Fascism

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blindpig
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 08, 2023 3:17 pm

Nazi Brotherhood: American Media Ignore Atomwaffen’s Plot for a Baltimore Terror Attack
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 7, 2023
Felix Livshitz

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Atomwaffen’s plot in Baltimore should have been headline news

American far-right radicals – linked to neo-Nazis from the Ukrainian Azov Battalion – have been charged with conspiring to stage a terrorist attack in Baltimore, Maryland. However, US media reporting on the story does not mention connections between the group and the militants.

Additionally, the attempted terrorist act may only be the first signs of the threat that Azov members, and their foreign friends, pose to Western countries.

Failed plans

In early February, the US Justice Department announced the indictment of neo-Nazis Sarah Beth Clendaniel and Brandon Clint Russell for conspiracy to destroy energy substations in Baltimore. Authorities describe the pair’s plans as “driven by their ideology of racially-motivated hatred.” If convicted, they each face a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Beginning in June 2022, though possibly earlier, the pair plotted a series of attacks against substations using balloons and rifle fire with the goal of shorting out power transformers and depriving thousands of residents of light and heat. They specifically aimed to carry this out “when there is greatest strain on the grid” and energy demand was highest.

Russell shared maps of planned targets with Clendaniel, outlining how even low-level strikes on electrical substations could cause a “cascading failure” across Baltimore’s entire electricity grid, an impact that would be maximized by hitting multiple sites simultaneously. Clendaniel envisioned the plan would “permanently completely lay this city to waste.” in supposedly encrypted messaging app chats.

To jail and back again

Russell is the founder of Atomwaffen Division, also known as the National Socialist Resistance Front, an international neo-Nazi terrorist network. In January 2018, he was jailed for possessing an unregistered destructive device and illegally storing explosives. An FBI bomb technician claimed the material was sufficient to completely destroy an airliner and prosecutors say he planned to use it in terrorist attacks targeting civilians, nuclear facilities and synagogues across the US.


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Sarah Beth Clendaniel was arrested by federal authorities on charges that she plotted to destroy energy facilities in the Baltimore area.

While in prison, Russell issued a video message to his followers thanking them for their “undying loyalty and courage,” and promising his incarceration would not stop Atomwaffen’s mission. He also provided them with bomb-making instructions.

“There is no room in this world for cowardly people,” he declared, quoting Adolf Hitler. “The sword has been drawn. There is no turning back.”

Despite such pronouncements and the fact Atomwaffen adherents both in the US and abroad carried out increasingly serious crimes while he was jailed, including multiple murders, Russell was released early from prison. Furthermore, he was not subject to any order banning him from contact with other members of his neo-Nazi fraternity.

It is just as remarkable that a federal bust of a domestic terror plot involving leading members of a group – who clearly pose a huge threat to public safety – has basically been completely ignored by the mainstream media and US politicians alike. After all, President Joe Biden’s administration has aggressively promoted the threat of far-right, racially-motivated extremism. Officials have even gone to the extent of carrying out secret social media witch-hunts targeting white conservatives to identify – or perhaps fabricate – evidence of this danger.

What accounts for the conspiracy of silence surrounding the indictment of Clendaniel and Russell? The incident should provide ample fodder for the White House, liberal pundits, and reporters. The answer may lie in Atomwaffen’s international connections – namely to Ukraine’s notorious, brutal Azov Battalion – and the inevitable consequences of Western training, funding and sponsorship of far-right elements in that Eastern European country for so many years.

A dark, but open secret

An investigation in 2020 by the West Point Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center found that Ukraine has long-held “a particular attraction for white supremacists–ideologues, activists, and adventurers alike.”

The abundance of nationalist groups involved in 2014’s US-led Maidan coup was “electrifying to far-right individuals and groups in Europe, the US and further afield,” the investigation records. Neo-Nazis the world over began flooding Ukraine, which they considered to be a new fascist state in the making. Of particular attraction was the Azov Battalion, which “enjoyed support from within the government of then President Petro Poroshenko and the security services, despite well-documented human rights abuses.”

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Brandon Clint Russell. © Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office via AP

This marked the first time since World War II anywhere in Europe that a neo-Nazi faction – “celebrated, openly organizing, with friends in high places” – had received warm state recognition and sponsorship. Quite a few of the neo-Nazi arrivals to Kiev joined the Battalion itself or received guidance and training from its fighters.

Among them were representatives of Atomwaffen, and the relationship between the two terrorist groups has strengthened and formalized in the years since. Its European division attended Azov training camps in Ukraine, as did several of its US-based members, who were subsequently jailed for plotting violent attacks and intimidation campaigns against journalists.

While the mainstream media for many years, post-Maidan, openly acknowledged and condemned Azov’s fascist nature, coverage of these groups has virtually disappeared. Since the Russian military offensive began, last year, this inarguable reality has either been ignored, or actively whitewashed. There has been a similar shift in political attitudes to the Azov Battalion. Once prohibited by law from receiving any US government assistance, now its members are hailed as heroic freedom fighters and invited to Washington to give inspirational talks.

Are more neo-Nazi issues on the horizon?

The media’s lack of interest in reporting the ties between the founder of Atomwaffen, Russell, and the Azov Battalion is certainly concerning, but could be easily attributed to covering for Biden’s administration and it support for the Kiev regime. After all, it would be difficult to maintain public backing for an extremist group that threatens its own citizens that it deems insufficiently anti-Russian, if the public were fully informed . However, there are other issues to consider – that may be just as significant – linked to the training of neo-Nazis by Azov.

In July 2022, Europol forecast an “increase in firearms and munitions trafficked into the EU via established smuggling routes or online platforms” arising from the war, and warned, “this threat might even be higher once the conflict has ended.” Since then, there have been multiple reports of weapons sent to Kiev circulating in arms black markets and being used by criminal elements.

The huge amount of weapons being sent to Ukraine – many of them unaccounted for – coupled with the influx of extremist elements joining or training with the Azov Battalion should raise red flags for the US and EU countries. The Atomwaffen’s plot in Baltimore may be just the start.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/03/ ... or-attack/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 10, 2023 2:41 pm

Fascist RESTRICT Bill is the State’s Reaction to an Irreversible Escalation in Class Conflict
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 8, 2023
Rainer Shea

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With the introduction of the RESTRICT bill, the element of the ruling elite that’s most committed to advancing imperialism has made its intentions clear: to criminalize anti-imperialist activities and sentiments, starting with efforts to build solidarity with anti-imperialist countries. Should it pass, it will make the organizers I know whose job is to cultivate relationships with foreign communist parties targets for criminal charges, and will potentially even make me a target should the act’s standards become loose enough. The point of RESTRICT’s banning the use of communications technologies from Washington’s adversaries is to create a loophole for prosecuting this kind of international organizing outreach work. Which creates the precedent for also going after those who merely speak out against the State Department’s narratives.

The latter project won’t even require anti-imperialist speech to be made officially against the law. Anyone who’s studied the history of the U.S. government’s censorship knows that to maintain the liberal illusion of a free society, our ruling class suppresses dissenting voices by charging them not with saying the wrong things, but with violating whatever existing laws the government spuriously claims they’ve broken. When Scott Ritter debunked the Iraq WMD hoax, the FBI charged him with a sex crime against a minor, even though he was on a site that had an of-age limit and the “minor” he had talked to was a sting agent. When the African People’s Socialist Party challenged the Ukraine psyop, the feds raided them last year based on a fabricated narrative about them being agents for Russian interference. RESTRICT, which warns against not just using foreign communications outlets but also collaborating with foreign governments to influence elections, is designed to act as a means for the feds to more easily accuse anti-imperialists of doing illegal things.

If this act passes, things like the framing of Ritter will be able to be done to people who engage in far more wide-ranging (and more productive) activities than going on porn sites. And things like the APSP raid will bring long-term damage towards the targeted organizations, letting the feds actually incarcerate the members like they’ve incarcerated many revolutionary organizers over the decades. Except now they won’t have to frame these organizers for murder, like they’ve usually done in those previous cases. They’ll only have to establish (truthfully or not) that the accused have been in contact with individuals from the “enemy” countries.

It’s an expansion of repressive power that will only grow as the ruling class escalates its war on dissent. And the denial from liberal “face-checkers” of the notion that RESTRICT will give it access to our home devices isn’t technically a lie, but it is a red herring, because we’ve known since the Vault 7 leaks that the feds hack into devices. The Patriot Act gave the government that ability prior to when smart mobile devices existed, with this new bill being a project to utilize that surveillance power for its maximum policing potential. RESTRICT is America’s Enabling Act. It’s the power grab that our ruling liberal fascists are trying to force through as part of their campaign to exploit a crisis. Except this crisis is not one singular traumatic event, like the Reichstag fire or 9/11, but rather a longer-term era of disaster that our government has been manufacturing for many years. It started with Obama’s pivot to Asia, which restarted the Cold War and led Washington to carry out a series of anti-Russian maneuvers with the ultimate goal of weakening China.

It’s involved everything from Washington’s Euromaidan coup, to the uproar over a Chinese “spy balloon,” to the propagation of the idea that Russia is waging a “war of aggression.” (This war was in fact a justified response to a U.S.-backed Donbass genocide.) Through hundreds of provocations and false flags, the imperialists have engineered a situation where the risk of nuclear war is greater than it’s ever been, and the Americans who’ve been fully swayed by the war propaganda blame this situation on the countries Washington has aggressed against. The campaign to pass RESTRICT depends on rallying support from this most chauvinistic, paranoid, and xenophobic element of the public.

RESTRICT, and whatever repressive measures that may come in place of it should it not pass, have a pivotal purpose within the class war: to replace COINTELPRO with open repression as the state’s primary means for combating revolutionary politics. One impulse is to be frightened of this bill and the growing anti-democratic governmental impulses behind it, but the reality is that since the start of this year alone, certain factors have been shifting in ways that place the class struggle in an increasingly advantageous situation. The state is reacting to this by preparing to abandon COINTELPRO as its main tool for frustrating the class struggle, since the standard movement-wrecking tactics are failing to neutralize the uprising our rulers are faced with. As soon as the revolutionary organizations grow too strong, and anti-imperialism gains too much influence over the popular consciousness, the state will have to embrace RESTRICT or some other version of it as its new biggest weapon in the class war.

RESTRICT wasn’t introduced in response to this year’s rise of a mass resistance towards the Ukraine proxy war, but it was introduced in response to the emergence of the conditions that made this powerful new anti-imperialist movement possible. The unprecedented reach that social media gave to those who seek to expose imperialism; the decline of U.S. hegemony and the subsequent rise in global support for China’s BRI; the rise in revolutionary consciousness that came when the 2008 crisis fully discredited the ruling class ideology; all of these developments were being talked about by the U.S. national security state years prior to when Russia’s special operation began. When Russia finally decided to take the actions necessary for making Washington lose the geopolitical chess game within Eurasia, and the psyop Washington created to try to counteract this failed, the state knew the time had come to intensify its censorship. The main censorship method is switching from pressuring the tech companies into suppressing anti-imperialist content, to attacking anti-imperialists through the police state itself.

Which of course was always something the imperial state did, but now it’s going to become vastly more prevalent. Prevalent to the extent that it was during World War I, when those speaking out against the war were jailed. Because today there’s no draft, and Washington sees proxy and informational wars as more economical options than direct invasions, the difference is that today’s repression against anti-imperialists focuses on the act of challenging imperialism’s psyops. During World War I, these psyops weren’t so important for the state to defend, as countering imperialism’s false accounts of world events wasn’t as important for the anti-imperialists. It was an inter-imperialist war, competition over the globe’s colonial holdings was the motive behind the state’s going to war, and everyone knew this. The antiwar activists only needed to argue that this goal of defending colonialism was not in the primary interests of the American people, who had the right to refuse to fight for the rich man’s interests. But today, our narrative battle is more complex. The new cold war is not an inter-imperialist conflict, as Russia, China, and Iran all lack an imperialist role or intent. The main goal of the empire’s modern psyops is to convince us that these countries are imperialist, and that they’re consequently carrying out transgressions against Taiwan, Ukraine, and other geopolitical focal points.

The main task of anti-imperialists is therefore to counter this narrative, a task which is essential for effectively countering the idea that imperialist wars are in the material interests of the American people. The better we do this, the more we diminish the power of the state’s controlled opposition within organizing spaces, which is the imperialism-compatible “radical” element known as the New Left. The New Left is obsessed with defending the notion that Washington’s modern adversaries are imperialist, because the prevalence of that notion is what maintains the New Left’s status. This status is one where these leftists act as the state’s designated gatekeepers of radical politics, casting out anyone who goes against the State Department’s narratives. For the last half-century, since the state successfully destroyed the Black Panther Party, these imperialism-compatible leftists have been the primary tool for holding back revolution. They’ve been able to co-opt and diffuse every spontaneous uprising, diverting developing radicals towards opportunistic projects which maintain the Democratic Party’s monopoly over activist circles.

But with the profound damage the Ukraine proxy war has caused towards the people’s living standards in a time of converging crises, and the mass resistance against NATO this has provoked, we have an opening to end the New Left’s dominance. We can make communism mainstream again by kicking the phony radicals out of our liberation movements, rallying the majority of the population that’s now living paycheck to paycheck, and bringing many libertarian-leaning or apolitical individuals into the communist movement. The decisive moment will be when we shift the balance of power within our spaces from the New Left to the actual revolutionaries, which depends on rejecting the advice of the reformists and the opportunists. They claim the class struggle can only succeed if it prioritizes winning over liberals above all others, but this idea can’t make the struggle defeat the state. It can only truncate the struggle, having it endlessly keep fighting from a place of self-imposed limitation. The New Left wants the movement to remain insular, because that’s what keeps it powerless to truly threaten capitalism.

The prospect of the workers movement gaining that level of theoretical intelligence and independence from the Democrats alarms the state. So the state is working to intensify its attacks against the movement, trying to reintroduce the early 20th century’s repressive campaigns in a version that’s fitting of the new cold war. Should we soon have to start organizing and educating via underground operations, the advantage we’ll have is that the state’s repression will be out in the open, creating a more apparent need to rebel. We’ll have lost the freedoms we had in the struggle’s previous stage, but this cost will be what we were always willing to take on by becoming revolutionaries. As soon as we became successful enough, the state was going to meet us with retribution. If we keep fighting through this coming dark time, we’ll be doing so during a stage much closer to victory.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... -conflict/

Been saying for years: 'Scratch(or scare) a Liberal and find a Fascists'

The Imminent Collapse of Eurofascism
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 7, 2023
Davor Slobodanovich Vuyachich

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After the collapse of Nazi Germany, the Americans entered Western Europe with the firm intention of staying there forever, and to be completely honest, they never really hid it from us. The first Secretary General of NATO, the British general and diplomat, Hastings Ismay, explained the essence of the founding of the military alliance, which he headed, in a short but more than precise and vivid formulation, saying that its goal is “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Lord Ismay was admittedly not American, but today many would consider him a typical, arrogant Anglo-Saxon fascist, and we should not really be surprised that a Briton was such an ardent advocate of an American military presence on the Old Continent. His military-political motto became not only the cornerstone of Atlanticism in Europe but, over the course of almost eight decades, evolved into its far more extreme variant. The goal of the Anglo-Saxon plutocratic elites today is for the Americans to militarily control all of Europe and to continue their aggressive expansion towards Siberia, to bring the Russians to their knees and make them beg for mercy, and to keep down not only the Germans but also the French and all other European nations — all of this, of course, at the expense of the Europeans themselves, who are expected not only to pay the hefty costs of their own occupation but also to finance the insane Anglo-Saxon proxy war against Russia, which is being waged through the previously occupied Ukraine.

As we all know, after the 2014 coup, directed by the CIA and MI6, Ukraine was deprived of real democracy, freedom, and its authentic national identity, while Ukrainians were pushed into a war against the inexhaustible military, human, and economic potential of the Russian Federation. The hapless Ukrainians are expected to fight to the last in order to revive America’s recessionary economy by more forcefully spinning the flywheel of its infamous military-industrial complex. This, by the way, is one of two favorite tricks that Americans learned during World War II, when they saved themselves from the Great Depression by starting a massive military industry. America’s second favorite trick is, of course, just participating in war and wantonly plundering other people’s resources. Although the American calculation in all this is clear to everyone, the interests of Ukraine and Europe are certainly quite different. Does Europe really want the fate of Ukraine to befall it, that is, to enter into an endless military conflict now not only with Russia but also with the power of Eurasia that rises protectively behind it? Do the Europeans really want to die in America’s dirty war to the last while the Anglo-Saxons watch it all from a safe distance and count the money earned? What mysterious force keeps the Europeans in a subordinate position in relation to the U.S. and makes them work against their interests?

The idea of not only an economic but also a political association of European peoples was so promising in its beginnings and had a large number of supporters, not only among members of the European business elite and politicians but also among ordinary people. Europeans enthusiastically believed that it was the beginning of a new, glorious, and fortunate age in which, united, they would find the strength to protect their own interests by resolutely opposing American hegemony and finally expelling the Anglo-Saxons from their continent. Contrary to all those childishly naive expectations, thirty years later, it became obvious that, as if by some political black magic, all the institutions of the European Union found themselves under a much tighter political, ideological, financial, and military control of Washington than was the case with the foreign policies of once sovereign European nations before their political unification. What’s worse, a fundamentally noble idea, such as the European one, merged with the criminal ideology of NATO into a single, now unfortunately difficult to separate, and not at all noble military-political concept known as Euro-Atlanticism. Of the 27 member states of the EU, as many as 21 are also members of the North Atlantic Alliance, and by all accounts, Finland and Sweden will join them very soon. At the same time, three more NATO members, Albania, North Macedonia, and Montenegro, started negotiations on membership with the EU, which indicates a clear trend toward an even deeper foundation of the Euro-Atlantic phenomenon, which completely cancels everything that was ever good about the idea of a politically united Europe.

Turkey could theoretically have become a part of that same Euro-Atlanticism if it had not been made to know so many times, in a typically Western, smooth, but hypocritical way, that it was not, in fact, welcome in a united Europe. Let’s just remember Sarkozy’s statement about how Turkey is too big, too poor, and too culturally different for Europe’s doors to ever be open to it. That’s why it could easily happen that in the near future, and after having, by all accounts, permanently given up on fulfilling the humiliating conditions necessary for the continuation of European integration, Turkey will completely return to its original national being, leave NATO, and look for a brighter future in Eurasian integration with Russia, China, Iran, and other countries of Eurasia.

Instead of the political unification of Europe bringing the desired release from the constraints of American omnipresence, it only deepened the subjugation of European nations to the interests of overseas plutocratic elites. Thus, on the one hand, the EU completely failed all the expectations of the nations and citizens of its members, i.e., ordinary people, while on the other hand, the European business and political elites found the calculation to continue artificially keeping this badly patched political Frankenstein’s monster alive. The interests of the elites, of course, have never been identical to the interests of ordinary people, and therefore it is not surprising that one of the most frequent criticisms of the EU concerns the ideologies and practices of the European business and political elites.

Another very common and justifiably repeated criticism refers to the lack of democracy and the absence of transparency in the institutions of the EU. The third fierce criticism of the EU concerns the fact that its institutions have created an unnecessarily cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus that is not only too expensive to maintain but also slows down economic processes, while at the same time harsh austerity measures are being introduced that mercilessly affect ordinary citizens. The EU has also created a whole series of other major problems such as uncontrolled migration, job losses, the collapse of living standards, and the impoverishment of the working class. However, what turned out to be the absolute biggest problem, and which will surely lead to either the disintegration of the European Union or some kind of European perestroika, is the fact that it destroys the national sovereignty and traditional cultures of its member states. There is not much left of the former defiance and contempt for American imperialism in the ranks of mainstream European politicians. Instead of Europe fighting for its interests with united forces, it seems that it is on the way to merging into some kind of concept of a new superstate under the working title of “the United States of America and Europe”, and this is happening mainly thanks to the Euro-Atlantic ideology that equated the interests of the nations of Europe with the interests of NATO. Because of all this, today the phenomenon of Eurofascism is justifiably spoken of as an ideological and political cannibal that kills and devours its children.

Although Eurofascism is very smooth and sweet-talking, its essence is still cruelty, and although this makes it less brutal than its ideological predecessors, it is far more hypocritical and perfidious. Mussolini and Hitler were thugs and villains, but they were quite honest about what they were doing, while modern Eurofascism goes about its business with a polite smile and wearing plush gloves. If the European fascists of the 20th century were ultra-nationalists, modern Eurofascism seems to rest on the motto “Europa über alles”, but it is only an illusion because it is more than obvious that the European nations are governed from the other side of La Manche and the Atlantic. There are many other reasons that compel us to call the current rule of European business and political elites an innovative form of fascism, and here we will list some of the most important moments.

First of all, the authoritarianism of the bureaucracy of the most important institutions of the European Union, which is imposed on its citizens as a necessary means to allegedly protect democracy and human rights, is undeniable. In fact, there are numerous mechanisms to completely bypass national parliamentary democracies and implement the will of the European administration at all costs, no matter how harmful it is for a particular nation of the EU. As for the persecution of the political opposition, fortunately there are still no mass arrests of their members and concentration camps, but that is why they are still very effectively suppressed by simply denying funding. This may not always leave them barely surviving and paralyzing their work entirely, but it certainly puts them in a very unequal position compared to the favorites of the elites. The Anglo-Saxon plutocratic and European business elites, of course, have no interest in funding left-wing and right-wing populist political parties that provide strong resistance to American hegemony and the European establishment by espousing beliefs such as Euroscepticism, anti-globalism, sovereignism, or conservative traditionalism, and that is why the winners of elections are generally known in advance.

The next characteristic of Eurofascism, which brings it into direct connection with the darkest pages of European history of the last century, is the tendency to strongly discipline the entire society with liberal, that is, when it comes to the economy, neoliberal doctrines. At the same time, although social mobility exists, the citizens of the European Union are increasingly resentful because there is a general impression that young Europeans, compared to the older generations, have much fewer opportunities to achieve their professional and family goals. The children of workers will most likely end up as workers themselves, while the children of more educated and better paid parents will have a better chance of getting a higher education and good jobs themselves. This means that the social hierarchy in the EU is rigid and difficult to change, and although this is far less pronounced than in classic fascist societies, there is still a worrying trend of decreasing social mobility. Summa summarum, Eurofascism simply works against the best interests of the nations and citizens of its member states, and it does so very meticulously, zealously, and ruthlessly.

If Eurofascism with its features mentioned so far, lags behind its predecessors, two of its worst features make it truly full-blooded fascism. The propaganda machinery of the EU is not only worthy of Joseph Goebbels, but it is safe to say that as a means of collective indoctrination it has surpassed the achievements of its great guru. European mass media like to brag about their supposed independence and objectivity, but they are managed from only a few centers of power. Euro-propaganda completely denies the necessity of dialogue and debate, and instead the final conclusions of various experts covering all possible aspects of social and political life are brutally imposed on the public. Therefore, the only thing left for Europeans is to make an effort to believe in what they are asked to accept as indisputable truth.

In the EU, criticism and free thought are not only becoming more and more unwelcome, but are increasingly being qualified as a punishable offense. At the end of the indictment, since the European Union is inseparable from NATO, militarism is a crime that gives Eurofascism a character that completely exposes it. If we were to compare Europe under Hitler’s occupation with today’s Euro-Atlantic one, we would see a huge number of similarities, including the effort to conquer Lebensraum in the East by military force. Among the differences, the most striking are these three: Eurofascism is much softer in relation to its citizens; it is not in conflict with the Anglo-Saxon elites but is subordinate to them; and finally, Europe is no longer governed from Berlin but from Washington and London, which could mean that the Russians will this time have to liberate not only continental capitals but also overseas ones.

The ever self-satisfied European elites are greatly mistaken if they think that the terrifying ramparts of repressive police systems they have erected between themselves and increasingly disaffected Europeans will be able to protect them from the growing anger of ordinary people for much longer. March started very badly for the Euro-Atlanticists. First, several tens of thousands of angry but dignified and proud citizens of Slovakia gathered in Bratislava for the “March for Peace,” where they resolutely demanded that their country withdraw from NATO as a matter of urgency, stop arming Ukraine, and instead establish the best possible relations with Russia. “Anglo-Saxon fascists out!”; “Slovaks and Russians — brothers forever!” shouted the demonstrators in the streets of the Slovak capital and cheered for Russia and Putin.

A week later, tens of thousands of angry Czechs, for who knows how many times in the past six months, took to the streets of defiant Prague, which had gathered hundreds of thousands of participants in similar protests before. In this latest, rather explosive revolt, citizens protested against poverty as a result of the proxy war that NATO is waging against Russia in Ukraine. “Stop the war, stop NATO!” shouted the dissatisfied Czechs, asking their government to finally address the problems of the Czech citizens instead of arming the Ukrainian Nazis. Just a day later, thousands of equally angry citizens of Sofia took to the squares and streets of the Bulgarian capital for demonstrations with a clear message: “NATO out!” Such protests are increasing throughout the European Union, and more and more people are participating in them despite open threats from the police and ministries of internal affairs that such manifestations will not be tolerated. To the dismay of the ruling Euro-Atlantic elites, Russian flags and symbols of Russian Special Military Operations are flying in the cities of France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia… As expected, the European mainstream media, as part of the Eurofascist propaganda machine, completely ignored or censored reports on all these events, but the truth could not be hidden. To the great delight of many, social networks were flooded with recordings, photos, and reports from all these numerous and massive protests against NATO and poverty, the culmination of which is still expected at the beginning of April.

Throughout the EU, even before February 2022, there was growing concern about the rising cost of living, but things are now slowly becoming unbearable for its citizens. Official surveys from November last year showed that the majority of Romanians, Poles, and Portuguese believe that their lives have gone in a very bad direction — downhill. Slovaks, Estonians, and Croats are the most dissatisfied, while Greeks and Belgians believe that their position in the European Union will worsen even more. And while ordinary Europeans are tormented by growing financial headaches that are directly related to NATO’s involvement in the Ukrainian war, the names of European leaders are increasingly and publicly linked to numerous financial embezzlements, tax evasion, and other exposed scandals.

For example, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently found himself in the spotlight when he was publicly accused of abusing his political influence to help Warburg Bank avoid paying back 47 million euros in illegal tax refunds. The same Scholz pretends not to know that the sanctions of the collective West against Russia, designed by the Americans, cause the most damage to Germany. Another high-profile European politician, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, also found herself on the pole of shame when an official investigation was launched against her in connection with murky dealings in the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines. There are reasonable suspicions that von der Leyen contracted for the procurement of vaccines even though she did not have the authority to do so herself. This is not her first affair. As the German Minister of Defense, Ursula von der Leyen was accused of awarding the most lucrative contracts to one and the same manufacturers, and it seems that in order to cover up these shady deals, she deleted all incriminating data from her phone.

We could also mention the scandals involving Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, French Minister Damien Abad, and many others because the list of European politicians’ scandals is long, which suits the interests of the USA very well. Specifically, corrupt politicians who are under strong public pressure and are under investigation are very easy to manipulate due to their vulnerability. Is it any wonder then that Olaf Scholz and Ursula von der Leyen, whose names have been used here as an example of the involvement of European politicians in scandals, are inveterate russophobes, warmongers, and all in all, “useful idiots” for the interests of the Anglo-Saxon plutocratic elites?

The citizens of the European Union are becoming more and more aware of a fact that cannot leave them indifferent. Thanks to the political elites who represent them, ordinary Europeans will not only be forced to bear the largest part of the costs of the Anglo-Saxon war against Russia, but similarly to the Ukrainians, in the very near future they will also have to pay for that war with their lives. Thanks to the arrogance and recklessness of Eurofascists, decent Europeans can expect only deep poverty, hunger, war and death. That is why we are not surprised by the dramatic increase in Euroscepticism in almost all member states of the EU, and what is especially important, in France and Germany.

All those anti-NATO protests in the countries of Eastern Europe, no matter how much they are based on indisputable truths and noble ideas, will not succeed in thwarting the aggressive plans of the Euro-Atlanticists without the full support of the rebellious French and Germans. The collapse of Eurofascism and the expulsion of the Anglo-Saxon fascists from the Old Continent are only possible if the two largest Western European nations, which participated in the creation of the EU, decide to do so. Only the citizens of France and Germany have not only the necessary courage, but also the strength and numbers to stand up to the dictates of the Brussels fascists, and this especially applies to the traditionally revolutionary-minded French, whose intolerance of injustice is written in their genetic code.

French President Macron, a typical European elitist, Euro-Atlanticist, and arrogant globalist loyal to overseas power centers but completely blind and deaf to the interests of ordinary citizens of France, has been in open conflict with his own people for some time. Macron’s image with the French public has been permanently damaged, and at this point, support for his coalition in the electorate has fallen to just 22%. The French president showed some flexibility in 2018 and 2019 and somehow managed to politically survive the Yellow Vest Movement, but it seems likely that he will have to back down in the face of persistent and fierce unrest caused by his pension reform. Millions of French people who are not ready to give up their struggle are taking part in these protests in more than 30 cities in France.

Namely, Macron, justifiably fearing that his government would not be able to secure the necessary majority in order to adopt the bill on raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, which was done at the request of the European Union, decided to use the infamous Article 49.3 of the French constitution, which allows laws to be promulgated without having to be voted on in parliament. A vote of no confidence in the government on March 20 was the last chance to stop this unpopular law, but it did not happen. The French government survived, but with only nine votes. Thus, bypassing the parliament, the law on pension reform was pushed through by force. Citizens of France, especially in large cities such as Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, and Toulouse, have been peacefully protesting against the controversial bill since January, but the news of its adoption without a vote in parliament immediately radicalized the situation. Protest gatherings of citizens became more massive, explosive, and violent, which was certainly contributed to by the brutality of the French police and gendarmes. Excessive use of force and random arrests of protesters by law enforcement officers led to strong protests by the French far right and far left, and the French Defender of Rights, Claire Hédon, and Amnesty International also reacted.

Schools are closed across France, airports are blocked, rail traffic is at a standstill, many refineries have stopped working, there is a shortage of fuel, and due to strikes, interruptions in the supply of electricity are also threatened. On the streets of Paris, due to the strike of city sanitation workers, tons of garbage are piling up, so that the city of light has been overrun by rats. It is a tragic picture of Macron’s France today, but also a mirror of the European Union. If in the beginning the protesters demanded the stopping of the controversial pension bill in a peaceful manner and parallel to the workers’ strikes, now there has been not only a radicalization of the protests but also the unification of numerous other demands into a single front.

In France, there is now an open rebellion against Macron’s rule, against the further arming of Ukraine, and against NATO membership. If, based on the way he categorized the unrest in Iran, we were to apply Macron’s own standards to the current state of affairs in France, we would conclude that the French president is facing nothing less than an open revolution. In any case, citizen dissatisfaction is growing in Europe, which is becoming more and more dangerous, as evidenced by the largest strike in Germany in the last 30 years, due to low wages, i.e., drastic price increases and a drop in the purchasing power of ordinary people. According to some polls, as many as 55% of German citizens supported this mass strike organized by the Railway and Transport Union (EVG) and the United Services Trade Union (Verdi) that practically brought the entire country to a standstill. Finally, thousands of dissatisfied Czechs took to the streets of Prague again on March 29, this time protesting against the announcement of a reform of the pension system that is even worse than the one imposed on the French, but the culprit is the same — the European Union.

Last August, the Minister of Justice of the Czech Republic, Pavel Blažek, warned that the crisis in the energy sector, as a result of the conflict between the EU and Russia, could lead to a pan-European revolution and threaten the very survival of the European Union. It is safe to say that the current situation in Europe is indeed pre-revolutionary, but not only because of the energy crisis but also because of numerous other consequences of the war in Ukraine, and mainly because European leaders have proven in front of the eyes of the whole world that the EU does not have its own independent foreign policy but is completely subordinate to Washington. Therefore, this is no longer just a conspiracy theory. The evident increase in anti-American sentiment in Europe is proof that the citizens of the EU are very aware of this huge problem that no one will be able to hide under the carpet anymore.

Although the European nations have nothing to gain and can lose absolutely everything by participating in the American proxy war against Russia, the leaders of the EU have chosen a course that is diametrically opposed to the most vital interests of its citizens. The EU is now faced not only with an energy crisis but also with a dramatic increase in the cost of living, a weakening of the economy, inflation, and rising interest rates. Even worse, according to many financial experts, the collapse of American banks could very quickly be transmitted to Europe through a chain reaction and lead to complete chaos. French academic Thierry de Montbrial, executive chairman of the French Institute of International Relations and founder and chairman of the World Policy Conference, warned of how much damage the sanctions against Russia are causing to the European economy. The most vital economies of the European Union, France, Germany, and Italy, had very strong economic ties with Russia before the start of the war in Ukraine, which also means that the economic stability of the entire EU largely depended on good relations with Moscow, which are now seriously and perhaps irreparably damaged. De Montbrial claims that Europe is in serious danger of impoverishment, while the USA could be “the big winner from this war” in economic terms.

On the monolithic structure of Eurofascism as an essential but freakish political entity of the EU, a deep crack is visible that clearly hints at its imminent collapse. If there had been no war in Ukraine, the character of that totalitarian and undemocratic political monstrosity might never have become so obvious to the vast majority of Europeans. What is needed today, not only by France, but also by all of Europe, is the best of authentic Gaullism. De Gaulle, unlike Macron, who these days is threatened by protesters with the fate of Louis XVI, was a righteous leader of his people, a true patriot, a great Eurosceptic, and a fierce sovereignist who adhered to the “Anglo-Saxons out” principle. He managed not only to fight for complete independence from the USA, which Europeans today could only dream of, but also to resolutely oppose the British and all others whom he considered harming the interests of France.

Thus, in 1966, de Gaulle withdrew France, which he had previously made the third nuclear power in the world, from the joint command of NATO, and there is no doubt that he would do the same today, since he was intimately sympathetic to Russia and believed that it was part of European civilization. It is clear that there will be more and more violent protests across Europe and that a European revolution is on the horizon. That emerging revolution has two strong arms, the left and the right, because only with two hands can the monster of Eurofascism be strangled. Only by crushing Eurofascism and expelling the Anglo-Saxon fascists from the Old Continent can the world be saved from a nuclear holocaust. And who knows, maybe at the end of that revolution, Lord Ismay will roll over in his grave because the Anglo-Saxon fascists will be out, the Russians within their historical borders, and the French, Germans, and other European nations will no longer have to kneel before anyone.

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 26, 2023 2:38 pm

How Ordinary People Become Nazis: A Review of Robert Gellately’s “Hitler’s True Believers”
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 25, 2023
Charles Wofford

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Imagine a political speech so venomous, so hate filled, so threatening, that at times it is impossible to understand the speaker. He rages against enemies foreign and domestic, against capitalism, against communism, against ethnic and political minorities, against disabled people, and insists on the superiority of his own nation. Thousands of torch-bearing zealots respond with orgasmic delirium. Is it not obvious who this image is supposed to evoke?

The image of German fascism as an overwhelming, cult-like madness is common and is re enforced by the Hollywoodization of the Nazis. In popular media Nazis might as well be demons who merely appear as human. As a result the protagonist may kill them without any guilty conscience. Ironically, this same mechanism of spectacle-induced failure of conscience found extensive use in German fascism. The radical Othering of the Nazis is comforting; it ensures us that it couldn’t happen here, it couldn’t happen to us, because the Nazis are not us, they are the radical Other.

In Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis, Robert Gellately shows that the German fascists were far more rational and normal than we often imagine. This is not his endorsement, of course. Gellately’s real accomplishment is in showing how normal the Nazis were without “normalizing” them, showing how rational they were without “rationalizing” their atrocities. The Nazis were not the radical Other; most of them were not very different from us. They went to work, followed the law, and loved their families. The lesson is how easily it all happened to the German people, how every step along the way made sense at the time, and by implication how easily the same thing could happen to us. Perhaps it already has.

The German people were aware of the regime’s crimes; indeed, they were in many cases active participants. If it were not for mass grassroots initiative the Nazis would not have been as successful as they were. Gellately writes of racial persecution, “It was all so public and impossible to overlook. […] The public did more than stand idly by, because numerous individuals cooperated in the enforcement of racial policy, before and after the milestone reached with the Nuremburg Laws in 1935” (263).

The most difficult lesson for those of us on the Left is recognizing that the “socialism” in “National Socialism” is not just a moniker but had real content. German fascism was a broth of nationalism, socialism, and antisemitism. The nationalist angle put it in opposition to the international socialism of Marxism, and the socialism positioned it as a foe to the bourgeois democracies of France, Britain, and the United States. Though the Nazis were hostile to the idea of abolishing all private property, they did seriously attempt to abolish finance capital (which, of course, they linked with Jewish influence), and they did attempt to nationalize several industries to wield them in the name of the German people. The antisemitic conspiracy mongering enabled the fusion, as the German fascists cast their capitalist foes and their Marxist foes as two sides of the same Jewish-led effort at world domination. The negative manifestation of this worldview culminated in the Holocaust. The positive vision was the Volksgemeinschaft.

Volksgemeinschaft is the National Socialist utopia; a futuristic vision of a society living in harmony with nature. “Nature” here is conceptualized in terms of a bogus blood-and-soil theory, but that was not an invention of the Nazis. Similar forms of racism were widely entertained throughout the global scientific community. “Volk” literally means “people,” but refers to a racialized concept of it as in the Völkisch Movement of late 19th century Germany. “Gemeinschaft” may be translated as “community,” but refers more to tight-knit communities of people who know each other personally (contrast Gesellschaft, a more rationalist conception of society as defined through social contracts, rational self-interest, etc.) Volksgemeinschaft is what emerged from the blending of nationalism and socialism. Its racism makes it repugnant to an internationalist or humanist perspective championed by the Left, while its community-oriented nature is repellant to today’s neoliberal individualism. The point here is that the Nazis were anti-humanist and reactionary, but they were also futurist and modern. They were not conservative.

But that recognition puts us in a difficult spot. Today’s popular left discourse has committed itself to an outright denial of any authentically socialist character to German fascism. So acknowledging that National Socialism is one of the infinite conceivable varieties of socialism leaves the Left rhetorically exposed. One of the foundational premises of socialism is that society is what we make it. We can therefore arrange society however we wish. But our time and place is so hyper capitalistic, and its ideology so individualist, that any and all socialisms are seen as equivalent. Yet the figures who became major Nazi leaders had, in Gellately’s words, “an obsession about socialism. Indeed, thanks to the creation of a welfare state from 1881 onward, reinforced by the social impact of the war, a degree of socialism engrained itself in German society and was enshrined in the Weimar Republic’s constitution” (41).

The place of socialism in the Nazi vision was not unambiguous, and there were internal debates. Gellately relates a debate between the Nazi Left represented by Gregor Strasser and the Nazi Right represented by Alfred Rosenberg.

If Gregor Strasser bowed to Hitler’s authority or at least his political abilities, he still advocated a more socialistic line. As might be expected, Alfred Rosenberg, as one of the party’s self-styled ideological experts and a die-hard anti-Bolshevist, pushed back in a newspaper article in early 1927. Nationalism in its purest form, he said, united with socialism and, if stripped of any internationalism, represented the nation’s spirit of liberation. Hence, emphasizing the socialism in the Party’s name (as Strasser and his comrades wanted) was wrong, because the main point of their activity was to rescue the nation. Strasser replied quickly that socialism meant more than merely using the state to protect the people from capitalist greed, as Rosenberg would have it. Instead, it aimed to create another form of economic life and implied the participation of workers in ownership, profit, and management. This socialism accepted that private property was the basis of all culture and because capitalism was an immoral system that stole the nation’s goods, the state had to step in to restore fairness (77).

These debates abated as the Right wing of the party took greater control. Eventually the Strassers were marginalized, and the working class elements of the party leadership liquidated in a series of purges. But their socialist contributions were still a part of Nazi doctrine, and if they did not represent a powerful wing of the party there would have been no need to purge them in the first place.

Another difficult lesson: many devoted Nazis in the 1930s had been equally devoted communists and socialists in the 1920s. The Nazis did not come to power primarily through violence; they persuaded the vast majority of Germans (and Austrians, and many others across Europe) that they really were the way forward. A big part of that was refuting of the Treaty of Versailles. The humiliations it imposed on Germany were despised by the entire population, so that anything done to escape its terms was met with enormous praise, and even foreigners were in admiration of Germany’s unwillingness to stay down.

Hitler’s True Believers belongs to a genre of “How the Nazis Came to Power.” It is not a strictly historical genre, and it includes such varied titles as Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason and William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. No matter the angle, the point is generally the same: this movement of German National Socialism, which culminated in mass murder on an industrial scale and the self-immolation of European civilization, emerged from beliefs and social structures that had been present in Europe for centuries, and every step of its development made sense at the time. National Socialism was not an aberration or explosion of barbarism in the midst of an otherwise civilized world. It was the culmination of particular processes of civilization which contained these murderous possibilities from early on. The hideous racism of the Nazis was well-supported by the scientific establishments of the time. Hitler’s survival-of-the-fittest mentality was derived from theories in the natural sciences (particularly Darwin) applied to the social realm. The Nazis saw Bolshevism as the death of civilization and the Western democracies as its decay. Thus they were (in their own minds) the sentinels of civilization, driven by science, united in their desire for progress toward a newly unified society, the Volksgemeinschaft.

One clear parallel to our own predicament is in the rhetoric employed to defend American military presence around the world. Neuroscientist and public commentator Sam Harris, for instance, is known for arguing that American-committed atrocities just aren’t as morally bad as those committed by official enemies, since we are “well-intentioned,” while they are not. But that merely brings us back to the issue of a failure of conscience. For the Nazis it was that they were Das Herrenrasse (the master race) while their victims were Die Untermenschen (sub-humans). For the French it was the cultural appeal: they were “civilized” and on a “civilizing mission” (Mission Civilisatrice), while the colonized were primitive. Whether we appeal to the Nazi blood theory, the French cultural theory, or Harris’s intention theory, the end is to facilitate that same failure of recognition, that same failure of conscience, which we also inflict on ourselves through our representations of the Nazis in popular media.

Hitler’s True Believers will remind leftists of the importance of internationalism. Yet even this concept is too limiting. In an era of mass anthropogenic environmental destruction and mass extinction, not even humanism is sufficiently broad. After National Socialism there is no excuse for blindly trusting humanism, enlightenment, science, rationality, technology, “the People,” “the Proletariat,” or any other idealized construct to save us from ourselves. These ideas must be engaged critically, their limits registered, and their employment must be razor-sharp. If we fail this challenge, then we may already have one foot in the jackboot.

My copy of Hitler’s True Believers shows on its cover a crowd of bright-eyed Germans giving the Roman salute, presumably to their Führer off camera. The focus of the photo is a young woman, flanked by several soldiers and many children. The exuberance on their faces is beautiful. It is hard to see anything political inspiring such admiration in 21st century America. Consider how defeated, how humiliated, how despairing many Germans were after World War I; is it so hard to understand why they would want to believe in something that could inspire that sort of joy? Our contemporary situation is also marked by widespread depression, anxiety, and despair about the future. How easy would it be for a Hitleresque figure to bring us all, by dint of our own reason, to the brink?

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... believers/

Socialism is internationalist, period. National Socialism restricted the 'socialism' to the tribe and thus is no kind of socialism at all. This book brings to mind a book I read years ago, 'Germans Into Nazis', which was good on details but the thesis, that the Germans response to the Nazi was some sort of innate desire for group solidarity I found wanting.
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Fri May 19, 2023 2:34 pm

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Police officers ask a man wearing a shirt showing hammer and sickle to close his jacket outside the tomb of the Soviet War memorial at the park in Treptow, during the 78th anniversary of Victory Day and the end of WWII in Europe, in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, May 9, 2023. [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber]

May 8 and the rehabilitation of Nazism in Germany
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on May 12, 2023 by Peter Schwarz (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted May 13, 2023)

On 8 and 9 May, Berlin traditionally hosts numerous commemorative events to mark the end of the Second World War in Europe. On these two dates, the German Wehrmacht signed the unconditional surrender in 1945 in Reims, France, and in Berlin-Karlshorst, Germany. The Nazi regime was finally crushed. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide eight days earlier.

The main burden of the struggle against Hitler’s Germany was borne by the Red Army of the Soviet Union, which defeated the Wehrmacht under immense sacrifices. At least 13 million Soviet soldiers and 14 million civilians lost their lives in the war. But at the Berlin commemorative events this year, the displaying of the Soviet flag was forbidden. The Berlin Senate called on more than 1,500 police officers to enforce the ban on the three Soviet memorials in Treptower Park, Tiergarten and Schönholzer Heide. There were more police officers than visitors.

On the other hand, it was permissible to show the Ukrainian flag, which was only used by collaborators who were deeply involved in the crimes of the Nazis during World War II. For example, the Melnyk wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-M) used the blue-yellow flag with a trident, as it is also used today in Ukraine.

While the vast majority of Ukrainian men and women, along with their Russian and other Soviet comrades in the Red Army, fought against the Nazis, the OUN-M and the rival wing around Stepan Bandera (OUN-B) joined German SS units and participated in mass murders that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians.

The decision to ban the display of the Soviet flag at the commemorative events was ultimately taken by the High Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg. The police originally banned both Soviet and Russian as well as Ukrainian flags and justified this on the grounds that they could provoke violence against the background of the Ukrainian war. The Berlin Administrative Court lifted this ban again on the basis of a lawsuit. At the request of the police, the High Administrative Court decided to ban only the Soviet and Russian flags and to admit the Ukrainian flag.

The political significance of this decision is unequivocal: 78 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime, it is forbidden in the German capital to show the flag of the liberators. The flag of collaborators and war criminals is welcome. A clearer commitment to the criminal policy of the Nazi regime is hardly conceivable.

This is not an isolated case or a misstep. The scandalous ban illustrates how advanced the trivialization of Nazi crimes in Germany is. Not a single significant media outlet and no established party has objected to it.

The trivialization of National Socialism is inseparable from the return of German militarism. The IYSSE already warned in 2014: “The revival of German militarism requires a new interpretation of history that trivializes the crimes of the Nazi era.” At the time, the youth organization of the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) protested against the historian Jörg Baberowski, who had defended the Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte in Der Spiegel and declared that Hitler was “not vicious.”

This warning has been confirmed in the intervening years. Even then, almost all the media, the leadership of the Humboldt University and numerous politicians supported Baberowski and denounced the IYSSE for daring to criticize the far-right professor. Close cooperation with the right-wing and fascists has since become commonplace, not only in Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany sits on all important parliamentary committees, but also in Berlin’s foreign policy.

In official Berlin, nobody is bothered by the fact that the German-backed and -armed Zelensky regime erects monuments for Nazi collaborators and mass murderers, names numerous streets after them, cleanses the country of Russian culture (even Alexander Pushkin and other representatives of world literature are not spared) and bans numerous left-wing parties.

In the Baltic states, too, the German government and the German army work closely together with forces that revere members of the Nazi SS as heroes.

If one follows the bellicose propaganda with which the population in Germany is daily bombarded, one gets the impression that large parts of the ruling elites deeply regretted that Hitler had not achieved his goal of conquering and destroying Moscow.

In a long commentary on 7 May, F.A.Z. journalist Konrad Schuller urged Ukraine to immediately join NATO to provide it with a “nuclear umbrella.” He warned of a “painful stalemate” if the announced offensive of the Ukrainians remains unsuccessful. The “vigilance” of the West could then weaken and “the temptation to put scarce money into other projects rather than into weapons” grows.

After NATO “had already gone out on a limb for Ukraine with material and ideological aid,” Schuller said, its solemn promises would turn out to be empty words. “The allies could then scatter like chickens when the hawk arrives.” Therefore, Ukraine must receive much more money and weapons than it does now.

Less than 80 years after large parts of Europe and Germany lay in ruins, people like Schuller are again ready to unleash a nuclear inferno to satisfy their imperialist world power fantasies.

In reality, the German ruling class has never resigned itself to the defeat of Hitler. After the end of the war, it took a full 40 years for a German head of state to refer to May 8 as “Liberation Day” for the first time. But Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, whose father was convicted as a war criminal in Nuremberg, also added at the time: “May 8 is not a day for us Germans to celebrate.”

Today, Weizsäcker’s Christian Democratic Union posts on social media that May 8, 1945 is indeed a “day of liberation,” but “also a day of immeasurable suffering.”

Immeasurable suffering for whom, one wonders. For the surviving concentration camp inmates? For the few Jews who had escaped their murderers? For the workers who had not come to terms with the Nazis and were spied on and terrorized by the Gestapo? For the Greeks, Yugoslavs, Poles and Soviet citizens whose livelihoods and lives were destroyed by the Nazis? For the young men who were forced into uniforms and massacred at the front? Or for the fat Nazi henchmen and entrepreneurs who had enriched themselves with Aryanization and forced labor and now feared for their fortunes—which, unfortunately, remained with them.

When the historian Ernst Nolte made his first attempt to rehabilitate National Socialism in 1986, he suffered a devastating defeat in the historians’ dispute (Historikerstreit). When Baberowski defended Nolte in 2014, he was met with open arms. Today, if Nolte were still alive (he died in 2016), he would be showered with prizes.

The rehabilitation of National Socialism has objective causes. German imperialism is confronted with the same insoluble contradictions as at the beginning of the twentieth century. And it is trying to solve them with the same barbaric methods.

Imprisoned in fragmented Europe, the dynamic German economy at the beginning of the twentieth century urgently needed raw materials, investment opportunities and markets. But these were already divided among the old colonial powers. During the First World War, Germany fought against France, Great Britain and the Tsarist Empire, which was allied with France and, with its enormous territory, offered great opportunities for expansion.

But Germany lost the war. Instead of victory came the revolution, which German capitalism only survived with the help of the Social Democrats. The real winner of the war was another rising power: the United States.

The Second World War was a gigantic attempt to correct the result of the first. Germany tried to bring Europe under its rule and smash the Soviet Union in order to challenge the world power, the USA. To this end, a conspiracy around Reich President Paul von Hindenburg with the support of leading economic and military circles in January 1933 brought Adolf Hitler to power. His regime had two tasks: the violent crushing of the workers’ movement, which rejected war and militarism, and the concentration of all the country’s forces on rearmament and war.

But Germany also lost the Second World War. German capitalism survived, partly because the U.S. needed it as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. In the post-war decades, it thrived and expanded in the slipstream of U.S. imperialism. But that changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, the conflicts between the imperialist powers have intensified.

The U.S. is trying to offset its economic decline by one brutal war after another. The German government supports these wars partly openly, partly indirectly, in order to become a European leader and a world power. One day after the start of the war in Ukraine, it launched the largest rearmament offensive since 1945. Like the U.S., it is steadily escalating its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and is not even shying away from nuclear annihilation.

This explains the changed view of Hitler, whose furious hatred of the Soviet Union, Marxism and the organized workers’ movement are now again gaining positive sides.

Above all, parts of the affluent urban middle class, which have enriched themselves in recent years by the stock and real estate boom, while the incomes of the workers fell, have found favor with imperialism. This explains the transformation of the Greens, which initially presented themselves as anti-fascist and pacifist, into ardent militarists.

The danger of a nuclear world war can only be stopped by an independent movement of the international working class that combines the struggle against social inequality and war with the struggle against its cause, capitalism. The same insoluble contradictions of capitalism that drive the ruling class towards war also create the conditions for the socialist revolution.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/13/may-8-a ... n-germany/
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:40 pm

Georgi Dimitrov’s ‘‘United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War’’ and its Value for Our Moment
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 2, 2023
Turner Roth

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Introduction

In a period of increasing tensions, where world powers, caught in the systemic compulsions of our contemporary capitalism dominated by the United States axis, draw closer to forms of world-historical conflict, a third world war being that thing which may if it comes to pass seal the fate of the human species on this planet, it becomes ever more relevant and pressing to read the ideas of those who came before us who confronted these conditions of imperialism, war, and the political-social-economic degeneration into that which we call fascism. Georgi Dimitrov (18 June 1882 – 2 July 1949), Bulgarian communist and leader of the Communist International from 1935 to 1943, later the leader of Bulgaria from 1946 to 1949, was one of those whose written and practical activity reflected in the highest degree a committed engagement with that which can be created to oppose the forms of large-scale destruction embodied in early to mid-century fascism.

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If today we are still living under those forms that threaten to engulf the entire world in flames, it is a reminder that we are needing ever more to comprehend what is happening around us, and how best to going about changing it. To understand the conditions of the present, however, necessitates a living engagement with that which precedes us, whose liniments form the historical conditions of what is in effect in the contemporaneity of our moment. As much as it feels to be the case that the time of the past ever faster recedes from where we are in the present, such that our contemporary problems seem to be all consumed within the very proximate conditions that form it, this epoch of the 1930s within which Dimitrov wrote the majority of his most important writings, collected in the work we will be exploring here, his “United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War” published in 1938 containing speeches and texts from the period of the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935, this epoch still holds great relevance for us to understand, as talk of a third world war becomes increasingly heard. Dimitrov’s writings in this period represent a deep theoretical and practical investigation and experimentation of those forms of struggle needed to prevent war, defeat fascism, and create a society built on the leadership of working people in which the horrors of war and domination have been transcended. While the conditions that Dimitrov was responding to and trying to intervene in were certainly different, there are undoubtedly many aspects of the struggle at this time and forms of organization that correspond to it that hold contemporary relevance. For what Dimitrov puts forward is not a set of dogmas extracted from a mix of experience and abstract logic, extended as universal, unchanging principles to guide all action at all times and places, but rather a mobile and historically open set of organizational problems that, while relevant wherever the fight for socialism and collective leadership occurs, do not proscribe any practical formulae that can simply be copied out from the book page to reality. Dimitrov poses open questions and problems of organization, revolving, as we shall see, around the ideas of unity and opposition.

The dialectical movement of these terms create the historical-material method of investigation and analysis that seeks to form the theoretical reflection and guide to action of the practical organizations that are the sole legitimizing and teleological fulfillment of what is postulated in theory. Dimitrov studied and applied the teachings of Marx and Lenin within the organizational structure of the international communist movement, defining what that means in practice within the period of the spread of fascism. The theoretical clarity and practical commitment of Georgi Dimitrov, the questions and problems he posed to his own time that even today, nearly 90 years later, still leap forth with the urgency of flesh and blood, are those that we will here try to draw out in a systematic way, showing the relations between the concepts and the reasons why they were formed.

We will be spending the majority of time looking at Dimitrov’s main report delivered to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International,” but we’ll consider as well alongside it his speech in reply to the discussion of his report entitled “Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism” along with his speech delivered at the close of the Congress, entitled “The Present Rulers of the Capitalist Countries Are But Temporary; The Real Master of the World Is the Proletariat.” We will also consider some speeches and texts from the years following 1935, principally his essays entitled “The Struggle for Peace” and “The People’s Front” of 1936. It is the hope of this analysis that a sense of the overall movement and claims of these writings are made clear in their interrelations so that a stronger theoretical grasp of the historical forms of relation to these themes is built up in order that we may be better able to approach the complexities of our moment. No simple reduction of the present to the past forms will suffice to clear the way for a proper theoretical and practical engagement today, but with an understanding of the past in hand, our understanding and thus possibility for action become enriched with the content of accumulated historical experience, on whose basis alone can we hope to advance soundly through all that remains unknown and unfinished.

What Is Fascism?

According to the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist Inter-national, fascism is defined as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”. As it was for Lenin, so for Dimitrov fascism is that which comes about as a way of “solving” the crises brought about through imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. The ruling bourgeoisie come to seek salvation in it as a way of shifting the burden of increasing capitalist crisis and instability squarely onto the backs of the workers.

Fascism thus is the outright dictatorship of finance capital, the logic of financial capital expressed in its highest form of negation of the working class. But fascism is not only the defeat of the working class, it is also the defeat of the liberal-democratic bourgeois political order: it is the open terroristic vengeance against even the limited forms of democratic rights as they exist within capitalist societies, the thoroughgoing exclusion of all forms of independence and formal liberties.

Fascism produces a qualitative, not simply quantitative, change in the existing political order. But fascism does not come onto the scene all at once. There is rather a quantitative buildup of reactionary measures put in place by the national bourgeoisie that, if not successfully countered, threaten to open up a qualitative rupture that brings onto the scene the open dictatorship of finance capital: “Before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory”.

Social-Democratic leaders, adherents of the Second International and those who led or were in coalitional governments in the various European countries that most proximately were affected by the rise of fascism at this time, betrayed the people according to Dimitrov, helping create the conditions for destruction of the working class in those areas and moments when the fascist threat was not properly seen for what it was. Those who are not able to mobilize united resistance to the quantitative heightening of fascist forces will not be able to prevent the qualitative change of bourgeois democracy into that of fascism. In this sense, these misleaders of the workers bear the historical responsibility for this failure.

But how does fascism take hold of the people? In relation to an ineffective fightback against it, fascism was effective in taking on the garb of the revolutionary working-class movements, concealing its alliance to the most oppressive capitalist actors through playing on the desperation of the masses and the genuine impulse for revolutionary change. “Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses, but it approaches them with the most artful anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, trusts and financial magnates, and advancing those slogans which at the given moment are most alluring to the politically immature masses” . And so, dressed in the garb of anti-capitalism, fascism institutes an even deeper system of exploitation than that practiced under bourgeois liberal democracies. A new state bureaucracy is formed that functions to an even greater degree as the facilitator of surplus value extraction; monopoly capital is expanded through the outright dictatorial control the state wields over the workers, who have lost even the right to organize, strike, and circulate information. Fascism claims that it will liberate the countryside from the tyranny of the landowners and the banks, but instead only further plunges agricultural workers into domination and servitude.

How was fascism able to come to power? Dimitrov responds that it is because of the class collaborationism of the social-democrats and the weakness of the communist parties to lead a decisive struggle against fascism that fascism was able to accede to power, despite being contrary to the interests of the majority of the people. If the German and Austrian masses had followed the road of the Russian Bolsheviks and not those of the collaborationist social-democrats, “Not the bourgeoisie, but the working class would long ago have been the master of the situation in Europe”. Instead of taking this road, the social-democrats instead granted concessions to the most reactionary forces of the bourgeoisie and split the masses through refusing to form united action with the communist parties and the revolutionary workers. The social-democratic leaders refused to bring the force of the state against the rising fascist movement, instead using the state apparatus to repress and hogtie the communists. Instead of going against the banks that were ruining the peasants, they collaborated with them, which was a central condition of fascism’s spread in the countryside. In Spain, the same story of class collaboration applies, wherein the socialists failed to unite forces, failed to go after the banks, the landlords, failed to purge the armed forces of fascist elements, and failed to fortify the electoral system to prevent the fascists from taking it over. Fascism also was able to take in a large section of the youth through its harnessing of their resentment toward the continued immiseration of living standards overseen by social-democratic administrations, as well as offering youth a promise of a better future through militant activity, which the social-democrats had completely abandoned.

While these conditions apply, Dimitrov does not eschew looking inward as well, pointing to a number of errors committed by the communist parties, which to an extent also bear responsibility for the rise of fascism. A persistent underemphasis of the fascist threat by communists led to a lack of conviction that it presented one of the greatest dangers to the working classes of the world, and hence a lack of organizational defense and sufficient mobilization needed to counter it. Many communists believed that in a country like Germany with long-standing worker movements and a well-established bourgeois democracy, fascism would not be able to take hold. Further, “In a number of countries the necessary development of a mass fight against fascism was replaced by barren hair-splitting as to the nature of fascism “in general” and by a narrow sectarian attitude in formulating and solving the immediate political tasks of the Party”. Despite these errors of both the communists and the social-democrats, Dimitrov emphasizes that preventing fascism was still possible at the time of his writing, and gives a number of conditions needed to be fulfilled in order for that to happen. The working class would need to unite its forces on a much larger scale in order to neutralize those sections of the working class and petty bourgeoisie that fell under its influence. There would need to be strong revolutionary parties that broke definitively with class collaboration and lead the masses. There would need to be a policy of struggle suited to where the uneducated and backward masses stand, leading them steadfastly to see that fascism is a direct threat to them. Finally, there must be a spirit of fight and determination to not cede an inch to fascism and to strike at it wherever it appears. “These are the main conditions for preventing the growth of fascism and its accession to power”.

Yet while fascism had already taken hold of large swaths of the populations of Europe, Dimitrov emphasizes that its hold on power is fundamentally unstable because the forms of resolution to contradictions it attempts to enforce only accentuates class conflict. “The existence of the capitalist system, the existence of various classes and the accentuation of class contradictions inevitably tend to undermine and explode the political monopoly of fascism”. Another reason for instability is related to this, in that despite its proclamations of anti-capitalism crafted to lure in the discontented masses, fascism serves only to aggravate those class contradictions, deepening the divide between the propertyless masses and the integrated monopoly capitalists and fascist state bureaucrats. It also appropriates a large portion of the national resources for war, which only intensifies inter-capitalist rivalries and leads to instability.

But despite these instabilities,

“Fascism will not collapse automatically. It is only the revolutionary activity of the working class which can help to take advantage of the conflicts which inevitably arise within the bourgeois camp in order to undermine the fascist dictatorship and to overthrow it”.

Yet such seizing of initiative to undermine fascism is difficult, if not impossible, so long as class-collaboration persists, which is precisely what the social-democrats in Germany represented, who bear the majority of historical culpability for the rise and taking over of fascism in their refusal to form a united front with communists.

To be continued…

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 05, 2023 3:24 pm

Fascism is the Western Answer to Class Struggle
Posted on August 4, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. While the word “fascism” or “fascist” is deployed way too casually as an epithet, sometimes labels like this are apt. Robert Urie below argues why.

To add to Urie’s analysis, we have been calling the US a Mussolini-style corpocracy as early as 2008 (see Mussolini-Style Corporatism in Action: Treasury Conference Call on Bailout Bill to Analysts (Updated), and extended that observation, over time, such as in a 2015 post: Mussolini-Style Corporatism, aka Fascism, on the Rise in the US. Germane snippets:

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. Confucius

One of the distressing things about politics in the US is the way words have either been stripped of their meaning or become so contested as to undermine the ability to communicate and analyze. It’s hard to get to a conversation when you and your interlocutors don’t have the same understanding of basic terms….

Now admittedly, the new neoliberal economic order is not a replay of fascism, so there is reason not to apply the “f” word wholesale. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable amount of inhibition in calling out the similarities where they exist.


Again, remember that this post was from 2015. Since then, we have had a rise of what Lambert has called “authoritarian followership” among liberals and Team Dem, and increased self and actual media/social media censorship, rising to the level of legislation in the EU and pending legislation in the US. Readers no doubt can provide more examples of the use of state power to curb dissent. Critically, thugs appearing in the middle of the night are less necessary for coercion; now making people near or actually unemployable via cancelling them or even worse, cutting them off from bank services, does the job without the risk of ugly photos.

By Robert Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

Setting aside culture war animosities for the moment to consider the direction of politics in the US— to the extent that doing so is psychologically and / or economically possible for dedicated culture warriors, recent revelations that the FBI and CIA were active participants in the 2016 and 2020 national elections run headlong into longer history. While ‘American democracy’ has always been tenuous and abstract (‘representative’), the US has now returned to a pre- and inter-War melding of state with commercial interests. The American political ‘system’ now fits the Marxist-Leninist conception of the capitalist state.

How is this working for ‘the people?’ Well, which people? The US has the largest military budget in the world by a factor of ten. But it is nevertheless apparently incapable of producing usable weapons and bullets. The US spends multiples of what the rest of the rich world does per person on healthcare while it has active genocide levels of people dying (graph below) who wouldn’t be in a functioning society. The end of the agreement between capital and the state to forego predatory pricing (‘greedflation’) on food and other necessities is increasing food insecurity for vast swaths of the West. And nuclear war with Russia is once again an implied possibility.


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Graph: while ‘inequality’ has received lip service of late, most Americans imagine ‘rich’ to be the neighbor down the street who just bought a new car. In fact, the concentration of income in the US in recent years is beyond the imagination of most Americans. The graph illustrates the general case that the richest one percent of wage earners earns 84 times what the poorest quintile earns. In terms of ‘dollar democracy,’ this means that the rich have 84 times as much political influence as the poor have. Source:inequality.org.

The recent shift from the soft power of trade agreements (NAFTA, TPP) to the hard power of military imperialism ties to the economic backdrop of a (US) corporate-state that exists to grab resources and market power for ‘American’ capital. In opposition to capitalist free-trade logic, American liberals have chosen the path of economic nationalism in a low-probability effort to regain political legitimacy for the American state. As temporarily disgraced American idiot-prince George W. Bush put it, ‘war is good for the economy.’ Of course, his war wasn’t good for the million Iraqis that died in it, nor for the wider Middle East that was lit on fire by it, nor for the European and Scandinavian nations that faced the ‘inexplicable’ surge in refugees that it produced. But for the titans of war, the benjamins are flowing again.


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Graph: while it is well understood that the US military budget dwarfs those of other nations, the question of what ‘we’ get for the money is never asked. That the Biden administration is pleading poverty with respect to supplying Ukraine with American weapons should bring this question to the fore. How can the US spend 10X as much as the rest of the world and not have the weapons and materiel to show for it? In fact, the neoliberal nature of military spending in the US has meant that the process is too corrupt to produce anything of value. Source: pgpf.org.

For analytical purposes— again with culture war flashpoints set to the side, current US President Joe Biden was the prominent liberal advocate for ‘conservative’ George W. Bush’s resource-grab-war in Iraq. Mr. Biden’s central selling point for that war, Iraqi WMDs, was a fabrication. It may have been Mr. Bush’s fabrication, but Biden went beyond ordinary bipartisan warmongering to sell the American war against Iraq. This likely has bearing on FBI / CIA ‘meddling’ in US elections for the benefit of national-security-state Democrats. Biden has been a consistent proponent of American empire since he entered Congress several centuries (five decades) ago.

The binaries used in American political discourse imply a distribution of political views that are mutually exclusive. Democrats versus Republicans is one such binary. Left versus Right is another. Racist versus anti-racist is another. Fascist versus anti-fascist is another. Analytically, this is to impose theoretical divisions onto American society, not to ‘report’ them. They are assumed to describe the ideological motivations that lead ‘us’ to act. But where do these binaries leave economic motives, the limits of what ‘we’ know, and the point at which we exist in history?

To bring this down to earth, the practical distinction in the twentieth century was between political movements defined in terms of national boundaries, not individual beliefs. This left imperial competition— global resource grabs to supply burgeoning industrialization, as the source of national competition. Like now, the sense was imparted that the first nation to control global industrial inputs would control the world. Industrialization was the perceived path to global domination via military production. The logical circle— military production is needed to fuel imperialism because imperialism is needed to fuel military production, was created.

But this formulation is incomplete. Wars based on national competition end when a nation or group of nations capitulates to a foreign power. Wars based on ideological competition end only when an ideology is ended (as in never). This incongruity led to the Cold War practice in the US of anti-authoritarian authoritarianism, of using the techniques of authoritarianism to crush authoritarianism abroad, only done ‘at home.’ But of course, the use of authoritarian techniques is by definition authoritarianism. The same is true in the present when politicians use propaganda and censorship to crush views that they find politically inconvenient.

American politics has long been premised in the conceit that this class collaboration via ‘national interests’ preempts the class divisions created through capitalist exploitation. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates may have made ‘their’ fortunes via Federal contracts, labor exploitation, and legal privileges denied to others, but when the US attacked Iraq in 2003, ‘we’ were united in being American, goes the logic. Never mind Orwell’s ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Through NAFTA, the American state helped Bezos and Gates lower the wages of ‘their’ workers.

Making a few people obscenely rich— and then maintaining that wealth, has taken precedence over providing workers with a living wage for most of the history of the US. From slavery through Joe Biden suppressing a railway strike after reneging on his promise to raise the minimum wage, the American ‘perspective’ has always been the wish-list of the oligarchs. However, it is untrue that this bias has the consent of the governed. To paraphrase political writer Thomas Frank, ‘every culture war in recent history has been a stealth class war.’ If the political and oligarch classes lived in the same country that the rest of us do, they would know this. But class divisions define the ‘American’ experience. A different class means a different experience.

Public discourse in the US over recent years has been of a relatively stable political system that rests atop changing economic relations. This stability was proved in the eyes of urban liberals when Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election following the manufactured turmoil of the Trump years. Missing from this analysis to date has been the impact of changing economic relations on the stability of the political system. The shift from the New Deal to neoliberalism in the 1970s didn’t just impact economic relations. It replaced the logic of a public realm with public support for ‘private’ economic production.


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Chart: having followed the healthcare impact of the ACA (Affordable Care Act), Obamacare, since the program was first introduced, the reporting has shifted from speculative— based on the imagined healthcare benefits of insurance expansion, to stunned incredulity that any healthcare system could produce such relentlessly bad outcomes. The Commonwealth Fund (above) is interesting because it employed Liz Fowler, the health insurance lobbyist who wrote the ACA. The evolution of its coverage has shifted from quiet despair to absolute horror at how little the program has actually accomplished. As a bonus, its neoliberal logic is now being used to gut Medicare. Source: Commonwealth Fund

This difference is fundamental. The New Deal featured programs to ameliorate capitalism’s tendency to produce too few jobs, insufficient public goods, and to create market power for connected capitalists. Its conception of the public realm was premised in social tension between state and ‘private’ interests. In this formulation, the state balanced the provision of public goods like national defense, education, and healthcare, against the rent-seeking tendencies of private interests.

In a way that is conceptually analogous to the saw that science is good for analyzing everything except what is important in life, the missing ‘public goods’ from capitalist production beg the question of the purpose of ‘the economy.’ Another way to put this is that while capitalism can occasionally produce what some people want, it is incapable of producing what all people need. Ironically, having the Federal government pay capitalists to produce ‘public’ goods makes them private goods. Their serial failures as ‘public goods’ demonstrate this point (graph above).

The neoliberal turn ended the very conception of a public realm through private provision of all goods and services. Given the economists’ fantasy that capitalist production is efficient, local productive efficiency was imagined to be superior to the public production of public goods. In other words, while the government may no longer produce national defense, education, or healthcare, the additional profits earned by private producers for producing them could in theory be applied to producing more public goods. But they never are.

If this ‘economics’ reads like a cynical farce, you may be onto something. The facts of the US in 2023 are of private military contractors setting US foreign policy, an education system set up to earn private profits for trade school type employment training, and a healthcare system that is the worst in the ‘developed’ world. Given the American capitalist practice of playing legal games like patent scamming when doing so is more profitable than producing quality goods and services, why would the architects of the US healthcare system and military production not expect the same game-playing from these?


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Graph: following from the Commonwealth chart above, child and maternal mortality, gun violence, suicide, and the health impact of the industrial food system, have now accumulated to have Americans live 6.2 years less than the citizens of functioning nations. This approximates the drop in life expectancy that took place during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. At the time, it was considered amongst the greatest tragedies in human history. American liberals elected Joe Biden to toss another trillion dollars into it. This is genocide. Source: OECD; World Bank.

Again, while GDP (Gross Domestic Product) measures P x Q (P = price and Q = quantity), it doesn’t measure the social costs of production, the quality of what is produced, or the social utility (or lack thereof) derived from it. In this respect, ‘the economy’ can rise while the economic circumstances of most people who exist within it decline. This has resulted in serial assertions that political dysfunction is the result of the ‘little people’ being too stupid to know how good they have it. This was the liberal chide against the American Left in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the implied Left charge against Donald Trump’s supporters from 2016 forward.

Consider, the Great Recession wasn’t a fantasy dreamt up by Right-wing malcontents. From the 1970s forward American oligarchs worked with their toadies in the political class to create the world imagined by what became the Reagan-Right. By 2016 Wall Street had been deregulated, ‘private’ healthcare had been funded at public expense, and privately sourced ‘public’ education was training children to sit down, shut up, and do what they are told for the benefit of their future employers. In other words, there is a material basis for widespread discontent.

In contrast to the fantasies of economists, the architects of the New Deal understood capitalism. The New Deal was based on knowledge of what capitalism does well, and what it doesn’t do well. In contrast, the neoliberal turn was based on the forgotten history of the Great Depression. In other words, neoliberalism was / is a forgetting—purposeful or not, of why capitalism doesn’t produce public goods without socially given reasons, like Federal programs, for doing so. In this sense, neoliberalism is the elimination of a public purpose to benefit private actors.

I recently spoke with a former analyst for a large and well-recognized agency of the Federal government who had participated in a project to ‘rationalize’ Federal defense spending along neoliberal lines. However, s/he had no idea the project as it was conceived was neoliberal. The goal had been to make government as ‘efficient’ as the so-called private sector. Missing from the analysis was any cognizance that the central point of post-WWII Federal defense spending had been to employ lots of people in stable industries at decent wages. It wasn’t to turn defense contractors into oligarchs on the public dime.

Back in the day, the employment benefit of Federal defense spending was well understood. No capitalist enterprise had a direct interest in providing national defense, so theory had it that ‘we,’ as in the people, must fund it collectively. As a consequence, between the end of WWII and today, American imperialism— from Krugmanite trade twaddle to arming Ukraine to fight Russia, has been funded on the public dime. Additionally, Americans were employed to produce the munitions and materiel used to destroy Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.

A few readers may recall that it was private equity’s foray into national defense spending that placed former US President George H.W. Bush in a meeting with the Bin Laden family in Washington, DC on September 11, 2001. The purchase and control of national defense infrastructure by private equity changed the logic of the MIC from the quasi-public production of public goods to the private production of nominally public goods by rent-seeking corporations. The employment aspect of the public production of public goods was discarded in favor of private profits.

Now for the trillion-dollar question: given that the US spends more each year on its military than the next ten nations combined (graph above), why has it run out of weapons and materiel to supply to Ukraine in its (US) proxy war with Russia? To be clear, there is no suggestion here that doing so would either be a laudable goal or good public policy. But still, if Russia can fund its military at eight cents / dollar relative to the US and still field an army in Ukraine, why isn’t the US, given its military expenditures, loaded to the rafters with weapons and materiel to sell to Ukraine?

A similar question faces the American healthcare industry. The US spends far more per person on healthcare than other ‘rich’ nations, and yet has the worst healthcare outcomes amongst them (graph, chart, above). Excluding bonuses and stock options, the healthcare ‘industry’ has the highest paid workers in the US who are producing the worst outcomes in the developed world. Like the defense industry, capitalists flipped the public purpose of the healthcare system on its head. The goal is now to extract maximum public payments while providing minimum goods and services in return.

With respect to both ‘industries,’ American liberals continue to conflate public payments to private interests with a public purpose. There is no such confusion present when the Federal government purchases writing pens and paper. The goal is clear: to support private profits by contracting with private corporations to produce writing pens and paper. The Federal government could create a federal institution to produce these. Or it could pay extra to ‘private’ contractors, as has been common with cost-plus Federal contracts, to pay higher wages to workers. But doing so would counter the neoliberal logic of economic rationalization.

Being American, with an internet now openly being ‘managed’ by the FBI and the CIA, actual history is getting harder to find unless you know before-hand where to look for it. In this regard, Daniel Guerin’s 1939 materialist classic ‘Fascism and Big Business’ provides detailed descriptions of the economic drivers of the rise of European fascism. To save the suspense, these details are eerily reminiscent of the US in recent decades. No, this isn’t to revisit the liberal fantasy that Trump = Hitler. History is more interesting than that. The link between then and now can be found in the exigencies of capitalism, which Guerin details.

As the willingness of American liberals to subvert the ‘freedoms’ that allegedly distinguish the US from authoritarian states grows, the Cold War irony of anti-authoritarian authoritarianism grows with it. As is illustrated through the public response to the official lies related to Hunter Biden’s now infamous laptop, censorship undertaken ‘in the public interest’ was more precisely to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election for the benefit of the Democrats. In so doing, the stated purpose of state propaganda and censorship was proved a lie. The revealed purpose has been to silence political opponents, not to protect the public.

Divested of its ideological and organizational paraphernalia, fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial circles.

The sense has been imparted via the urban, bourgeois, press that ‘normalcy’ was restored in the US through the election of Joe Biden in 2020, even though Biden has been consistently less popular with the American people than the relentlessly demonized Donald Trump. With recent revelations that the CIA and FBI actively interfered in the 2020 election on behalf of Democrats by putting forward the false allegation that Hunter Biden’s computer contained ‘Russian disinformation,’ what normalcy has been restored— that the CIA runs American politics?

The question isn’t rhetorical. There is an answer. From the House Judiciary Committee in April, 2023:

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell testified before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees and revealed that (now current Biden Secretary of State Antony) Blinken was “the impetus” of the public statement signed in October 2020 that implied the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was disinformation. A = inserted by Urie for clarity.

Mr. Blinken was acting as Joe Biden’s campaign manager when he ‘inspired’ former CIA Director Morrell to publicly mischaracterize the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop as ‘Russian disinformation.’ He also got fifty of his fellow spooksto do the same. And, lest you have forgotten, the public statement issued by Morrell and his fellow election fraudsters was reviewed by the current CIA and given a green light to be disseminated. Question: why haven’t these people been arrested for election interference and conducting dirty ops domestically?

Whatever, your political allegiances, getting the CIA to publicly lie in order to elevate Joe Biden’s chances of being elected is as anti-democratic— dirty, manipulative, dishonest, and corrupt, as any of the allegations yet made regarding the ‘fascistic’ tendencies of other politicians and parties. Fighting fascism with fascism leaves fascism as the only possible result. It is therefore ironic that ‘liberal fascism’ and ‘left fascism,’ have since entered the lexicon to denote political repression undertaken to counter political repression.

Dan Guerin’s (above) central insight is that big business— multinational corporations and Wall Street, is the central proponent of fascism in the same way that it is a central proponent of imperialism. It was the leaders of large industrial enterprises in the US that supported the rise of European fascism from afar. The only attempted fascist coup in the US, the ‘business plot’ of 1933, was carried out by Wall Street in league with leading industrialists. Had the plotters not chosen the wrong General to lead the coup— socialist gadfly Smedley Butler, it may well have succeeded.

Why might American industrialists and financiers favor fascism in the present? Well, the ‘private’ provision of necessities like healthcare, education, and collective defense, isn’t going that well for the ‘consumers’ of these products. Why the rush to censor the internet? A bipartisan consortium of human snakes, lizards, and anal warts (apologies to snakes and lizards) has ‘brokered’ the delivery of decidedly low-quality public goods and would find it distinctly inconvenient to have their names associated with their political products by the public. In fact, the goods are so low-quality that liberal largesse looks a lot like looting.

Amongst the largest contributors to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign were Wall Street and health insurers. ‘We’ got consequence-free bailouts for Wall Street and four million ‘excess deaths’ from a healthcare system that has gotten worse since the ACA was implemented. Health insurers were amongst the largest contributors to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign as well, and he doubled down on Obamacare by shoveling another trillion dollars into it. Where is the accountability that requires that every mother in New Jersey piss in a jar (get a drug test) to get $15 per month in food assistance?

So again, the answer to the question is implied in the widespread failure of ‘private’ contractors to produce functioning public goods. In the first, these producers are raking in profits and bonuses as things stand, so why should they change tactics? In the second, the Federal oversight ‘process’ features future employees negotiating with current employees of ‘revolving-door’ corporations. What incentive do they have to stir the pot? In the third, there is no not-corrupt political party in the US to compete with the two conspicuously corrupt parties of the present. With voting as the sole ‘legitimate’ mode of changing politics, what choice is there?

My regulatory acquaintance mentioned above is a dedicated liberal Democrat. Their take on the neoliberal economic project that they were engaged in (‘rationalizing’ defense spending in terms favorable to capital) is that it was ‘liberal’ because it featured government spending. In fact, the same claim could be made when fascist Italy and fascist Germany geared up war spending in anticipation of WWII. While I don’t dispute that this spending could be considered ‘liberal,’ few Americans liberals who took the time to think about it would likely agree.

Daniel Guerin’s book ‘Fascism and Big Business’ (link above) should be required reading in public schools in the US. That they aren’t suggests why profit-seeking charter schools are such a bad idea. What is the incentive for committed capitalists to risk their profits by teaching political theory that is threatening to their business interests? Did the lightbulb just go off? ‘Capitalism’ is no more ideologically neutral than any other economic system. That American liberals can’t differentiate between their beliefs and fascist logic of the twentieth century should be telling

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08 ... uggle.html
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 30, 2023 2:54 pm

How Washington Weaponizes Radicals for its Political Goals
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
Fiorella Isabel

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Christopher “Hammer” Pohlhaus (C) leads a rally with neo-Nazi groups on September 2, 2023 in Orlando, Florida © Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

An outspoken American neo-Nazi recently voiced support for the Democrat president. That’s not a glitch, it’s a manifestation of US policies


Orlando, Florida is home to Mickey Mouse, popular beaches, sunshine, alligators, and your hometown Nazi.

That’s what residents in parts of central Florida witnessed in an ironic twist, when multiple groups of neo-Nazis consisting of the Aryan Freedom Network, Order of the Black Sun, the 14 First, the Goyim Defense League, and Blood Tribe, were recently spotted around the area, exercising their First Amendment right, chanting hateful slogans and proudly boasting their White Supremacist tattoos for all to see.

The protestors claimed to support Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida who’s also running for president. Present was Kent “Boneface” McLellan, a neo-Nazi who reportedly gave information on others in his group after being arrested in an FBI sting in 2012 for domestic terrorism. He claims he went to Ukraine after the US-backed Maidan coup of 2014, to join the Right Sector ultranationalist group in the new Kiev authorities’ war against the dissenting republics of the Donbass. He then returned to the country in 2022, when the Russian military operation started, to join the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and said it was not the FBI that helped him get involved, but the CIA.

While American politicians and establishment media were appalled by the Orlando neo-Nazis’ display of hate, Blood Tribe leader and former US marine tied to the January 6th Capitol Hill riots, Christopher Pohlhaus, also known as “Hammer,” professed why he preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump in next year’s 2024 Presidential election. He proclaimed that at least “Biden sends rockets to Ukraine.” This highlights what the US media and Washington have consistently tried to bury since February of 2022: That Ukraine has a huge Nazi problem and that the US and its intelligence agency apparatus have historically not only been aware of it, but stand determined to train, advise, and weaponize these factions to achieve certain political goals.

In an article published on November 17, 2017 CNN precisely outlines the connection between European fascism and factions of Neo-Nazis in the US. A 2021 Time magazine article highlighted how Azov is both a military and political force in Ukraine whose influence extends far beyond the country’s borders, with a network of extremist groups stretching from California to Europe and all the way to New Zealand. Among other evidence, one of the organizers of the August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia cited the Azov Battalion as an inspiration. That rally became infamous when one attendee plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring many others.

The article admits that the rise of Azov and the white nationalist movement came as a result of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, stating how Ukraine’s first post-Maidan president Petro Poroshenko lauded the Azov members as heroes. Just last week, Poroshenko was spotted wearing a Black Sun logo, a Nazi symbol once featured in the official Azov insignia, on his shoulder while visiting Ukrainian troops.

In October of 2019, forty members of Congress signed a letter calling for the US State Department to designate Azov a foreign terrorist organization, saying that “Azov has been recruiting, radicalizing, and training American citizens for years,” but the letter ultimately went nowhere. Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI at the time, later confirmed via testimony to the US Senate that American white supremacists were “actually traveling overseas to train.” Both the CNN and Time articles went as far as (accurately) comparing Azov to jihadists in the Middle East, as this would not be the first time Washington resorted to using radical factions in order to achieve a political agenda.

Almost immediately after Russia began its military operation in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs, the media child of the Council on Foreign Relations, issued an interesting article outlining “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency.” For background, the CFR is an invitation-only think tank, born out of the British Institute of International Affairs, created to shape and mold the US role in international foreign policy. Founded in 1921 by business and civic leaders, the organization’s main goal was to exert the US as a dominant leader in global affairs, following the Monroe Doctrine thought process. In the piece, Douglas London, a retired Russian-speaking former CIA operations officer who had managed “counterinsurgency operations” focused on Central Asia, stated that thanks to “Putin’s aggression,” Russia would face a Ukrainian insurgency in an escalating conflict that could spread beyond the two countries’ borders and would have the support of the United States and NATO. “Ultra-nationalist” factions could be used by NATO-supported Ukraine in the same way that insurgencies were used in Afghanistan and Vietnam. London further haughtily outlined how the West uses these groups to create conflict and destabilize regions, exhausting nations with endless proxy wars until they admit defeat. He even mentioned the clandestine US military support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s against the Soviet Union, and for the Kurds post-2003. We can also look at how Libya, targeted under the Obama administration via then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, fell victim to such a regime change playbook, or the American support for the Contras in Nicaragua under then President Ronald Reagan. Remarkably, London outlines much of this as a good and necessary series of historical events, proclaiming that supporting insurgency is “in the CIA’s DNA” and that because of the agency’s experience in these regions, it is well-equipped to “assist Ukraine in its war against Russia.”

Perhaps a less successful example is Washington’s backing of the “moderate rebels” in Syria, less than a decade ago. Recently journalist Seymour Hersh revealed new evidence of US intelligence supporting radical factions. In his latest article Hersh exposes a 5-page all-source report outlining how sarin gas, a toxic nerve agent, was prepared for the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) back in 2013. The report shows striking, detailed evidence that it was the jihadist faction al-Nusra and not Bashar Assad’s government, that was behind the now-infamous chemical attacks in Syria, like the ones in Ghouta in August 2013. And Washington’s intelligence not only had knowledge of this report, it willingly lied about it and, according to Hersh, kept it from the White House. He indicates that the issue of national security was used as the pretext to say nothing, as mainstream media vilified dissent on the issue and claimed that it was Assad who was responsible for gassing his own people, justifying US involvement in the decades-long Syrian civil war.

Post-World War II, the CIA embarked on Operation Paperclip, a program sponsoring the immigration of German and Austrian scientists and technicians, in order to exploit their knowledge for military purposes. Though it lasted only two years, versions of the program continued until 1962. In the end, 1,500 German and Austrian citizens were relocated to the US, along with their families. Most of them went on to become American citizens and their “nominal” ties to the Nazi Party were not a disqualification. As time went on, opposition and inquiries into the history of some of these scientists led to hearings in the US Congress and then an investigation. But no one was ever brought to trial and while Washington used the go-to pretext of “national security” to justify its actions, it omitted that the aim was to use the knowledge of these former Nazis to defeat the Soviet Union, which of course had lost millions of lives and played an essential role in defeating Nazi Germany just a few years before.

Just days ago during Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s speech in the Canadian parliament, the MPs gave a standing ovation to a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian man who had fought in the 14th division of the Waffen SS (also known as the 1st Galician) and hailed him as a hero because he fought against Russians during World War II. They failed to mention that the unit had committed massacres against Jews, Poles, Slovaks, & Soviet Partisans.

Washington’s use of radicals never ended in this regard, instead expanding and rebranding itself via regime-change operations under the lofty ideals of “democracy” and “humanitarian aid,” embedded in the unipolar world order dominated by the West, led by the US, the EU, Great Britain, NATO and their multi-pronged military intelligence apparatus. An agenda that’s clearly come to a dark hour, faced by a new emerging multipolar world order from the East and South, impassioned by decades and centuries of exploitation, domination, and neo-colonialism.

But the NATO bloc seems to have no intention of acknowledging this global paradigm shift, and is instead sinking its nails into immovable cement, mired in an existential proxy war with Russia that it feels it must prolong until the very last Ukrainian. The Pentagon recently approved yet another billion dollars for Ukraine, including sending deadly depleted uranium ammunition, which will likely end up being used by factions of armed neo-Nazi forces on the people of Donbass. And as if that weren’t enough, NATO is planning to assemble more than 41,000 troops and 700 air units for what officials say will be the largest military exercise in decades, to be held next spring across Germany, Poland and the Baltic States. The goal is to show Moscow that NATO is ready to fight at any cost, whether it includes the weaponizing of dangerous, radical groups or the sacrificing of thousands of civilian lives amid nuclear escalations. The problem the world faces is in understanding that history often rhymes, and recognizing these patterns is essential in order to avoid further catastrophe.

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 20, 2024 3:54 pm

Fascist salutes officially allowed in Italy
January 20, 17:36

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Fascist salutes officially allowed in Italy

The Roman salute, which was also used in fascist Germany, is illegal only if it carries the risk of reviving the fascist party, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation decided, RAI TV channel reports.

The TV channel notes that it made its decision while considering a case related to the events of 2016. Then, at a memorable demonstration, several participants used this greeting, which led to accusations of an attempt to rehabilitate fascism. Eight people were convicted but appealed the decision. The Supreme Court ordered the case to be heard again.

“It is clear that the fascist salute is an insult to individual feelings,” but it becomes a crime “when it poses a concrete threat to public order,” prosecutor Pietro Gaeta said in court, as quoted by Il Fatto Quotidiano. The newspaper notes that the court ruled that the use of such a greeting in private or at memorial events should not be considered a threat.

According to RAI, several days in Rome, as part of another commemorative event, several participants also used the Roman greeting, and an investigation was launched against them. However, the court's decision put an end to the controversy that arose from this situation.

It is believed that in Ancient Rome the greeting was used in the form of raising the right hand forward, which is why it received this name. In the 20th century, the Roman salute was common among followers of fascism. First they began to use it in Italy under Benito Mussolini, and then it moved to Nazi Germany. At the same time, the phrase “zag heil” and others were used, the greeting in Russian began to be called “zig”, and its implementation - “zigovaniye”.

In Italy, crimes that are aimed at restoring the fascist party are covered by the special Mario Scelba law of 1952. There we are talking about punishment not only for attempting to reorganize the party, but also for praising the principles, methods and facts of fascism.

https://www.rbc.ru/society/20/01/2024/6 ... f59c5cc1e3 - zinc

The fascisation of Europe continues successfully. This is for war.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8907092.html

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