage more people to join the movement. It is crucial at this time to remember accurately and to speak out against censorship and share fact-based news, since Marcos Jr., following his father’s example, has taken an aggressive stance against press freedom. And it is especially important for Filipinos and our allies in the U.S. to put pressure on the Biden administration to end support of the current Marcos administration through the Philippine Human Rights Act.

The fact that the Filipino masses, with support from progressive media and the U.S. Congress, could oust Marcos Sr. in 1986 suggests that we have the power today to prevent another period of dark and bloody history.

We have seen history repeat itself in a harrowing way with the return of the Marcoses to Malacañang, but we could see it repeat favorably with another mass movement of remembrance that can hold the Marcoses and Dutertes accountable for their crimes. In doing so, we can uplift the history of activism that brought an end to martial law and, drawing on that legacy of people power, build a genuinely democratic Philippines.

The post Using Memory to Fight Fascism in the Philippines appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Make no mistake: Understanding what fascism meant in its time, 1920 to 1945, is absolutely crucial to understanding the gravity of our own current national political crisis—as well as to summoning up the huge political creativity we will need to address it. But we won’t get close to that understanding if we keep confusing fascism, the historical phenomenon, with fascism, the political label.

If you grew up as I did, in the United States after the Second World War, everyone seemed to be an anti-fascist, at least at first. America had fought the good fight, and triumphed. I ached at my father’s war stories about the misery of the newly liberated Italians, studied army snapshots of him in front of a mound of corpses at Dachau, and suffered nightmares at learning what the Nazis and the Fascists did to the Jews.

But the picture grew complicated. From my Jewish American mother, a New Dealer and later a communist fellow traveler, I learned that McCarthyism was the form fascism took in America. After my study abroad in Italy during the 1960s, where I had joined student and worker demonstrations against the country’s still-vivid authoritarian streak, I came home rhetorically armed to denounce fascists. America seemed riddled with them—starting with those “fascist pigs” in the Princeton, New Jersey, police force who hauled the Black kids (and my little brothers) into custody for Halloween pranks and held them indefinitely, as if habeas corpus didn’t apply to juveniles. My Smith College dorm mother was a fascist for enforcing fascistic-patriarchal rules in loco parentis, as were a couple of professors who argued that fascism and communism were opposite sides of the same coin. The ranks of the fascists included LBJ for Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger for many reasons, and even my father (who also supported the Vietnam war) for his haywire libertarian politics.

Calling people “fascists” has been as American as apple pie for as long as I can remember. But, after becoming a scholar of fascism, I came to see the phenomenon of fascist labeling very differently.

This is especially true now, 20 years into the 21st century, heading up to the 2022 centenary of Mussolini’s March on Rome.

It’s been 75 years since the coalition of armies—spearheaded by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Great Britain—crushed the Axis belligerents, Germany, Italy, and Japan. And it’s been 30 years since 1990, when the relatively stable Cold War world order, ruled by the two superpowers, broke up with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.

I now see the fascist phenomenon with new context—the crumbling of the liberal norms that were constructed to save the world from a recurrence of authoritarianism after World War II; the social inequities and financial crises arising from globalization; the failures of American unilateralism; and the obsolescence of domestic and international institutions in the face of new challenges, from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, that are posed to wreak even greater global disorder.

In this 21st-century light, fascism and its horrific trajectory in the second quarter of the 20th century look at once inexorable and global, awful and attractive, even understandable. Fascism, its early 20th-century proponents claimed, had all of the answers to the political, material, and existential crises of the British-led imperialist world order in the wake of World War I: It would mobilize the militarism generated by World War I to reorder civilian life. It signaled a third way between capitalism and socialism by imposing harmony between labor and capital. And fascism would establish new racial hierarchies to defend the West against soulless American materialism, Judeo-Bolshevism, and the inexorable advance of Asia’s “yellow masses.” It would knock the hypocritical British Empire off its plutocratic pedestal, destroy the puppet League of Nations, and carve out new colonial empires to let the proletarian nations of the world get their just desserts.

It makes sense that Italy was home to the first fascist takeover. After surviving well enough as a second-order power through the end of the 19th century, the country’s retrograde monarchy eschewed undertaking needed social reforms and instead got swept up in the competition for colonies, empowering a flamboyant young nationalist right. These activists dominated debates in the piazzas and ultimately pushed the country to enter World War I believing it would be richly rewarded with new lands.

But that vision was not to be. Mobilizing at a grand scale to fight the Austrians and Germans unhinged Italy’s political system. The country divided into interventionist and anti-war camps. After fighting ended, the old political class secured a few new territories out of the Versailles Peace Conference, but not enough to satisfy the imperialist expectations of the pro-war factions. Nor could elites deliver a substantial program of reforms that would have made war sacrifices seem worthwhile to the ever-larger, ever-more-exasperated movements of workers and peasants spearheaded by socialist and Catholic opposition parties.

By 1921, the liberal political elite calculated that if it opened its electoral coalition to Benito Mussolini’s burgeoning fasci di combattimento movement, it could coopt this vigorous political upstart, punish the left and Catholic opposition, and shore up its own power.

Who better than the brilliant, unscrupulous journalist Mussolini, a leading socialist turned radical nationalist, to offer a new way? Lover and tutee of brilliant cosmopolitan women, with a facile ear for big ideas and overweening self-confidence in his political intuition, Mussolini claimed to be both a revolutionary and a reactionary—and positioned his anti-party’s armed squads as the only bulwark against the Reds’ advance. Avowedly opportunistic, he seized every moment to bash the opposition, ingratiate himself with the old elites, stymie alternative solutions, and woo the military and the police by stressing their shared struggle to restore law and order against the Bolsheviks.

Called by the king to form a coalition government, Mussolini embarked on a restoration more than a revolution. He established an unshakable political majority by outlawing opposition parties. He revived the economy through austerity measures, outlawing non-fascist unions, and renegotiating war debts to prompt U.S. capital to pour into Italy. He restored national prestige by swagger and bluff, no longer a junior partner to Great Britain in the Mediterranean and East Africa, but a freebooting statesman with the ambition to reestablish Italy’s Roman empire.

Fascists spoke of the state as something alive, with a moral personality of its own, and justifiably predatory to survive in a Darwinian world. They celebrated people as energetic animals—New Men and Women who needed hierarchy and a true leader to harness their vigor. The males could become more virile breedstock, the women more fertile, all for the purposes of the State.

Between 1920 and 1930, as Mussolini turned his one-time radical-populist social movement into a giant party-militia, seized power, and transformed his government into totalitarian dictatorship—in his words, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”—fascism established itself as an international reference point for a wide array of like-minded political entrepreneurs and collaborating movements. With the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, and fascist Italy’s alliance with the Third Reich, fascism would transform into a multi-pronged global force. Militarily, Mussolini conquered Ethiopia and Hitler re-armed, both in defiance of the League of Nations. They intervened to help General Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish Second Republic and formed their anti-Bolshevik Axis with Imperial Japan.

Economically, fascism appealed during a worldwide depression because it seemed to have found a winning model to confront it: closed economies, big state spending, and tightly controlled labor organizations and markets to control wages and inflation. Revved up by rearmament spending, Germany was becoming the new engine of Europe and the leading trade partner for most of its neighboring nations. Germany boasted that it had no unemployment, and Italy had at least suppressed the visibility of out-of-work citizens by recruiting them for its ever-growing volunteer militia, sending them back to their rural home towns, settling them in its new empire in Libya and Ethiopia, or offering them assistance through winter help funds. In both regimes, leaders claimed, capital and labor cooperated in the national interest.

Political enthusiasm displayed itself in whole peoples uniformed and integrated into mass organizations, their distinctions effaced, united in their cult of the leader. By 1938, propagandists were speaking of the Nazi-Fascist New Order as the true heir to European culture. It launched a counter-Hollywood in the form of UFA, the giant German-dominated film production and distribution cartel, and financed joint film productions with the Japanese as well as a dazzling film festival at Venice to counter the one at Cannes.

The Nazi-Fascist New Order championed the new sciences of demographics and race hygienics in scientific congresses and exchanges. It fostered debates over how to revive jurisprudence and political science by differentiating between friends and enemies in legal codes and in international law and how to build more totalizing welfare states by incorporating sports and healthy eating, in addition to eugenic measures to prevent “useless” lives from detracting from the social good. And it portrayed itself as a pioneer in geopolitics, striking a new balance so that all of the world’s great powers would have their so-called vital spaces or “lebensraum.” Just as the U.S. would rule Latin America through its Monroe Doctrine, fascist geopoliticians said, Italy would have Eur-Africa, Japan its Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia, and Germany its Ost-Plan for colonizing eastern Europe and Russia. On that basis, fascism had a right to make war and for the winning regimes to re-distribute chunks of colonial empire to the “deserving.”

It’s scary to look at a map of the world in 1941: continental Europe conquered for the New Order, the Nazi war machine at the gates of Moscow; Italy in the Balkans, its armies in the field from Benghazi to British Somalia; Japan occupying much of East Asia. The war was a true crusade, driven by its dictators’ furies, as well as old-fashioned imperialism: for the fascists, winning meant not just territorial conquest, but population elimination including the global eradication of the Jews, wholesale pillage, and capturing prisoners for slave labor. The tyrants had few qualms about immolating their own peoples to salvage their lost cause. Rather than capitulate to the Allies in June 1943, Mussolini abandoned Italy to German military occupation and two more years of bombardment, invasion, and civil war. Refusing to capitulate as Soviet forces encircled Berlin, Hitler summoned his people to continue the “sacrifice” and “struggle,” then killed himself.

Americans may think we know this history, but we have oversimplified its complexity. Boasting about defeating fascism, and declaring it our duty to police the world against any recurrence, we have lost sight of the global crises of the early 20th century, born of World War I and the Great Depression, that fascism was invented to address.

Over time, we have become accustomed to political leaders of both parties turning the history of fascism into a set of political hobgoblins to legitimate new wars. Never again a Munich, where the great powers capitulated to Hitler, to justify intervention in Vietnam. Never again the Holocaust, to justify intervention in the Balkans and Libya. Never would we bow to an Arab Hitler, to justify invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

We also have gotten used to Hollywood turning the U.S. encounter with Nazi-Fascism into mawkish images of good and evil, and to facile evocations of the Holocaust making Antisemitism practically the sole measure of what it meant to be fascist. “Fascinating Fascism” is the term Susan Sontag, the literary critic, once used to call out American culture’s superficiality at being beguiled by fascism’s kitschy aesthetics and by the sadomasochistic pleasure of thinking of fascism as chains and shackles that, once shaken off, reinvigorate the meaning of being whole and free.

By cultivating such a jejune view of what fascism was historically, we have struggled to understand the highly relevant story of why it took two decades between the world wars to develop a coalition powerful enough to fight it. Fascism always had opponents, of course, but they—dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, old-fashioned liberals, Catholic centrists, social democrats, communists, and anarchists—were deeply divided. Mussolini got points from his men when, after outlawing the opposition, he brushed off its leaders as “anti-fascists,” meaning they had no program except to contest his.

It is no disrespect to the hard-fought struggles of anti-fascist forces to underscore how hard it was to win, much less sustain, electoral victories once the right in polarized political systems aligns itself with forces identifying with fascism. In Spain, the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front won in February 1936, only to be overthrown by a military coup, backed by international fascism. In France, the May 1936 victory of the Popular Front was reversed in short order as capital took flight for fear of a Red revolution, the economy stalled, and the coalition dissolved.

Most places sought to immunize themselves from fascism by becoming more conservative. Nearly everywhere, the interwar years were a time of nationalism, red-baiting, and eugenics. Antisemitism and race-mongering were normal. There was only one place in Europe that fended off the fascist turn with substantial social reforms: the Kingdom of Sweden, where the Social Democratic party won the vote in 1932. Of course, this solid left regime only could thrive as a neutral power, as a niche at the edge of the New Order, supplying the German war machine with coal and steel.

Ultimately, it was the rising hegemons, the United States and the Soviet Union, which had the strongest interests in battling Nazi-Fascist hegemony: the Soviet Union because it was in the direct line of Nazi aggression; the United States because it opposed German and Italian, allied with Japanese expansionism around the global. But it still took years for New Deal America, the troglodyte British Empire, and Stalin’s walled-off USSR to overcome their differences and forge a functioning antifascist military alliance.

Fascism was not fully vanquished by the military victories of World War II alone. Preventing its revival required a big rethink of economic and political principles around the world. It called for big projects, for huge investments, and for government planning to bring about economic recovery. How could a nation’s subjects be citizens if they were excluded by their poverty, and by caste-like differences in their education, standards of living, and life prospects? How could enhanced productivity, and big profits from new mass-industrial technologies like cars and radios, be more equitably distributed? Capitalism had to accept regulation. Old-fashioned liberalism had to accept labor reform and state spending on social benefits. Europe, if it was to end its warring divisions, had to accept some kind of federalism. The Catholic Church had to resolve its theological ambivalence and champion human rights universally, not only for Christians. Socialism (and communism) had to become more patriotic and reformist. World government had to become stronger, fairer, and more universal.

The substance, then, of fascism, but also of anti-fascism, is what mattered about fascism—not the label of “fascism” that obsesses so many people and dominates our politics today. That focus on substance is what we need now in the U.S. as we face not fascism, but rather a crisis of a kind that historic fascism invented itself to address, in the most awful ways. In this crisis, we need to summon up the terrifying honesty to address our nation’s responsibility for the crumbling of the liberal international order, and, if history serves, to create Popular Front forms of collective action nationally and globally with the power to confront our many challenges—ideally, well short of new wars.

The post What We Don’t Understand About Fascism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet each of these movements in the U.S. and Europe claims to be the true expression of democratic legitimacy. The raison d’être of UKIP was a referendum on British membership in the European Union, and now its mission is to defend the “the will of the people.” As for Trump, his sensitivity to having been substantially beaten in the popular vote implies a conviction that democracy somehow matters.

So are they fascist or not? And what does that tell us about where we’re headed?

In principle, there is no problem with using the term fascism in debate—after all, we use terms like socialism or liberalism all the time. But we are able to use these terms because we realize that they can’t be defined once and for all. We know (or rather we implicitly accept) that there are many ways to be a socialist, for instance, and while some see it as a term of abuse, others are happy to apply it to themselves. The problem with fascism is that any use of the term functions as a political assault, and so leads to defense or attack through definition, and that distracts from real issues. Personally therefore, I use terms like “extreme right”—not because I think that people or groups “scientifically” belong to the category, but because we can use the term knowing that it can mean very many different things. In the end, politics (and life) proceeds through misunderstandings and unintended consequences—which historians try to explain retrospectively.

After decades of research, academics—myself included—have been unable to agree on the proper definition of a fascist. Some see it as a conservative ideology, protecting property and capitalism; others see it as reshaping society in the name of revolutionary nationalism. Neither can academics agree on whether national socialism (commonly called Nazism) was a form of fascism. Some emphasize the many similarities (dictatorship, anticommunism, antiparliamentarianism, and so on), while others argue that Hitler’s drive to create a racially pure state through extermination of minorities was significantly different from the expression of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy.

Even those who embraced the moniker did not agree on what fascism was. Fascism—like socialism or any other political movement—was diverse and meant different things to different people. Among those Italians who described themselves as fascists between 1919 and 1945, there was an enormous range of views on what fascism was. It’s not surprising that academics cannot say which of the many fascist factions or movements represented the “real” fascism (was it the Brownshirts or the SS for instance?). However, our specialist knowledge and training as academics makes it possible for us to say what is similar and different about modern groups. Scholars can also trace the different meanings and their consequences.

Mussolini’s supporters represented a minority in parliament and needed conservative support to form a government. They got it not just because conservatives sympathized with fascism (their views were mixed), but because fascist paramilitaries had waged a campaign of systematic violence in town and country, and were already the de facto government in some areas. The Blackshirts began a “March on Rome,” which persuaded conservatives to do a deal with Mussolini, making him head of a coalition government. The use of violence stretches the definition of legal.

Hitler and others were terribly impressed by this precedent, but reinterpreted it. In the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, he failed to carry out his own “March on Rome,” that is, an attempt to carry out a coup. Reflecting on this reversal, he concluded that electoral methods were also necessary. Hitler’s Brownshirts were not as murderous before they came to power as the Italian Blackshirts were, but in Germany, too, both paramilitary pressure and parliamentary deals brought the Nazis to power.

The combination of pressure from a violent mass movement and political deals that brought fascism and Nazism to power had significant consequences for legitimacy. The streetfighters of the SA (Brownshirts) claimed to be the emanation of the people—not through having won an election, but through some kind of communion with the German racial soul, proved by their bravery in the streets. Other Nazi supporters placed more faith in order, hierarchy, and stability, and saw Nazism as a way to reinforce the power of the administration, churches, and army. To simplify greatly, there was an ongoing conflict within the Nazi regime between these different groups—and a similar one in Italy. It was complicated further by the personality cults of the two dictators, based on the conviction that they as individuals were mystical emanations of the people—over and above both the state and the party. Each group claimed that it represented what Nazism or fascism “really were”—in other words, they struggled to “define it.”

These debates had real consequences for people. For example, after the Nazi seizure of power, the SA demanded a second revolution, which meant, for instance, making the SA the core of the army. Some officers were alarmed, while others welcomed this infusion of nationalism. On July 2, 1934, Hitler ordered the execution of several SA leaders—but the action was carried out by the SS, marking the arrival of a new actor in the struggle to shape Nazism. Historians do their most valuable work when they trace these conflicts and their consequences—they don’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) try to decide which of these groups had the correct definition.

Nevertheless, many academics do still claim to have correctly defined fascism. In my view they have misunderstood the role of categories in the human sciences, but it’s not necessary to go into that here. More relevantly, the reason they do so is that there is a “market” for such definitions. The reason is quite simple: Fascism is the ultimate term of political abuse; nobody wants to be a fascist, and it’s a tempting label to stick on others. Consequently, everyone defines fascism in a way that excludes themselves and includes their enemies. For instance, opponents of Donald Trump have said that the implicit appeal to violence makes him fascist. Defenders of Trump say that fascism is actually defined by state control, and so Obamacare is the real fascism.

So what are the similarities and differences between fascism, Nazism, and the modern far right? Confining our attention to the question of legitimacy, the modern far right, like the fascists and Nazis, claims to represent “the people” against the “liberal elite,” especially the press. Trump boasts that he takes his message directly to the people. Indeed, Trump’s words sometimes seem like a direct borrowing of Nazi terms. The President’s expression “lying press” echoes the slogan of Pegida and the AfD in Germany, which in turn echo Nazi denunciations of the “lying press” (Lügenpresse). Another similarity is the support for the modern far right of often wealthy and powerful conservative elements—in neither the U.S. nor Europe is the far right simply a movement of the disaffected working class. There are well-documented struggles within far-right movements to define its direction.

Notwithstanding the populism common among the far rights of then and now, a major difference is that these days there is no equivalent of the mass paramilitary movement, able to subvert constitutional politics by the threat or reality of violence. Of course, there are violent tendencies within modern movements, encouraged by Trump among others. The racist language of the far right encourages attacks on minorities, and there are violent groups attached to movements such as the English Defence League. But the far right these days has not engaged in the systematic destruction of trade unions or socialist local governments and other potential threats to their power that happened in Italy. In Germany, Nazi violence prior to winning power was much less extensive, but in power it went much further than the Italian regime.

The contemporary decline of paramilitarism is due partly to context—in the interwar years, millions of men in Europe and the United States had fought in World War I, and many of them believed that the values of the front should re-shape the social and political system.

Another reason for the decline of paramilitarism is that in the 1970s and 1980s, the then-marginal far right deliberately re-defined their movements, by attempting to distance themselves from violence, and by adopting the languages of liberal democracy instead. They now demanded the “rights” of all ethnic groups to preserve their identity—thus white nations supposedly required protection from immigration. In other words, they co-opted the language of rights and democracy. In effect, the modern far right exploits the discriminatory potential of democracy, interpreting it as a sort of dictatorship of the majority, in which judges serve not the law, but the democratic majority. They separate democracy from pluralism, respect for minorities, and the rule of law.

And finally there is the fact that politicians are aware of history, and it shapes their actions in the present. Protests against Trump and others are motivated partly by the fear of a return to the 1930s. Conservatives, too, have the past in mind. In Germany, above all, many conservative politicians outspokenly oppose the far right, not wishing to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s.

Interestingly, in the depths of the crisis in Greece in 2013, which looked worryingly like interwar crises, the conservative government chose to arrest the leaders of Golden Dawn rather than ally with them. In France, on the other hand, many conservatives have proven willing to compromise ideologically and practically with the far right, claiming that it represents not fascism, but the values of frustrated ordinary people. Where these conflicting tendencies will lead is uncertain. Knowing the past does not allow prediction of the future.

The policies of the modern far right are not to be judged on the category to which they belong, but on whether they are morally right, and that is a question not just for academics, but for society as a whole. In that respect, it is worth bearing in mind that the crimes of fascists, Nazis, and indeed others, depended on the willingness to assist, or just look the other way, of people who did not consider themselves to be political at all.

The post No One Wants to Wear the “Fascist” Label, Even If It Fits appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The answer is there is a lot more to be said, I hope, when both the lives, works, and times of these two Englishmen are considered at once, illuminating each other.

Winston Churchill and George Orwell were, in the formulation of the historian Simon Schama, “the architects of their time.” Together in the mid-20th century they led the way, politically and intellectually, in responding to the twin totalitarian threats of fascism and communism, and helping carve out a space in which liberal democracy could survive. Ironically, the system they helped save, which favors individual thinking and innovation, has gone on to devise just the sort of all-seeing surveillance system of “telescreens” that Orwell portrayed in his dystopian vision of the future, 1984.

So I think it is time to revisit first principles. Who were these men, what arguments did they use in preserving a space for the individual in modern life, and how did they make them? Those are the questions I intend to address over the next two or three years as I write what I am tentatively calling Churchill, Orwell and the Making of the 20th Century.

The two men were in many ways opposites. Churchill was a Tory aristocrat determined to preserve the British Empire. Orwell was a son of the middle class who served the Empire, then turned against it and became a socialist. Churchill was a champagne-loving bon vivant who despite his voluptuous ways lived nine decades, Orwell a self-denying ascetic who perished before the age of 50. One favored pale pink silk underwear, the other characteristically appeared in baggy corduroys, a tweed jacket, and unpolished shoes. The politician was a great orator, the writer an awkward speaker with a reedy, damaged voice. One led his nation to victory in World War II, while the other more or less sat it out as an invalid. And while they were contemporaries for decades in a nation with a tiny elite, there is no record of their actually meeting.

Despite those differences, they agreed on the most important question of their time: how to respond to fascism and communism. Churchill played the greatest role in the West in defeating the former, while Orwell was the intellectual leader of the West’s response to the latter. It was Orwell who coined the phrase “the Cold War.” Orwell was arguably the most important writer of his era, Churchill the 20th century’s most significant political leader.

And on closer examination, the two have unexpected and illuminating similarities. Both had foreign mothers—Orwell’s was French and Churchill’s American—backgrounds that gave each a bit of an outsider’s perspective in xenophobic early-20th-century England. Neither attended a university. Instead, both grew to manhood in distant outposts of the British Empire. Both men worked as war correspondents of a sort, while young, and both joined their fights as well as covered them. Both were masters of the English language, but in very different ways: Churchill’s style is grand, anachronistically ponderous at times, while Orwell’s is sparse and clear. His anti-heroic style feels remarkably modern even today, six decades after his death.

Most importantly, both men possessed political foresight: In the 1930s, both saw that war with Germany was coming, and probably within a few years. Then, as Churchill moved toward victory in World War II, Orwell wrote Animal Farm, the first of the two novels that helped define his time. When Orwell wrote his masterpiece, 1984, he named his hero “Winston”—at a time when Churchill was the only British political leader often referred to by the public by his first name. Not surprisingly, 1984 was a book that Churchill admired deeply and read twice.

***

It’s worth lingering on the 1930s, a time of lengthening shadows across Europe. War was spreading in Asia and brewing in the West. Many people, especially the young and engaged, thought that liberal democracy was failing, and that there were only two choices available for the way forward: fascism or communism, the dynamic new ideologies beckoning from Berlin and Moscow. In the 1930s, the best and brightest, wrote the poet Stephen Spender, believed they were “about the end of Western civilization.”

Orwell and Churchill, each in his own way, insisted that there was a third way available. Churchill provided the leadership that preserved England when it stood alone against the Nazis. In the summer of 1940, England was a beleaguered island, literally and metaphorically, with barely an army left to its name. The British order of battle from that time reflects how much gear had been abandoned on the beaches of Belgium and France: The British army stood almost naked, possessing only a few hundred first-rate tanks and artillery pieces, about what one modern U.S. Army division fields today. But England had Churchill, and, as the collapse of France would demonstrate in June 1940, having him at the helm was more important than possessing a thousand tanks.

George Orwell, a far different man, a few years later wrote the books that helped rally the West in responding to Soviet-led communism. Together, they showed that there was a genuine and even better alternative to the totalitarianisms of left or right. He and Churchill did not make the prosperous liberal post-war world—with its sustained economic boom, its huge technological leaps, and its steady expansion of the franchise and citizenship to previously marginalized minorities—but together their efforts helped establish the physical and intellectual conditions that made that world possible.

Both men, I should hasten to add, were also terribly wrong about many things. Churchill likely was wrong more often that he was right—about Ireland, about India, about strategy in both world wars. Yet it was his persistence and determination, so evident in his many errors, that proved critical when he carried his nation, and the future of the West, on his shoulders in 1940.

Orwell is a less appealing person, a glum man who celebrated the proletariat yet complained that the working class smelled bad, who prayed for a socialist revolution during World War II, and who assumed that capitalism was doomed. Yet he also saw the essential point that England and its democratic traditions were worth defending. That was not a given, coming at a time when many of his comrades on the left were not sure. Later, at a time when almost no one would criticize the USSR, he wrote the scathing satire Animal Farm, portraying Stalin as a bullying pig, and found almost no one interested in publishing it.

They were also very different as observers. Churchill’s subject is himself. He was a public man, with a life lived in the forum. He brought the public realm into areas that usually are private, often working from his bed, and sometimes even from his bathtub. The core theme of his writings is his experience of British power, within the limitations of the British tradition.

George Orwell was a private man, not even known to the public by his real name, Eric Blair. His core theme is the abuse of power—by himself as a young British policeman in Burma, by Stalinists in Spain, by the pigs of Animal Farm, and finally by the state in 1984. That last book is a sustained plea to preserve some private space in the modern world, especially from the unrelenting reach of the state. “We live in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist,” he wrote in June 1941. In his personal life he also pursued this quest. In his last years he moved for part of the year from London to a hermetic existence at the roadless northern end of Jura, in Scotland’s remote Inner Hebrides islands. Even while taking refuge there, he packed a pistol out of the concern, not unreasonable, that Stalin’s agents might try to kill him, as they had Trotsky and other defectors and anti-Stalinists outside Russia in the preceding years. For Orwell, the more modern of the two men, the task of the writer was simply to observe the facts of the matter—itself difficult enough to do when modern political trends ran against such impartial recording. As he wrote in 1946, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs constant struggle.”

Ultimately both men focused on the value of the individual in the world, and all that means: the right to dissent from the majority and even the right to be persistently wrong. “If liberty means anything at all,” Orwell wrote, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Likewise, on September 3, 1939, as British participation in World War II began, Churchill (who was not yet prime minister) stated, “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”

***

Both men emerged from the war somewhat broken. Orwell’s deterioration was more evident than Churchill’s. Orwell, his lungs damaged, and his throat recovering from a bullet wound suffered in the Spanish Civil War, worked steadily, smoking all the while his health declined. Churchill, also ill, was voted out of office even before World War II had ended—after the surrender of Germany but before the final victory against Japan.

The last piece of writing Orwell completed, auspiciously enough for my project, was a review of Churchill’s Finest Hour. “Whether or not 1940 was anyone else’s finest hour, it was certainly Churchill’s,” he wrote. “However much one may disagree with him, however thankful one may be that he and his party did not win the 1945 election, one has to admire in him not only his courage but also a certain largeness and geniality.”

Churchill’s reputation was huge in the wake of the war, then declined in the 1960s and 1970s, and now seems to have recovered. Orwell’s stature has continued to grow steadily. As late as 1963, Stephen Spender could dismiss him as a fine prose stylist but still a minor figure of little or no impact. Few writers would estimate Orwell so low today. Neoconservatives bear-hug him with phrases such as “the most important writer of the 20th century.” Christopher Hitchens went even farther, asserting, “He owns the 20th century, as a writer about fascism and communism and imperialism, in a way that no other writer in English can claim.”

I wouldn’t go that far. I think he co-owns it with Winston, after whom he named his most famous protagonist.

The post The Men Who Made the 20th Century appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.