Episode 1 of a new mini-series by Dan Freeman-Maloy.
Since the Israeli elections of March 2021, a political philosophy, Kahanism, that was once banned even by Israeli law is openly proclaimed in the Israeli legislature. To the quieter brutality of Israeli colonial rule have been added firebombing Israeli hate crimes against Palestinians – horribly reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan violence – and the open celebration by emboldened Israeli racists of Palestinian pain and death. A colonialism that was once half-hidden is now there for the world to see. This has been clear since Israel’s 2014 killing of hundreds of Palestinian children under the command of current Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz. It was clear after the vicious celebration by Israel’s extreme right wing of a 2015 firebombing of a Palestinian family. And now the horrors of spring 2021.
This is not Judaism. As Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned, this is something else.
As our governments refuse even to speak out against the killing of Palestinian children by an Israeli government that they arm and support, the Israeli press fills with warnings of fascism and, time and again, references to the Third Reich. The lying hypocrisy that refuses to discuss this truth plainly is an affront to humanity, to Judaism, and to all principles of honesty and conscience.
Haidar Eid of Gaza’s Al-Aqsa University has discussed these horrors as the Sharpeville moment of the Palestine tragedy, referring to a tragic but hinge moment in the struggle against South African Apartheid. Refusing to ignore warnings about Israel’s descent into fascism does not mean accepting any further horrors; it certainly does not mean ignoring the inspirational steadfastness of Palestinians. It means taking an honest look at plain facts, warning signs, and anti-racist principles that deserve more than lip service and post-2020 liberal re-branding.
In this first segment of “Monsters in Our Midst,” we underline the legitimacy of anti-racist references to the struggle against old hatreds in the context of Israel’s descent into fascism.
The Paris Commune was so much more than a short bloody two-month interlude in European politics. In this episode, the story of the Paris Commune as related by Karl Marx in his address to the International Workingmen’s Association. From passing debt relief programs to tearing down militarist statues, the Paris Commune was a real revolution, for a moment at least. With the usual asides and notes about what else was going on.
A discussion of the book Artificial Whiteness, by Yarden Katz
Step off of the Artificial Intelligence hype train with me and my guest Yarden Katz. Yarden is the author of Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. AI is a squishy concept, and under scrutiny it is full of imperialist and racial assumptions. We go over some of the many ideas in this idea-packed book, which I highly recommend.
The policing system wasn’t created by elections and can’t be ousted by one.
The policing system wasn’t created by elections and can’t be ousted by one.
Back in June, I sent an article around about the irrelevance of policing for public safety. With the article below, I’ve studied the roots of the policing system in colonialism, and why it keeps delivering counterinsurgency outcomes despite claiming that it is about public safety. Dave Power and I have also been preparing for a series of Civilizations episodes on the US Civil War – those will start next week.
I’m also saying RIP to Robert Fisk, who was one hell of a journalist of a type that almost doesn’t exist any more. I interviewed him back in 2005 when he was promoting his gigantic book about the .
Below, the article on the policing system and counterinsurgency.
The Police System That Terrorizes the Poor and Minorities Is Rooted in the Colonial Past
Justin Podur for Globetrotter, October 22, 2020
The Minneapolis City Council’s attempt to defund police may have fizzled out for the moment, but the problem of police violence across the United States is unresolved—and much of it stems from the institution’s colonial, counterinsurgency roots.
Here are seven counterinsurgency features of policing and the inequities in the criminal justice system.
1. Counterinsurgency Tactics Are Everywhere.
In the Canadian province of Ontario, when the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) changed its public transportation fare collection method from tokens to the Presto card, users had a strange experience. Sure, the fare booth was predictably replaced by an inhuman and unforgiving terminal that malfunctions all the time (despite the steep price the province had paid for it). But instead of having less human interaction, TTC passengers found they had more—with fare inspectors who corral passengers into small spaces at stations to test everyone’s cards. In counterinsurgency terms, this is called a cordon-and-search operation.
Another counterinsurgency concept, that of “hearts and minds,” can be seen in a public information campaign to shame fare evasion through posters blanketing subway walls and the sides of buses. Riders were infuriated—not just by the campaign itself but also by abuses and racial discrimination by the fare inspectors. Unsurprisingly, spoofs of the TTC’s messaging followed, as they did in New York City in resistance to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s fare evasion messaging.
There is nothing special about Toronto, New York City, or other transit systems that increasingly use these warlike techniques to police customers; what’s happening with the TTC and MTA is a relatively mild example of what happens when counterinsurgency methods are the first resort for any urban problem that arises.
2. Police Don’t Live in the Communities They Police.
Colonial forces are imposed from outside; this prevents too much natural solidarity between the occupier and the occupied. In the United States, the majority of police don’t live in the communities they serve. One Newark officer from the Fraternal Order of Police put it succinctly: “the community hates the police. And you want to put us right in the middle of that with our families?”
The polling is consistent with the idea that one group of people is policing another. A July 2020 Gallup survey showed that 70 percent of Black Americans support reducing police budgets, while only 41 percent of white Americans do. Out-and-out defunding is more commonly supported by Black Americans (according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of two polls, 45 percent of Black Americans polled support defunding, with 28 percent opposed) and opposed by white Americans (with 61 percent of white Americans opposed to defunding and only 23 percent in support of defunding). The difference in public opinion reflects one group benefiting from police security and another suffering from police violence and surveillance.
As Richard Rothstein showed in his book The Color of Law, the racial segregation of U.S. cities was brought about by methodical legal means, racially explicit zoning, and the destruction of integrated neighborhoods. This segregation, too, has consequences for the police-counterinsurgency alignment.
In author James Ron’s book Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, he compared the methods of state violence used in a “ghetto,” where a hostile population is meant to be contained by powerful state control but where law and morality still limit its enforcement due to the nature of oppressor and oppressed living side-by-side; and on a “frontier,” where even more devastating warfare is unleashed since state power is more tenuous on targeted populations who don’t live among their oppressors, but the bounds of law and morality are weaker.
In the United States, this theory also has applied throughout its history: domestic ghettos are policed, and frontiers are the sites of total war both at home and abroad. But the more police think of cities as the “frontier,” the more violence they will commit against the policed.
3. Police Get Specialized Counterinsurgency Training.
Police officers are encouraged to take weekend courses in a field called “killology,” developed by retired Army Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. There, they learn to see themselves as “front-line troops” in a war, presumably on the civilians they are policing.
A critic of killology courses, Seth Stoughton, says they steep police in the worldview that “the officer is the hero, the warrior, the noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and who does so by imposing their will on the civilians they deal with.” Another critic, Craig Atkinson, calls the courses “fear porn.” One such training, “The Bulletproof Warrior,” was taken by Philando Castile’s killer.
4. In a Counterinsurgency, Everyone’s a Criminal.
According to defenders of law enforcement, the thinking is: If you don’t want to be policed, don’t commit crimes, right? But the law creates the criminal.
And the number of laws for police to identify those criminals is growing suspiciously. American University professor Emilio Viano notes, quoting the conservative think tank the American Heritage Foundation, that “the ‘number of criminal offenses in the United States Code increased from 3,000 in the early 1980s to 4,000 by 2000 to over 4,450 by 2008.’ From 2000 to 2007 Congress added 56.5 new crimes every year.” The staggering number of laws is incongruous to American society’s actual concerns, as is evidenced by attorney Harvey Silverglate’s book arguing that the average American commits “three felonies a day.”
In this system, the full weight of the law is available to bring down upon anyone at any time.
And once it is brought down on you, you have no meaningful right to a trial.
5. There’s No Right to a Trial in a Counterinsurgency.
In TV cop shows, the police are constrained by clever lawyers and fair-minded judges in the courtroom—but in reality, cases almost never go to trial. As Professor Viano writes:
“In fiscal year 2010, the prevalent mode of conviction in U.S. District Courts of all crimes was by plea of guilty (96.8% of all cases). The percentage ranges from a relative low of 68.2% for murder to a high of 100% for cases of burglary, breaking and entering. With the exception of sex abuse (87.5%), arson (86.7%), civil rights (83.6%) and murder (68.2%), for all other crimes the rate of convictions by plea of guilty is well over 90%. In the… [2012] U.S. Supreme Court decision, Missouri v. Frye, Justice Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, pointed out the statistics that 97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas.”
The fact that 90 percent of cases don’t go to trial is the outcome of two Supreme Court rulings described by Michelle Alexander in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times:
“The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”
Regardless of the innocence of the offender or the senseless overzealousness of law writing and enforcement, it is standard operating procedure that the accused do not get their day in court. Instead, prosecutors threaten the accused with shocking sentences, and have them plead guilty to something less to get them into the life-ruining prison system.
Alexander noted that the criminal justice system is unequipped for any other way: “If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.” The author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness also argued in the New York Times op-ed that “crash[ing] the system just by exercising our rights” could comprise a strategy to combatting the inequities and flaws in the criminal justice system. Blogger Arthur Silber agreed that this strategy could work if done en masse, noting, “[n]othing short of mass non-cooperation has a chance in hell.”
But the price of seeking one’s right to trial is prohibitive. Julian Assange is being publicly tortured right now mainly for doing journalism, but partly also for insisting on his rights to a trial. And Aaron Swartz was hounded to death, driven to suicide by a prosecutor applying the standard operating procedure by threatening Swartz with a 35-year sentence for trying to make scientific publications available to those outside of university paywalls.
In cases relating to the drug war, the goal of police and prosecutors is also to get the accused to turn on one another: in exchange for more lenient punishments, suspects are made to become informants against others—another key element of counterinsurgency and its slow destruction of solidarity in the criminalized, targeted society.
6. U.S. Policing Was Developed in Concert With the U.S. Empire.
Consider one of the founding fathers of American policing, August Vollmer. A U.S. Marine who invaded the Philippines in the Spanish-American War in 1898, he set out to “reform” Berkeley’s police when he became its first chief in 1909. He used the scientific techniques of counterinsurgency developed by the U.S. empire in the Philippines (a system described in Alfred McCoy’s book Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State). Vollmer brought in centralized police records, patrol cars, and lie detectors. Vollmer established a criminal justice program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1916 and wrote books including scientific racist theories of “racial degeneration” and crime. He joined the American Eugenics Society and wondered how to prevent “defectives from producing their kind.”
Smedley Butler provides another example. The military man famously wrote that he had been “a gangster for capitalism,” including that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.” He had done so by, among other things, establishing Haiti’s first police force when the Marines occupied that country in 1915, as Jeremy Kuzmarov describes in his book Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century. When Butler became police chief in Philadelphia in 1924, he too upgraded police technology and militarized its tactics, including military checkpoints and Marine-style uniforms. The mayor fired him after two years, sending him back to the Marines.
7. Counterinsurgencies Use Auxiliaries.
In counterinsurgency campaigns, state armies and police work with paramilitaries, who do dirty work with plausible deniability.
As Alan MacLeod reported on September 28, there were more than 100 vehicle ramming attacks against protesters since the George Floyd protests started in May, many of which “seem to have the tacit approval of local law enforcement,” given the lack of consequences.
Portland activist Mac Smiff told the Brief Podcast, “We call it a shift change. They’re all the same people… there’s the cops, there’s the sheriffs, there’s the marshals, there’s the DHS [Department of Homeland Security], there’s the Proud Boys, there’s the Patriot Prayer, it just goes on and on. They just take turns.”
It is called impunity: the criminal activities of paramilitaries or proxy forces go unpunished, while the full power of the state is brought down upon the intended victims of counterinsurgency.
The default counterinsurgency mode is a consequence of being ruled by an elite that sees the whole population as the enemy. The model for policing isn’t going to be changed even if Trump is replaced by “shoot them in the leg” Biden. The occupied always challenge the legitimacy of their occupiers: the debate about abolition is not going anywhere.
Why do Indian boys love Jordan Peterson? If war is hell, as Jocko Willink says, why do they keep doing it? And is it unfair to consider Joe Rogan conservative?
To debate these questions, I’m joined by screenwriter and comedian Amish Patel, who analyzes fake gurus on the coffeezilla podcast. This episode is kind of a continuation of the episode 57 discussion with Dan about “super wealth through the right mindset”.
Conservatism, Liberalism, Communism, Anarchism, and more – in the early-mid 1800s
Choosing our avatars carefully, we take you through the political ideologies of the 19th century. Conservatism (Burke, Metternich); Liberalism (Paine, Locke); Radicalism (Condorcet, Gregoire); Anarchism (Bakunin, Kropotkin); Communism (Marx & Engels); and we throw a few more in as well (nationalism, humanitarianism, romanticism). This episode will set you up nicely for the next round of revolutions – 1830, 1848, and 1870.
Chomsky signed a letter about free speech and something called “cancel culture“, which has prompted a small social media wave of responses.
There is a good piece by Jonathan Cook about how focusing on Chomsky’s signature misses the point. But I am going to focus only on Chomsky here.
My argument: Chomsky’s most powerful message is anti-imperialism. Containing that message has been the preoccupation of the propaganda system since the 1960s.
In 1973, they shut down a whole company and pulped the print run of his book with Ed Herman, Counter-Revolutionary Violence.
Mostly, though after the peak of protests, he was just driven out of the mainstream. He published with activist publishers and the alternative media.
Like Z Magazine and ZNet, one of the principals of whom was Michael Albert, who’s now… a podcaster.
Beyond marginalizing him, they also smeared him. Because he compared Indonesia’s Timor massacres to Cambodia massacres, they called him denialist.
A French publisher slapped a free speech essay he wrote on a holocaust denier’s book, and they smeared him about that.
In the 1990s, a new generation of people discovered Chomsky on the web. The web was different then. Not fully sealed up by the tech giants.
Chomsky’s influence grew and some of the alternative media also grew and became mainstream or close. By the time of the Afghanistan War 2001, he could no longer be marginalized.
Indeed it became a good careerist move to make a showy denunciation of Chomsky in the mainstream. It worked for Samantha Power, for example.
A hilarious 2005 interview by Emma Brockes in the Guardian resulted in a very extensive corrections page that was basically a retraction.
Johann Hari, who went somewhat downhill and then turned around and did some good work since, invented a comment by Chomsky at a luncheon.
These are just off the top of my head and intended to reveal the particular way that Chomsky was handled by the mainstream in the 2000s: try to introduce inaccuracies and falsehoods; prove your liberal credentials by denouncing Chomsky the leftist.
Chomsky’s influence didn’t stop, but the whole media ecosystem that he analyzed has changed. So has the strategy for containing him.
The strategy today is to select the views that he holds that are closest to the mainstream and amplify those, while de-emphasizing the anti-imperialism.
That’s what the Intercept does when it sends someone to interview Chomsky on how Biden is the lesser evil.
That’s what the new “cancel culture” petition is about.
Yes, Chomsky is a free speech absolutist, he’s a lesser-evilist on electoral politics, he’s a two-stater on Palestine, he broadly prefers nonviolent strategies, and is critical of every state, including those targeted by imperialism.
But can find those views everywhere in the mainstream. They are not why people admire Chomsky and they are not why imperialists hate Chomsky.
Activists in every anti-war movement in the US since the Vietnam war have relied on Chomsky’s analysis and arguments; including movements against Israel’s wars in Lebanon & Occupied Palestine.
Chomsky believes in challenging the reader or audience: in Canada, he talks about Canada’s crimes, because it’s cowardly to denounce crimes you can’t affect while doing nothing about crimes you can affect.
There’s much more. My point: Chomsky is a proven person of principle, impossible to deny. The Biden people, the “cancel culture” people, they want to use that to advance their agendas.
As they do so, they want you to forget the anti-imperialism that is what Chomsky is really about and has been about for 50 years.
This is just the 2020 iteration of the campaign to contain Chomsky’s anti-imperialism.
Whether you’re disappointed that Chomsky signed that letter or newly concerned about cancel culture because Chomsky signed the letter, consider this option – read enough of his work to get a sense of what it is about, and if you like his ideas, principles, and methods try to assimilate them into your world view.
Facing the wave of growth and success of political and social movements of the ultra-right, it is necessary to ask: are we witnessing the rise of a series of fascist movements in many parts of the world as occurred in the 1930s? Or is fascism an unrepeatable historical phenomenon limited to the period between the two world wars?
Some consider that fascism only arose to prevent the victory of socialist revolutions or to stop the communists, but “fascism did not triumph when the bourgeois was threatened with proletarian revolution, but rather when the working class was weakened and put on the defensive.” The role of fascism was not to overcome the socialist revolution but to “erase the conquests of reformist socialism.”i
In Germany it was the social democrats that liquidated Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebnecht and stopped the communists fifteen years before the Nazi triumph. The Soviet Republic in Hungary was stopped by the invasion of the Rumanian army sent by the Liberal party. In Italy the occupations of the factories and the workers’ councils were stopped by the Liberal Party two years before the triumph of the fascists. Fascist propaganda insisted and insists always on a “communist threat” but for the past 90 years, capitalism has used the fascist “solution” to destroy reforms and human rights after the “communist threat” has been defeated.
What then is the difference between the Italian blackshirts, the German brownshirts, the Rumanian iron guards, the Ukrainian flagmen, the Hungarian arrow cross, the Spanish falange or the Croation Ustache – and today’s ultra-right parties?
All of the protagonists of European fascism of the last century professed a visceral hatred of Jews, expressed in extreme form in Germany, Ukraine, Romania and Croatia and culminating in the Holocaust. Today, by contrast, with the exception of Ukraine’s Svoboda, Hungary’s Jobbik, Greece’s Golden Dawn, the KKK and a few small neonazi groups, the majority of the global right is pro-Israel and supports the extermination of the Palestinians.
In general, on the xenophobic right, anti-Semitism has been replaced by Islamophobiaii, hatred of refugees, and particular racisms, like that expressed on the US right against Mexicansiii. In other aspects, however, despite its diversity, the 21st century ultra-right bears a growing resemblance to the European fascism of the 1930
. This is not coincidence. Fascism is a phenomenon specific to the crises of certain phases of the imperialist and capitalist order.ivvvi
Those who believe in the “end of history” – that colonialism is a thing of the past and capitalism is the final historical order – incorrectly discard the notion of a rebirth of fascism. The reality is very different. In this century so far, imperialist wars have destroyed Iraq, Libya, and Syria, all as a way of resolving the cyclical crises of capitalism. The recolonization of the Middle East is a fact. Colonialism was in retreat during the period that began with the fall of Nazism and ended with the US loss in Vietnam. It has returned with force in the past three decades.
To understand how fascism arises from the necessities of internal and external imperial wars, Hitler’s January 27 1932 speech to the industrialists at Dusseldorf is instructive. This speech convinced big business to support the Nazi solution.vii
Hitler explained that the defense of private property required a dictatorship like that of the Fuhrer. Because private property is the result of economic inequality and different classes of citizens, to defend private property it would be necessary to impose political inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism. Hitler explained that England did not just go to India sell its wares; it obliged India to buy them by invading the country. If the businessmen wanted the success of their enterprises, they had to support Nazism to conquer new markets and resources in the wider world and destroy the “Bolshevism” that was damaging the racial and national unity needed for victory.
In this speech, unusually light on Hitler’s characteristic constant attacks against the Jews, Hitler focused on “Bolshevism”: not just the need to stop it, but also to stop it from dividing the people and spreading a mentality opposed to the singular national interest. The businessmen applauded loudly for several minutes. Hitler’s program for big German business included a wave of privatizationsviiiix – and was only stopped by the fall of Nazism itself.
For Milton Friedman and the Chicago School to impose neoliberalism on Chile, it was not just necessary to prepare an elite of Chilean economists. It was also necessary to install Pinochet’s “Patria y Libertad” to impose the laws of the market.
Vilfredo Pareto, the economist considered by neoliberals as the precursor of their “libertarian” ideas, raged against strikes as the enemies of an economic optimum. He hated the worker’s movement’s taking over factories. He celebrated the ascent of Mussolini to power. Even though Pareto himself was not a fascist, the fascists made him a senator-for-life. In the first few years of his government, Mussolini followed Pareto’s prescriptions to the letter, destroying political liberalism, reducing state administration in favor of private enterprise, reducing property taxes, favoring industry, and imposing religious education.x The capitalists and neoliberal economists would prefer not to associate with fascists and repudiate their ideology, but they acclaim it when it is time to smash “Bolshevism” and go to war with other countries.
As it did 90 years ago, fascism today liquidates the gains of workers and collective rights, cleanses universities and schools, and promotes war. When the domination of transnational capital is not maintained merely by the laws of the market, it is maintained by direct violence. When institutional solutions are insufficient, the mass mobilization of one part of civil society is used against the rest.
Colonialism has strengthened. What is today called “extractivism” was once called “accumulation by dispossession”. It reigns throughout multiple parts of the world, an expression of the strength of colonial enterprises that have existed for centuries. It is the exact same primitive accumulation that occurred in the original phase of colonialism.xixii
In the 20th century, war was integrated with colonial enterprise and the destruction of competitor capital (as we saw in Iraq, Libya, and earlier in Yugoslavia) in a way that foreshadowed the destruction of local capital, the conquest of new markets, new investment zones and sources of land, minerals, gas and petroleum.
But imperialism, colonialism and war are not in themselves fascism, which is a mass movement based in the middle class and the unemployed, mobilized in diverse forms – including armed militias – to destroy workers’ rights and organizations and perpetuate war in the interests of transnational capital and landowners. In Latin America, the landowners always have their paramilitary bands at the readyxiii.
In contrast to other forms of authoritarianism, the success of fascism is guaranteed by the mass mobilization of the middle class against the “enemies of the nation”, be they Jews, Communists, Africans, refugees, Muslims, or Mexicans.
As the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger said, “ …it can accordingly seem that there is no enemy. It is then a fundamental requirement that the enemy be found, brought to light, or even created so that this stand against the enemy may take place… with the goal of complete extermination.”xiv
The state that persecutes the enemy, according to the theorists of nazism, is not merely the judicial institution, but the people’s Being intrinsically united with its leader (Heidegger). It’s not a state machinery, but the people organized by the nazi party organized through its Fuhrer that is the source of law (Rosemberg). It is not the law that establishes order, but the “movement” that imposes an order, from which the law springs(Schmitt).xv
This is why Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, presented the thesis that civil society is itself a form of the state. This makes the problem of emancipation more complicated and more dramatic. “Civil society could very well express violence and oppression not inferior to that of the state, and very unscrupulous besides, and it will tend to exercise this violence without obstructions since it has no concern with even the pretense of impartiality.”xvi
The idea of needing to attack an enemy was and is a part of an ultra-right wing strategy, with false information used to agitate about the fantasy of the enemy. The great theorist of what is now called “fake news” was the publicist of Siemens and the Reemtsma tobacco company, Hans Domizlaff, who began his application of marketing techniques to politics in 1932.xvii
According to Domizlaff, “people can believe in gross lies or, in any case, there can be found freedom for action if lies are openly told and obstinately maintained…xviii the masses cannot be educated, only domesticated, led, and voided.”xix
In the 21st century the role of enemy is assigned in Europe and the US to migrants, especially refugees or to “terrorist” Muslims. In Latin America it continues to be “communists”, the political left, as it was in the time of the Doctrine of National Security.
But more and more, in the north and in Latin America, LGBTQ communities are targeted, called the “gender ideology”, with propaganda about apparent “scientific” research into gender. This is not new.
Homophobia was one of the hooks the Nazis used to win over religious sectors. Magnus Hirschfield’s theory of the “third sex” and his books on homosexuality and transgender were attacked. Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Research was the target of homphobic attack. Its administrator Kurt Hiller was sent to a concentration camp in March 1933 and on May 6 the building was occupied and its archives, photos, and library were confiscated to be burned in the famous book-burning of May 10, 1933.xx
The bonfire linked the “judeo-bolshevik conspiracy” and the third sex. Homophobia played a mobilizing role in the bonfire and in the concentration camps. The annihilation of the third sex occurred alongside the extermination of communists, unionists, Jews and Roma – the extermination of the enemy. The state apparatus, from its perch in the universities to its gas chambers, was rooted in the “people’s Being” directed by its leader.
The ultra-right of the 21st century, especially in Latin America, has rediscovered the role of homophobia. The struggle against “gender ideology” was embedded in the “No” vote against the Colombian peace accords and has moved millions of votes from Brazil to the US, including Costa Rica, where an important group of churches joined these homophobic manipulations with enthusiasm.
The manipulation of religion by the ultra-right is not limited to homophobia. For more than one hundred years the right has developed a theology of war. The spread of Wahhabism in the Muslim world has served as the basis for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and the “dispensationalism” of Cyrus Scofield has played a role in the West in creating a war theology, nourishing militarism on the evangelical right-wing.
The Islamic State is apocalyptic: it is preparing for the final battle of history, in which Jesus and the Mahdi will fight alongside them. “Dispensationalism” also views war in the Middle East as anticipation of Armageddon and considers US support for Israel part of a divine plan. The faithful expect to be transported directly to heaven before seven years of great disasters, at the end of which will occur the great battle of Armageddon, when Jesus will return to defend Israel.xxi
As the Nazis struggled against the conspiracy outlined in the “protocols of the elders of Zion”, the Latin American ultra-right struggles against the conspiracy of the Forum of Sao Paolo, which they believe wishes to impose communism and homosexualism. Bolshevism, however, has changed: it is no longer a Jewish conspiracy but the source of conspiracy, since Israel is now an ally and the Palestinians the enemy.
The ultra-right of the Americas is diverse, but its common symbols and leaders are always anti-communist, loyal to the US, and loyal to the transnational corporations. Under these three principles, religious fundamentalism can easily co-exist with the debauched life of Donald Trump. The white supremacists of the US are not in agreement among themselves about anti-Semitism. But the Klan and the neo-Nazis continue to co-exist and to coordinate on common projects like the wall on the border with Mexico.
The ultra-right in Europe is more divided. There are anti-EU and pro-EU ultra-rightists. There is one anti-Semitic right and another Islamophobic right. In Israel, the extermination of Palestinians signals fascism; in Islamic countries it’s Wahhabism; in India it is Hindu supermacy and there is even a Buddhist right-wing in Thailand and Burma. All of the ultra-rights deny our common humanity, are xenophobic and racist, homophobic and enemies of human rights and of international law.
Not every ultra-right is fascist. Several have given rise to diverse Bonapartes,xxiixxiii whether by electoral movements or by military-parliamentary-or judicial coups. Laws and repressive means strengthen state oppression, but fascism is not simply the repression of the system towards its enemies. The triumph of fascism is a qualitative change. xxivxxv
For fascist regimes to establish themselves it is not sufficient for there to be a fascist party, nor is it sufficient that the president be a fascist. Fascism requires a mass movement that is capable of smashing the organizations of workers and of minorities, and capable of supporting perpetual wars. Fascism in the 21st century is reaching that point.
It is time to resist.
iBAUER, Otto (1936) Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen?. Bratislava: Eugen Prager Verlag, p. 136.
ii HUNTINGTON, Samuel 1997 O Choque das Civilizações e a recomposição da ordem mundial. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Objetiva.
iii HUNTINGTON, Samuel 2004. ¿Quiénes somos?: los desafíos a la identidad nacional estadounidense. Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica.
iv MANDEL, Ernest (1969) El Fascismo. Revolta Global, p.10.
v POULANTZAS, Nicos (1970) Fascismo e Ditadura. Porto: Portucalense, 1972, p. 13.
vi DIMITROV, Jorge (1935) “La ofensiva del fascismo y las tareas de la Internacional Comunista en la lucha por la unidad dela clase obrera contra el fascismo”; Informe ante en VII Congreso Mundial de la Internacional Comunista, 2 de agosto de 1935. Selección de trabajos. Buenos Aires: Estudio, 1972.
vii HITLER, Adolf (1932) “The Dusseldorf Speech of 1932”; C N Trueman editor. The History Learning Site, 22 May 2015.
viii BUCHHEIM, Christoph and Jonas SCHERNER (2006).”The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry”. The Journal of Economic History 66(2) 390-416 (406). Cambridge University Press.
ix BEL, Germà (13 de noviembre de 2004). “Against the mainstream: Nazi privatization in 1930s Germany”. Universitat de Barcelona i ppre-IREA.
x BORKENAU, Franz (1936) Pareto. New York: John Wiley & Sons, p.40.
xi HARVEY, David (2004) “El ‘nuevo imperialismo’: acumulación por desposesión”; Leo Pantich & Colin Leys (Ed.) El nuevo desafío imperial, p.p. 99-129. Merlin Press-Clacso.
xii MARX, Karl (1867) El Capital, v. I, c. XXIV-XXV. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 1974, p.p. 607-650.
xiii See the character Attila in the film Novecento, by Bernardo BERTOLUCCI (1976).
xiv HEIDEGGER, Martin. Gesamtausgabe, 36/37, Sein und Wahrheit. 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie. 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 2001, éd. por Hartmut Tietjen, [GA 36/37], 90-91.
xv FAYE, Emmanuel (2005) “El derecho y la raza: Erik Wolf entre Heidegger, Schmitt y Rosenberg”. Heidegger: La introducción del nazismo en filosofía. Madrid: Akal, 2009, 2018, capítulo7.
xvi LOSURDO, Doménico 1997. “Com Gramsci, para além de Marx e Gramsci”; Crítica Marxista 3-4. Roma.
xvii DOMIZLAFF, Hans (1932) Propagandamittel der Staatsidee. Altona-Othmarschen.
xviii DOMIZLAFF, Hans (1952) Brevier für Könige. Massenpsychologisches Praktikum. Hamburg, Institut für Markentechnik, p. 208.
xx BAUER, Heike (2017). The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture. Temple University Press, p. 92.
xxi SIZER, Stephen (2006) Sionismo cristiano ¿hoja de ruta a Armagedón? Bósforo libros, 2009.
xxii THALHEIMER, August (1928) “Über den Faschismus”; internes Dokument der Komintern, 1928 ; Gegen den Strom, theoretischer Zeitschrift der KPD(O), 1930.
xxiii TROTSKY, Leon (1934) “Bonapartism and Fascism”; New International, 1(2): 37-38.
South American Independence pt1 – Miranda and Bolivar
The struggles for Independence against the Spanish Empire rocked the Western Hemisphere at the beginning of the 19th century and changed the world. We focus on Simon Bolivar to tell this story in two parts. In this part, the Precursor, Francisco de Miranda, and the first half of Simon Bolivar’s campaigns.
