I have to say that the present events over the past couple of weeks have been amusing to me in a schadenfreude type sense. After decades of denying the possibility of incipient fascism in the developed world, especially over the past 25 years when a massive growth in neo-fascist parties occurred on the European continent, now mainstream liberals have erupted with the howl that "Trump is a fascist!" or pained question-begging in numerous click-bait articles variously titled: "Is Trump a Fascist?" Trump, for his part, is aware of the similarity of his positions with that of the far-Right and instead of calling upon the ghost of Hitler or even a living Marine Le Pen, he meekly outlines the similarity of his position to that of US presidents past. FDR, in the first-case, the great holy spirit that dwells within the bosom of American liberals, and Carter--another reasonable liberal, a humanitarian no-less, who was one of America's lest militaristic post-war presidents, who also prioritized rationality over nationalist idealism on issues like the environment or dependence on foreign oil. What also should we make of Trump's twitter spat with a Saudi prince and billionaire? Isn't it an absurd, perhaps even obscene, spectacle that it was a Saudi billionaire-prince who called Trump "a disgrace to America and the GOP"? Zizek correctly pointed out that while Saudi Arabia seems the most feudalistic fundamentalist country in the region, it is also the nation most integrated with modern global financial capital. Perhaps then its no wonder that this Saudi prince donned his social media armor to ride in to the rescue of American democratic liberalism, in the same way that the US has consistently rode in with lavish support for the brutal monarchy based on sclerotic feudal principles.
But let's get down to business shall we? As always when there's some kind of outburst of political activity, there's always someone who sits in the back of a room somewhere and says, "c'mon its really not as bad as all that!" I couldn't help but notice a Vox article in that vein where the author interviewed five "fascism experts" on the subject of whether Trump was a fascist. Being a "fascism expert" in present times is a lot like being a "pornography expert" because the criteria for whether something is fascist always seems to boil down to a "I'll know it when I see it" basis that was the Supreme Court's rationale for determining what is and isn't pornography. Most left-wing groups have allowed Dimitrov and the COMINTERN's Marxist analysis of fascism to go by the wayside in favor of a left-liberal definition where it constitutes whatever is mean, white, and male. I'll be the first to say that there are problems with merely grafting Dimitrov's analysis of fascism from the 1930s onto present times, but in general it retains a greater clarity and correctness than, say, the 14 points of Fascism which is often bandied around on left-liberal websites.
We should note the absurdity of having a debate about fascism within the present mainstream political discourse and press in the United States. The US is involved in so many illegal wars, both overt and covert, that it is honestly exhausting to list, document and catalogue them all. And they are only proliferating. Ever since WWII, but especially since Vietnam, the United States Deep State has made every effort possible to short-circuit democratic checks and balances on war-making and to avoid seeking popular mandates on wars. The case of Libya was instructive, Obama addressed Congress on the situation but chose not to put the Libyan war to a vote citing presidential powers--remarks for which he received applause. Prompting the question, why even address Congress on it in the first place?
Then what should be said about the lack of resistance to war or any kind of Left outside the Democratic party (and its fellow travelers) in the United States? You see, for 8 years while Bush was waging these wars, we heard that they were the result of bad old christian white men. The Republicans seem to specialize in being the party of older Christian whites, so as the question was framed, the struggle against militarism outside US borders is inherently connected to resistance to greater democracy and liberalism in US borders. To the great embarrassment of the Left, it was the conservative christian whites, particularly those attracted to the edges of the Tea Party, who put up the only resistance to an open war against Syria and Assad. Then to great embarrassment, and only Black Agenda Report critically reported this shameful fact, black support for Obama's war on Syria outpaced that of whites.
While the Right had been motivated more by the fact that Obama had chosen to use Jihadist proxies in Syria against a secular government that protects Christians than any genuine anti-war/imperial sentiment, it was easy to detect within the speakers who protested this move a war-weary exhaustion from a community that had served as the foot soldiers for the war on terror. On the other hand, Black Lives Matter, a mob controlled by the democratic party, has said very little about the wars, and offered next to nothing besides rhetoric. Black Lives Matter is seeking partnership with US imperialism in exchange for elevating more blacks to positions of privilege. And even Bromma, hardly some white racist has pointed out 1. capital gets more bang for its buck by offering privilege to historically excluded populations 2. some segments of America's national minorities have outpaced the white working class in living standards, which have stagnated.
Let's be clear: buying off more "non-white" people isn't emblematic of the standard of bourgeois democracy; the present ethos of the Democratic party is hardly the antithesis of fascism. While Trump is taken for task for things he might do, we should talk about things that have already been done, histories which would be relevant if it was Bush in the White House. While democrats are held captive by the fantasy that Trump maybe reading Mein Kampf before he goes to bed, we hear nothing about Lolo Soetoro, the step-father of Barrack Obama who was colonel in the Indonesian military during the genocide of 1965. We hear nothing about how Obama's life in Indonesia during the genocide may have affected him, but during the Bush years, some liberals talked of the flirtation of W's grandfather with Nazism as a permanent stain on the political family; something dark that could not be exorcised. Unremarkably, documents on US involvement with the Indonesian genocide(s) have never been released. I wonder why? I think comparatively, if Romney had been elected in 2012 he would have had a lot less to lose by doing such a thing.
Then who talks of the fact that the Clintons have more blood on their hands than any family on Earth? Who talks of the 8-10 Congolese killed by Bill Clinton's proxy armies in the Congo? Or the 1.7 million Iraqis killed by the sanctions that he organized, at least 500,000 of whom were children. Bill Clinton invented the WMD canard that was used to invade Iraq by Bush. Some sources even claim that 50,000 black libyans were exterminated by the proxy forces that Clinton and Obama gave so much support to. Too my knowledge, Trump hasn't killed anyone, but we must act extremely worried that he will when he gains power. Unlike Clinton who shares blame in a body count that is probably second only to Hitler's.
Then we must, of course, really fear that Trump will wage rhetorical or economic attacks on friendly imperialist nations like China, South Korea, and Japan. However, we have nothing to fear from Obama's hate campaign against Russia and Russians. In the age of Buzzfeed liberalism, Russia has emerged as a most convenient boogeyman, it is a ready-made trailer trash nation, and hence promoting hatred of it is not racist, in fact it is now defined as "anti-racist". The Russians still carry around pictures of Stalin and Lenin and communists and their supporters still play an important role in Russian politics, so to the liberal mind, the Russian working class is just like the white working class whom they lock up in prisons and who join Nazi prisons gangs there. Like the demographic that consistently refuses to vote for Obama and put its trust in the democratic party, the Russians are alleged to be homophobic, transphobic, crypto-totalitarian religious xenophobes who have yet to embrace a nebulously defined "Democracy".
Obama and the Clintons want to finish what they started in the Soviet Union in the 1990s, they want what's remaining of the collectively owned assets to be sold off, for Russia to become a banana republic that's fated to break up. They want to fill their mouths with the blood of the carcass of what's remaining of the "last great European Empire"and to call it democracy. Meanwhile the more than a billion people who will become subject to the TTP and TTIP blocs will become the subjects of a top-secret experiment of corporate extra-territoriality, placed under the thumb of finance capital, walled off in the resurrected wet-dream of Japanese Fascism, America's very own Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere. Violating democratic rights and starting trade wars are only fascist when Trump proposes to do it.
In the spirit of taking discussion of fascism away from rough-shod definitions of what's merely "white and mean" I propose that a discussion regarding the development of a new type of social-fascism begin. The concept has been much neglected ever since historians have dubiously assigned to it the blame for the lack of an effective opposition to Hitler's rise to power. We maybe coming to the the age of Buzzfeed social-fascism where the interests of the labor aristocracy, whatever its skin color, and finance capital combine in a kind of lynchmob democracy with a utopian liberal veneer. I do not propose a full explanation of the concept here, but merely argue that in relation to the issue, choosing democratic social-fascism over Trump's "fascism" is no choice at all, they are "both worse" to borrow from Stalin.
What drives buzzfeed social-fascism in its essence, is a combination of the rent-seeking techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley with its dreams of hierarchal anarchism with the free trade ideology of port-centers like Singapore and Hong Kong which are important nodes in the geographical construction of global finance capital. In other words, yes to free trade, and now even limited freedom of population movement, but no to the obstruction of rent and interest payments, we are talking about a militarized free trade, where lowly tinkerers and tech pirates along with politicians who emphasize national sovereignty will be swiftly dispensed with. It is to be expected that humanist and ecological objections to technological violations of nature and human bodies in pursuit of capital will also be quashed and struck down as merely quaint luddism.
To return to the original topic, when modern liberals accuse Trump of engineering a neo-fascism reliant on populism and utilizing American democratic norms they are only setting themselves up to be hung by their own petard. For decades, liberals countered accusations of human rights abuses, comparison of their policies with those of the fascist nations of WWII with the objection that fascism was an internally coherent 'total' ideology and historically specific. In other words, the US could violently kill 3.8 million civilians in Vietnam according to a Harvard medical study, and that wasn't fascist because there were no gangs marching down streets with jackboots and arm bands. De Gaulle could take power in a coup and re-write the French constitution and that wasn't fascist, because he did it to preserve the liberal norm, and in any case popular involvement in politics was returned after May 68. Horrors resulting from local responses to the refugee crisis in Hungary and the Czech republic again raise the canard of "populism" now practically a by-word for the trans-atlantic elite for fascism. But few care to remember that it was in Brussels and Berlin where the continent's atrocious immigration policies and border militarizations initiated.
Meritocratic technocracy is its own type of populism, otherwise where comes the colleges filled to the brim with business, management, advertisement and STEM students? Buzzfeed social fascism produces its own mobs, its own sophistic talking points, its own tyrannies, its own privileged castes which no one may dare speak against. It creates a populism for the labor aristocracy on a global scale; and with the new reports on the spike in mortality among the white working class, we may legitimately say old labor aristocracies are allowed to collapse into proletarian status because of their skin color, proletarian whites have sunk still further. Enlightenment and Christian culture alike is destroyed in the name of particularity, of privilege, of grievance, of identity, paradoxically crushed under the banner of "equality".
Very little evidence has been provided that Trump will be worse than Clinton. We could probably expect slow-motion attacks on muslims and (proletarian) immigrants rather than Trump's blanket repressions. We could expect a totalitarian submission to the logic of capital, which Trump accepts but only rejects in the case of free trade. Its no basis for supporting the democrats.
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