Back in March, I wrote a post here called “I Think They Call This Fascism,” meant to be a preliminary inquiry into how to define “fascism” and apply it to present circumstances. I laid out seven methodological issues that arise in defining “fascism,” the second of which was how the concept of “fascism” applies to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. At the time, I was conceptualizing totalitarianism as revolutionary and all-encompassing, and conceptualizing authoritarianism as traditional and more limited in scope. Though I still think that totalitarianism vs authoritarianism is an essential issue, it now occurs to me that the preceding conceptualization, somewhat uncritically adopted from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s account, is misleading or wrong.
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I Think They Call This Fascism
They say, you know when you know
So let’s face it, you had me at hello
Hesitation never helps
How could this be anything, anything else?
–Elvis, in a slightly different context
Are we living under fascism? Are we on our way to it? It’s natural to ask these questions, but hard to answer them, mostly because it’s hard to know what they’re asking. To know whether we’re living under or en route to fascism, we need a workable definition of “fascism,” but strangely enough, decades after the defeat of the worst of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century, that’s what we seem to lack. We know that fascism was defeated, but still don’t know what it was. In what follows, I simply want to canvass some of the problems involved in answering my opening question, not so much to provide a conclusive answer to it, as to figure out why it’s so hard to come up with one. Continue reading
Blue Line Excuses for the Insurrection
If John Catanzara’s views are representative of sentiment within American law enforcement, that institution is gradually pushing us into an American equivalent of the Third Reich.
The president of Chicago’s largest police union defended the actions of a mob of Pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol—an incident that resulted in four deaths on Wednesday.
John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 and a Trump supporter, defended the rioters in an interview Wednesday by saying “there was very little destruction of property.”
“There was no arson, there was no burning of anything, there was no looting, there was very little destruction of property,” Catanzara told the radio station WBEZ in a Wednesday evening phone interview. “It was a bunch of pissed-off people that feel an election was stolen, somehow, some way.”
Those claims are the twenty-first century American equivalent of excuse-making for the Beer Hall Putsch, and from pretty high up within the law enforcement establishment. It’s hard to know how representative or widespread Catanzara’s view is, but this Newsweek article is not the first time I’ve encountered it. It’s making the rounds within law enforcement circles. Continue reading
It Just Happened Here
For thirty years, I’ve heard conservatives lecture everyone else about the supposed “lessons” of Munich, Neville Chamberlain, and appeasement, all in order to rationalize endless warfare against “threats” abroad. Every time they want to start a war, they roll out their canned lectures on Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich, the one-size-fits-all analogy that justifies any brutality from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Persian Gulf. In fact, all they’ve managed to accomplish is perpetual war abroad, and fascist sedition at home. (Paul Krugman’s columns on this topic have been both prescient and explanatory.)
Solidarity with Nathan Jun
The following is an open letter by Professor Nathan Jun, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Midwestern State University Texas (ht: Roderick Long). Please distribute widely.
Dear Comrades:
As many if not most of you are already aware, I was subjected to an intense campaign of doxing, harassment, threats, and vandalism this past summer owing to comments I had posted on social media in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Although this campaign had waned significantly by August, it has since resumed with a vengeance this past week following a speech I delivered at a campus rally for Breonna Taylor on Thursday, 24 September. Within 24 hours of that event I had already received several death threats. The situation quickly escalated after fascists (acting in concert with local media) disseminated a comment I posted on a friend’s Facebook page.
Coronavirus Diary (2): Against Ageist Fascism
I shouldn’t have to make this point in this, our post-Auschwitzean age, but just a quick PSA, FYI: age-based genocide (or even malice or discrimination) is immoral. And PS, a pandemic is not the time to be wishing death on the elderly. Call me crazy, but there’s no good time to be wishing death on anyone. And yet I’ve seen more than one instance, on Facebook and elsewhere, of people’s expressing genocidal or near-genocidal sentiments about the elderly. Genocidal sentiments aside, there’s been no shortage of ageist malice for “Boomers,” or “old people.” Paraphrase of a rant I saw in the comments section of a local newspaper:
The Boomers raised our rents, gouged us on tuition, saddled us with debts, dragged us into unwanted wars, pay us crap wages, and vote the wrong way: so good riddance to them; may they all drop dead.
Substitute “Jews” for “boomers” or “the disabled” in rants of this sort, and you have the logic of the Final Solution-by-viral-proxy. Continue reading
The More You Suppress Him, the Larger He Get
I have in the past criticized the U.S. government’s decision to bar Tariq Ramadan’s entry into this country on ideological grounds (26 page PDF). This isn’t because I have any admiration for Ramadan, to put it mildly, but because I don’t think that decisions to allow entry into a country should be made on ideological grounds. Genuine security concerns are one thing; ideological objections are another. The distinction isn’t that hard to draw, and shouldn’t be that hard to respect. In Ramadan’s case, we neither drew nor respected it. We managed in the process to make a martyr of him and take a crap on our own principles. Continue reading
Hey, PoPo–Leave Those Kids Alone
Is the behavior described in this story immoral? Yes. Stupid? Yes. Punishment-worthy? Maybe. But the appropriate subject of a police investigation? No.
We’re all justifiably outraged when someone calls the cops on black people engaged in some innocuous activity–be it barbecuing, babysitting, or whatever. But calling the cops to “assist” in a school investigation into fascist speech is no better than that, and fundamentally, no different. It’s a misuse of the powers of the police, and yet another illegitimate broadening of the scope of their activities. Continue reading
Now’s the Time for “Never Again”
A piece of advice: if you see a sign like this on a telephone pole in your neighborhood, rip it down.
A “Blood and Soil” sign in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Photo credit: Dario Gal
Don’t just leave it up and take a picture of it, and don’t bother calling the police to investigate. No one has a right to put a sign of any kind on a telephone pole without authorization of the owner, much less a sign of this kind. You’re not violating anyone’s rights by taking it down. If you have a genuine “civic duty” as an American, it’s to express your rejection of the politics of “Blut und Boden“–Blood, Soil, and Master Race–before it takes hold more powerfully than it already has. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 