Archive for category: COUNTERPUNCH

When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.

George Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 1972 [1]

Part 1 of this essay presented and criticized 14 interrelated falsehoods whereby intellectuals, commentators, and activists denied that the Trump presidency and Trumpism deserved designation as fascist[2]: (1) the classic “It Can’t Happen Here” claim that American “constitutional democracy” has safely inoculated the United States against fascism; (2) the notion that fascism is purely a 20^th Century (1920s-1940s) European phenomenon; (3) the idea that a handful of selectively tapped “fascism scholars” who happen mostly to be historians of 20^th Century European fascism are qualified to offer “expert” commentary on 21^st Century American politics and American fascism/neofascism; (4) the time-frozen and Eurocentric definition of the only relevant fascism as a fully consolidated fascist regime on the model of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich; (5) the denial that fascism could arise within and through formally constitutional and electoral institutions; (6) the “old guard” (George Jackson’s excellent description) definition of fascism solely as a corporatist political-economic regime under the command of a single party state and dictator; (7) the idea that Trump’s lack of intellectual and doctrinal rigor and discipline disqualified him and his presidency from being considered fascist; (8) the notion that Trump had/has “no ideology” beyond pure venal selfishness; (9) the idea that Trump was just another “authoritarian;” (10) the claim that Trump was/is a “populist;” (11) the notion that fascism requires a pre-existing revolutionary challenge from a powerful radical Left in order to have any relevant existence; (12) the notion that Trump was/is some kind of anti-imperialist; (13) the idea that Trump’s weak response to the COVID-19 epidemic was non-and even anti-fascist; (14) the idea that Trump’s fascism was merely symbolic, rhetorical, and performative, without serious consequences.

This follow-up essay adds 17 more misleading anti-anti-Trump/anti-anti-fascist narratives. This makes for 31 flavors of American anti-anti-fascism during and since the 2015-16 Trump campaign and the Trump presidency of 2017-21,*up from my originally proclaimed number of 26. Many if not most of these 31 flavors/narratives have been scooped and served (often with considerable disdain) by commentators and activists who identity as leftists. Many of these self-proclaimed portsiders qualify as “Trumpenleftists” – a curious and surprisingly widespread cohort that seeks common ground with neofascism in the name of radical politics. [3]

The Final Seventeen Flavors of Anti-Anti-Trumpfascism

Here are anti-anti-fascism flavors 15 to 31, to be followed with a supplementary reflection on America’s distinctive form of racial fascism, which predates and informs contemporary American fascism (and also predated and informed, indeed inspired classic 20^th Century European fascism):

15. “Trump never had a dedicated and powerful paramilitary wing to enforce his will, so don’t talk about ‘fascism.’” Well, it’s good that Trump never got that, no? He certainly tried to develop one, however ineptly. The special border patrol agents he called in from the white-supremacist southern borderland to unleash on social justice protesters in Portland, Oregon were a federal Trump paramilitary force-in-training. Trump got an antifascist (Michael Reinoehl) killed, death squad-style, as “retribution” by U.S. Marshalls outside of Seattle with a snap of his fingers last September. (The Trump hit was payback for Reinoehl’s killing of a fascist Trump supporter, Patriot Prayer terrorist Aaron Danielson.) He fueled and encouraged the growth of a vast swath of proto-fascist paramilitary sorts like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, various neo-Nazis, the Kenosha Guard (of Kyle Rittenhouse infamy), the Wolverine Watchmen (Michigan fascist militia men who plotted the kidnapping and murder of Michigan governor Gretcham Whitmer) and the like. He cultivated dangerous loyalty from white police officers across the country – a vast army of authoritarian and racist cops (including much of the NYPD, the CPD, and other major metropolitan gendarme forces) who would have gladly and bloodily suppressed urban rebellions against an election he would have stolen if it had been closer. Who knows how many supporters Trump and fascism had/has in the military and among military veterans? Who knows what kind of paramilitary he would have cultivated within and beyond the nation’s armed and police forces had he gotten a second term (which would have happened but for COVID-19)? As Max Berger observed two weeks after the Trump-sparked Attack on the Capitol:

“Trump’s support among enlisted service members was threatening enough to the incoming Biden administration that the Joint Chiefs had to issue a report clarifying they stood behind him. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of current and former law enforcement and military who are devotees of Trump. There is no shortage of veterans or police officers who could be mobilized to violence by white grievance politics and serve as easy recruits for the next fascist leader” (emphasis added).

+16. “The American capitalist ruling class did not support Trump.” Some relevant sections of the ruling class (especially in the fossil fuel and other polluting industries) did back the sloppy orange fascist. Many of those corporate and financial elites who didn’t want the demented monster in the White House in 2017 were perfectly happy to leave him there for a full first term thanks to his tax cuts and arch-neoliberal de-regulation policies. A respectable wealth and power elite that seriously wanted a fascist out could have pulled the plug well before the fall and winter of 2020-21. But this “deep state” coup never took place. If Trump had gotten a second term (as he would have but for COVID-19), many corporate and financial chieftains not on board would have accommodated or re-accommodated to his power. A future fascistic presidential candidate and president who knows how to ruffle fewer ruling class feathers can expect to do much better with the nation’s wealth and power elite. And make no mistake: most of the American corporate and financial elite would have backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections had the Democrats run Bernie Sanders, the leftish contender who campaigned in accord with majority progressive public opinion and called himself a socialist. The America ruling class will pick fascism over even mild social democracy ever time.

(Please review the rejection of flavor #4 in Part 1 of this essay: the point is to properly identify, fight, and defeat fascist social and political movements before they hatch full-fledged fascist regimes.)

+17. “The top military brass did not support Trump’s attempt to stay in power.” Who said they did? Thank God they didn’t. Trump clearly tried to enlist the military in service to his efforts to stay in power. After the election, Trump fired his Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who had incurred Trump’s wrath by refusing to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress the remarkable George Floyd anti-racist people’s rebellion last summer. At the same time, some inside the military establishment clearly worried that there was potential Pentagon support for a military intervention in the 2020 election. Fully ten former U.S. Defense Secretaries felt compelled to an issue an extraordinary January 4, 2021 public letter warning military leaders and the acting Secretary of Defense not to get involved in election results. The missive, published in the Washington Post, reflected no small alarm:

“As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, ‘there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.’ Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful, and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic…Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates — political appointees, officers, and civil servants — are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”

For the authors of this letter, there was genuine concern that Miller might work with Trump to carry out former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s delusional plan for a military coup.

It’s good that Trump failed to win the military over. This hardly means there are no fascistic sentiments in the officer corps and command heights for a future American fascist commander-in-chief to tap. A future and, yes (see flavor #7) smarter Republifascist president more attuned to military culture and sentiments could well do much better with the Pentagon.

Again: yes, the U.S. did not become a full-fledged maximal fascist regime under Trump (see flavor #4), but nobody serious has ever claimed it did. The point here is to properly identify, fight, and defeat fascist social and political movements before they hatch such regimes. A fascist having made it into the world’s most powerful office for four years and nearly for (at least) eight was no small fascist achievement.

+18. “Trump’s base is working-class and open to the progressive political and policy agenda of the Left. The Left needs to reach out to Trump’s proletarian base. Calling Trump and Trumpism ‘fascist’ works against that. We can win his backers to the progressive side with a Left policy agenda.” Nonsense. Intimately related to the false description of Trump as a “populist,” the statistically illiterate notion of Trump’s base as proletarian has been discredited again and again (for the latest destruction of the sadly durable Trumpenproletarian myth, see this excellent Boston Review piece). Trump’s base is relatively affluent and petit bourgeois. Trumpenproletarian mythology (remarkably durable among liberal and many left intellectuals) is based on false conflations between education level and class and between region and class.

The main motivation driving Trump base was not economic grievance against the corporate and financial elite but rather white-identitarian authoritarianism and nationalism directed against people of color and a liberal and “Left” elite that is absurdly accused of having let supposedly undeserving nonwhite people “cut in line” ahead of purportedly harder working and more meritorious white “true” Americans.[4] American right-wingers hate socialism. They think Joe Biden is a socialist. The Left will not win them over with Medicare for All.

Much if not most of the nation’s white-nationalist core is simply detached from reality. QAnon is a delusional but dangerous “Nazi cult, re-branded.” Some few people on the right may have “American History X”-like experiences and come over to the side of humanity (super!), but we on the Left do not need to spend scarce time, energy and resources trying to link up with the Amerikaner Trumpenvolk. To the contrary, we need to defeat, marginalize, and indeed crush the nation’s white-supremacist fascists. “Reaching out” to meet them “half-way” is appeasement.

+19 “The ‘Attack on the Capitol’ wasn’t all that big a deal. Geez, some crazy lumpenproletarian working-class Yahoos got out of control, broke some windows, and wandered around like idiots before getting cleared out. Some ‘fascist assault!’” No. Eight thousand militant Trumpist-white supremacists and proto-fascists marched to Congress at the direction of their fascist commander-in-chief, who told them to “fight like Hell” to “take our country back” from “evil” liberals, falsely conflated (in accord with the fascist playbook) with “the radical Left.” An armed fascistic assault broke into the U.S. representative chamber with the explicit intent of halting the certification of a free and fair presidential election. The frothing mob included military veterans and law enforcement personnel scheming to capture and even kill members of Congress and even the insufficiently Trump-loyal Christian fascist Vice President. The event riveted national and global attention for hours and many days afterwards. Five people died. Many more might have easily perished. Fascist quasi paramilitary groups (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and others) were prominent among those who breached the complex. Herr Trump hoped the attack would provoke a crisis he could use as a pretext to declare a state of emergency and martial law, suspending Congressional authorization of Biden’s victory. Triggered by the president’s big fascist election lie (repeated over and over again in accord with the Goebbels playbook), the rioters had allies inside Congress, including at least four Republifascist Congresspersons. Their motives were highly political and driven by Trump’s insane fascistic “great nation stabbed in the back” claim that Biden’s election was fraudulent. Political scientist Robert Pape and researcher Kevin Ruby’s recent detailed analysis of the 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6^th Capitol riot finds that “the attack on the Capitol was unmistakably an act of political violence, not merely an exercise in vandalism or trespassing amid a disorderly protest that had spiraled out of control. The overwhelming reason for action, cited again and again in court documents, was that arrestees were following Trump’s orders to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the presidential-election winner.”

The January 6^th Storming of the Capitol was a really big and dangerous deal and the stormers were heavily petit-bourgeois. Pape and Ruby found that “Two-thirds [of the 193 arrestees they examined] are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.”

+20. “The ‘fascist’ Trump is gone now and he’s had (as CUNY political scientist Corey Robbin risibly claimed last December) little impact even on his own party, so it’s really time now about Trump and the supposed menace of ‘fascism.’” Nonsense. It’s good that Trump has been removed from the White House, to say the least (a second Trump term would have unimaginably tragic and possibly terminal for humanity), but serious anti-Trump antifascists have never thought the fascist threat in America was or is just about the demented and delusional oligarch Trump. They have always considered the Trump presidency a reflection and agent of a “fascist creep” with a life before, during, and after the tangerine-tinted, Twitter-tantruming tyrant’s presence in the White House. The American fascist virus that Trump channeled and fanned is alive and well. As Max Berger noted in the wake of the January 6^th assault in a chilling reflection titled “Donald Trump is Leaving But American Fascism is Just Getting its Boots On”:

“We must consider the defeat of Trump’s insurrectionary, incoherent fascism not as the end of the threat posed by American fascism, but as the beginning…Whether Trump is a fascist, or merely a pre-fascist, the fact is that he has demonstrated the path to power for future, more coherent fascist leaders to follow…The majority of Republican voters support Trump’s American fascism—even after the coup. According to polling by The Washington Post, 51 percent of Republicans say GOP leaders didn’t go far enough in nullifying the election, 56 percent say Trump bears zero blame for the insurrection, and 66 percent say he has acted responsibly. Trump …[is] still at 60 percent favorability among Republicans and is the prohibitive frontrunner for the Republican Party presidential nomination. Sadly, these numbers are likely the floor, and not the ceiling for these beliefs…The fascist majority within the Republican Party means that Republican office holders can’t break with Trump’s vision of the party even if they wanted to. Democratic Rep. Jason Crow told MSNBC, ‘A couple of [my Republican colleagues] actually broke down in tears talking to me, and saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for [Trump’s second] impeachment.’ Republicans are already talking about primarying the members who supported impeachment and are taking steps to remove Liz Cheney (R-WY) from leadership for supporting impeachment. So long as the majority or even a significant plurality of Republican voters are fascist, it will continue to be in Republican politicians’ interests to support fascism” (emphasis added).

Berger might have added that 70 percent of Republicans believe Trump’s Big Fascist Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him – a great and terrible deception that cannot but fuel more far-right movement formation and violence going forward.

Meanwhile, the Oregon Republican Party has endorsed the insane claim that the Attack on the Capitol was a left wing false-flag deep state operation. The Texas Republican Party has adopted the fascist QAnon (QANazi, frankly) slogan “We are the Storm.” The Arizona Republican Party has become a neofascist Trump cult. A recent New York Times report from Michigan after Trump’s second impeachment trial shows “growing signs of a party not in flux, but united in doubling down on the same themes that defined Mr. Trump’s [unmentionably fascist] political style: conspiracy theories, fealty to the leader, a web of misinformation and intolerance…his party shows little desire to break with him or his grievances” (emphasis added)/

The 2021 Republican House of Representatives contingent contains at least four far-right lunatics with ties to fascist groups: Paul Gosar (Proud Boy ally-AZ), Andy Biggs (Oath Keeper ally-AZ), Lauren Boebert (Three Percenter ally-CO) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (QANazi-GA). The Republican Senate cohort includes the mouth-foaming white nationalist hyena Ron Johnson (Rf-WI), who claims to believe that January 6^th was a false-flag deep state op, and the demented white nationalist Josh Hawley, who joined five other Republifascist Senators in voting against the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6^th, after the fascist assault. Hawley encouraged the attack with a raised fist before entering Congress to try to cancel Biden’s election.

Just seven of fifty Republican Senators voted to convict Trump after House Managers presented a slam dunk case showing beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt that Trump had fueled and sparked the murderous fascist assault on Congress.

The nation’s Trump-fanned Nazi problem could well get worse in the absence of Trump. Terrorism expert Colin Clarke thinks so, noting that the Storming of the Capitol marks “a new era of far-right violence in America”:

“the siege of the Capitol will be framed [on the far right] as a successful demonstration …Almost immediately, images from that day proliferated across [far right] social media platforms…Large segments of the mob that stormed the Capitol were unaffiliated…. these could well be the new foot soldiers of the far right. Some, perhaps many of these new recruits will have military experience or law enforcement training. The infusion of younger members into the ranks of the far right is likely to breathe new life into the movement…References to the date Jan.6 will be just as symbolic for far-right extremists as Sept. 11 is to Americans…[Trump’s] efforts to spread disinformation, undermine longstanding democratic institutions and pit Americans against one another will continue to help propel the far right long into the future…8 percent of Americans …support…the insurrection. …the imager of the Capitol siege …will have enduring resonance…The turbulence of the next several years should not be underestimated…With Mr. Trump no longer in office, a portion of his supporters are vulnerable to recruitment into more extreme networks and, potentially, white-supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations. These groups are energized and confident in their ability to co-opt militant Trumpists…As a result, a larger segment of the far right could come to engage in racially and ethnically motivated violence…the siege of the Capitol…could catalyze an age of domestic far–right extremism.”

Trump’s gone and done with now? Really? In the final week of the month in which he left office after inciting an insurrectionary fascist attack on the Capitol and getting impeached for a second time, the Republican party establishment reconnected with their recently defeated Dear Leader [5]. On Tuesday, January 26^th, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republifascist-KY), who earlier acknowledged that Trump’s sparking of the assault was an impeachable offense, led 43 other Republifascist Senators in embracing the absurd authoritarian “January exception” by voting to declare the coming second Trump impeachment trial unconstitutional since the 45^th president was no longer in office (an opinion rejected by all but a few constitutional scholars). (Hilariously enough, in his prior role as Senate Majority Leader, Malevolent Mitch had refused to permit a trial prior to Biden’s inauguration). Two days later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Republifascist-CA), who said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack, traveled down to Mar a Lago to make amends with the orange monster.

Trump’s popularity is too strong with the Republifascist Party’s Amerikaner base for GOP leaders to jettison him just for a tiny little infraction like trying to cancel and election and carry out a fascist coup. All ten of the Republican House representatives who had the decency to vote for Trump’s second impeachment are facing a storm of right-wing criticism in their home districts. The same is true for most of the seven Republican Senators who voted to convict.

As this essay nears completion in the last week of February 2021, Trump remains in firm control of the Republican Party base and most of the nation’s state Republican parties. He is scheduled to give a major address to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) – an address in which he will send the message that that he is Republicans’ presumptive 2024 presidential nominee with a death grip on the party’s base. He will be backed by state Republifascist leaders who have led party votes to censure of Republican Senators who had the elementary decency to vote to convict Trump for instigating a fascist assault on the Capitol.

CUNY political scientist Corey Robin’s claim one month after the election (in an interview where he called Trump “almost the complete opposite of fascism” and even denied that Trump was even an authoritarian) that Trump has had less impact on his party[5A] than any other post-WWII Republican president does not jibe very well with what we are seeing so far.

+21. “The Democrats are fascists too. Both of the major parties are the same.” Wrong. Yes, the neoliberal corporate Democrats are a despicable ruling class party owned by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital and empire. They have appeased, enabled, and otherwise encouraged the crimes of the Republifascist, Party. They have participated in, profited from, and generally advanced the creation and preservation of authoritarian and oppressive institutions that amount to a type of underlying societal pre-fascism and an on ongoing American racial fascism (to be discussed at the end of this essay) – richly bipartisan affairs. They are a Weimar party, so to speak, in relation to the ever more Nazified Republicans. But no, the dismal Democrats aren’t themselves political and ideological fascists. They do not conduct their politics out of the fascist playbook to anywhere near the same extent as does the contemporary GOP. Proper Left contempt for the Democrats does not require diluting our understanding of fascism so completely as that. And no, the two dominant U.S. political organizations are not “the same.” Part of their hegemonic function is precisely their real differences in the constituency by race, ethnicity, gender, region, culture and more, all reflected in differences of policy and rhetoric that co-exist alongside shared captivity to U.S. capitalism and empire. “Two wings of the same [corporate, financial, and imperialist] bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904)? Absolutely. “The same?” Sorry, no.

+22. “Our real problem is capitalism; there’s no need to talk about fascism, which is a distraction from the real problem.” This is a false dichotomy. Fascism is, among other things, vicious, arch-repressive capitalism. Fascism is a product of, and subservient to, the modern corporate and capitalist era. It does not overthrow capitalism. Even in its classic historical European and statist form, it never supplanted private ownership of the means of production and investment or bourgeois class rule. Fascism (both as a social and political movement and as a regime) is dedicated to smashing popular resistance to capitalism, among other things. Left anti-fascism is intimately bound up with and all about anti-capitalism.

+23. “Anti-Trump anti-fascism is a liberal Democratic Party thing meant to defend the American status quo, falsely described as democratic. It blames everything on Trump instead of the terrible capitalist, imperialist, neoliberal, and racist social order that produced him.” No. Liberals and Democrats were and remain highly reluctant to use the F-word (fascism) to describe Trump and Trumpism. Many if not most serious anti-Trump antifascists were and are socialists, communists (the present writer), and left anarchists who see Trumpism-fascism as a product of the racist, capitalist, sexist, and imperialist American order. They have no illusions about the U.S. status quo being democratic.

(Antifascist and anti-Trump leftists like myself faced constant idiotic charges of undue sympathy for the corporate-imperialist Democrats during the Trump presidency. As the incisive Salon commentator David Masciotra wrote me last January 29^th: “It was exhausting to deal with the bizarre and disconcerting amount of people on the ‘left’ who were defending or downplaying Trump and acting as if anyone warning of Trump’s danger had somehow co-signed on all the awful Democratic Party policies since the early 1990s. ‘You don’t want Trump to become a fascist dictator? You must love Clinton’s welfare to work program.’ This is a jocular exaggeration, but not too divergent a depiction of what passes for edgy, critical thinking in some of the more embarrassing ‘left’ quarters.” Indeed, the Dem-baiting from Trumpenlefties was incessant and absurd, directed at me even as I published my third book eviscerating Barack Obama and the corporate-imperial Democrats from the radical Left last October).

+24. “Railing against ‘Trumpism-fascism’ gives a free pass to the terrible neoliberal Democrats, so you should stop talking about ‘Trump’s fascism.’” No, it depends on who is doing the “railing.” Denouncing Trumpism-fascism only does that when it is done by people who give a free pass to the neoliberal Democrats. When a radical Leftist like the present writer “railed” (a word choice meant to make serious observation seem unhinged) against Trumpism-fascism, they did so with no love for the dismal corporate and imperial Democrats. Numerous anti-Trump leftists (present writer included) find the Democrats centrally responsible for the rise of Trumpism-fascism – appeasers and enablers of the fascist disease. (See my book Hollow Resistance, written by an antifascist and Marxist Trump critic who has never held back on the corporate, imperialist, white-supremacist, patriarchal, and eco-cidal Democrats.).

+25. “You have Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)!” Anti-Trumpism-fascism activists often got accused of this “hysterical” mental health malady not just by right-wingers but also by oddly Trump-friendly “leftists.” It was a commonly unsupported accusation. “TDS” certainly happened in the mainstream media, which became passionately and commercially fixated on Trump’s every action and tweet. But when hurled at serious Left anti-fascists, the charge of “TDS” was both a bullying smear and incorrect. Those antifascists saw Trump as the reflection and agent of a fascistic movement that had been germinating in the U.S. for many decades and that promised to live beyond Trump’s removal from power. It’s a shame more Germans didn’t develop “Hitler Derangement Syndrome” in the mid-1930s.

+26. “Trump never said he was a fascist and has in fact accused his enemies of being fascists.” So what? Murderers tend not to describe themselves as murderers while trying to murder people. Racists don’t typically identify themselves as racists. Sexists don’t commonly out themselves as sexists. “Fascism” is a very bad word in American (and global) political discourse thanks to the world’s experience with the Third Reich and its Axis allies in the 1930s and 1940s (50 million people died during the global war against fascism, 1939-45), so it is hardly surprising that Trump would not openly identify as a fascist or that Trump would absurdly call Black Lives Matter activists and Portland antifascists “fascists.”

+27. “Leftists and liberals call every political tendency and authority they don’t like ‘fascist.’ When everything is fascist, nothing is fascist.” Insofar as this alleged habit exists (it likely does in some circles), it does not apply to the serious anti-fascist thinkers and activists of the Trump years. Refuse Fascism, for example, was rigorously specific about precisely how and why Trump and Trumpism were/are fascist.

+28. “All the Democrats and their corporate media allies at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC etc. called Trump and his backers ‘fascists’ from the start. That ought to tell you something about how wrongheaded it was/is to consider Trump a fascist!” Incorrect. If the “liberal media” had done that, it would have shown that they get some things right (as they sometimes do for their own reasons, which are the not the same as our reasons on the Left). But that didn’t happen. The corporate non-FOX media have been remarkably disinclined to identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist. Empirical research on mainstream corporate media content during the Trump years will show that American media has been extremely reluctant to see Trump and Trumpism as fascist. (It has been surprisingly hesitant even to use the words “authoritarian” and “authoritarianism” to describe Trump and Trumpism.) The “liberal media” has preferred to run instead with the deceptively democratic-sounding terms “populism” and “populist,” idiotically merging Trump’s hard-right neofascism with the leftish social-democratic progressivism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It has also habitually and misleadingly described Trump and his backers as “conservative” – a strange term for a wannabe dictator who spent much of his presidency holding mass rallies fomenting racial hatred and political violence and who (as predicted and warned by many, including people from his inner circle and administration) tried to subvert a bourgeois- “democratic” election last year.

+29. “We must stand with Trump and his right-wing backers against censorship and repression in the wake of the January 6^th Attack on the Capitol. The repression and censorship of Trump and Trumpists will blow back and harm progressives and the Left.” This might not sound like fascism denial, but it is. Nazis and their 21^st Century equivalents must always be crushed and marginalized. Fascism is a malignant tumor that cannot be allowed to grow. It is perfectly appropriate for leftists to collaborate with non-fascist liberal and moderate elites in trying to cut out this cancerous, life-threatening tumor from the body politic. Wanting the fascist monster Trump, his Capitol rioters, the Proud Boys and Three Percenters et al. to go free and have full access to giant megaphones like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Parler is to fail to understand these supposed victims of repression and “cancel culture” as lethal neo-Confederate fascists who would like to re-institute Black slavery and replace bourgeois democracy with an authoritarian ethno-state. Do leftists seriously think they are incapable of distinguishing themselves from neo-Nazis and other fascists in making their own case against repression and censorship? It has been depressing to see and hear numerous “leftists” who couldn’t bother to protest a fascist United States president get more concerned about the malignant lunatic Trump’s access to Twitter than they were about his access to the nuclear codes.

+30. “Trump wasn’t/isn’t a fascist because he increased his percentage support from Black and LatinX voters between 2016 and 2020” I am not making this up. This argument was actually advanced – along with many of the other moronic denialist narratives criticized in Flavors 1 to 29 (including the false claims that to observe Trump’s fascism was to distract from the horrors of capitalism, that Trump’s crimes and fascism were mainly just “symbolic and rhetorical,” and that Trump stood down from military imperialism) – in Samuel Moyn’s January 19th Nation essay titled “Allegations of Fascism Distract from the Real Danger.” The Yale law and history professor Moyn is yet another (see Part 1 of this essay) 20th Century historian masquerading as a contemporary political and neofascism expert. In his Nation piece, Moyn pontificated as follows:

“The same system that often rendered Trump harmless continues to fail most Americans. The most graphic proof of this lies in the latest election returns, which embarrass the fascism paradigm. The most shocking thing about them is that, after four years of de-legitimation, Trump increased his support among the presumed victims of fascism, while the Democratic Party faltered. Biden broke through, thanks to the wealthy and powerful. The state where I live, Connecticut, is among the most unequal, with some of the country’s worst poverty. Biden fared worse among urban workers, including Blacks and Hispanics in my city of New Haven, than earlier Democrats—but far, far better among the wealthy denizens of Greenwich and Westport” (emphasis added).

Beyond the almost unfathomable idiocy of (a) thinking that the super-liberal state and city where one lives are proxies for the entire nation (Connecticut is home to 3.6 million people, 130,000 of whom live in New Haven), (b) calling Black and LatinX people merely “presumed victims” of Trumpism-fascism, and (c) thinking it “embarrass[es] the fascism paradigm” that some wealthy people in liberal Connecticut voted for Biden in 2020 (how so?), Moyn needs to be badly embarrassed by his statement regarding ethnocultural voting patterns in 2016 and 2020. In 2020, Black voters went 87% for Biden, similar to their 88% vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. LatinX voters chose Biden over the “often harmless” (Moyn) Trump 65-32%, similar to their 65-29% break for Mrs. Clinton.

+31 “Trump’s open white supremacism was preferable to the Democrats’ more cloaked white supremacism because the former produces mass protest while the latter puts the people to sleep and keeps them off the streets.” This is something I have heard from numerous Trumpenleft keyboard warriors even after the openly fascist Capital Riot of January 6th. It is richly ironic. There was a fascist in in the White House for four years and the makers of this claim not only refused but actively opposed and mocked the advocacy of mass resistance to him as complicity with the Democratic Party and the capitalist-imperialist system. Now that a Democrat holds the White House, they argue that it would have been better to have a second Trump term because an open white supremacist president is what “puts people in the streets.”

This is bad faith and/or stupidity on steroids. After Trump has left office, Trumpenleftists claim to be what is known on the left as “accelerationists” –radicals who want the system to become more oppressive to spark popular resistance and even revolution. But while an actual fascist, Trump, was in the White House, Trumpenleftists were de-accelerants, deriding anti-Trump protest as complicity with the other, supposedly also “fascist,” major party.

Historically speaking, the claim that right-white Republican presidents push more people into the streets and fuel more popular and progressive social movement activism and radicalism than do supposedly sleep-inducing Democratic presidents is false. If anything, the opposite is the case. The systemic nature of our difficulties and the limits of American major party electoral politics as the supposed solution become more evident and transparent when Democrats hold nominal power. This is part of the dynamic behind the rise of the New Left and poor people’s movements during the 1960s, the rise of the anti-nuclear power movement during the late 1970s, the rise of the global justice movement in the late 1990s, and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement under Barack Obama. The Democrats are best able to deceptively pose as something they aren’t — a popular opposition party — when they are out of office. They are most effectively exposed as captive to concentrated wealth and empire when they hold nominal power and the limits of the change that can be accomplished by voting them back into power are made clear. The realization can lead people into the streets, the public squares, progressive social movements, and radical thinking.

At the same time, and this is no small matter, the Left, such as it is, has more breathing space and freedom to advance its ideas and build its organizations when the most powerful office in the world isn’t occupied by a fascist maniac who rails constantly against the supposed grave dangers posed to the glorious nation by the “radical Left,” falsely conflated with the corporate Democrats. Imagine that!

American Racial Fascism

A final reflection is necessary in response to anti-antifascism flavor #s 1 through 8 and 11. I strongly recommend the cultural theorist Alberto Toscano’s brilliant October 28, 2020 Boston Review essay “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism.” Toscano challenges readers to move “talk of [American] fascism” off the familiar track of “asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships.” Toscano reminds us that Black American radicals have long identified “a distinctly American” form of fascism understood as “a continuation of colonial dispossessions and slavery” and of “the overthrow of Reconstruction,” which “enacted a ‘racial fascism’ that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, conscription of poor whites, and manipulation of (to quote the famous definition of fascism by Georgi Dimitrov) ‘the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist sector of finance capital.’” This longtime pre-Mussolini/-Hitler U.S. “racial fascism” hatched the bloody, noose-haunted “slavery by another name” Jim Crow South, the urban Black ghetto, Sundown Towns across America, and racial pogroms in East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), Tulsa (1922) and elsewhere. It currently takes form in the globally unmatched U.S. racist mass incarceration system, a critical arm of the counter- and anti-revolutionary white Amerikaner response to the Black and brown “insurgencies of the 1960s and early 1970s.” As Toscano notes, Black radicals like George Jackson and Angela Davis reasonably saw American fascism not merely by comparison with past “European exemplars” but rather “from within a prison-judicial system that could [can] accurately be described as a racial state of terror.” This enduring American “racial fascism” has proven especially sinister and intractable because it has developed alongside yet largely hidden, rendered invisible, within the sinews of outward “liberal democracy.” “For those [Americans] racially cast outside liberal democracy system of rights,” the antifascist scholars Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials write, “the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.” The quote from George Jackson placed as the epigraph to the present essay says it all. Half a century after Jackson wrote it, it offers a powerful retort to those who, like VOX’s Dylan Matthews, can only grasp fascism as “an analogy to a specific moment in European history.” [6]

Endnotes

1. Quoted in Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review, October 28, 2020. “Recent debates,” Toscano write, “have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.”

2. Readers interested in a precise “taxonomy” of what I mean by “fascism” may find it useful to review my previous Counterpunch essay “Thirty-One Flavors of Fascism.”

3. For a brief description of “the Trumpenleft” and its beliefs see the last sub-section of my January 15^th 2021 Counterpunch essay “Why There was No People’s Rebellion Against a Fascist U.S. President: Nine Reasons.”

4. David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley, “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Trump and Why,” Critical Sociology (March 2018): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920517740615

5/5A. The 2020 Republican Party didn’t even bother to have a policy platform in 2020! Behold these two key resolutions at the Republifascists’ 2020 convention: “RESOLVED, That the Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention…RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” What did the GOP stand for? The white nationalist cult of Trump. How fascistic was that?

6. The juvenile Caucasian Dylan Matthews (a Harvard political science graduate and former Washington Post blogger) is perhaps more personally responsible for advancing “sophisticated” and “higher educational” Trumpism-fascism denialism than any single individual in the “liberal media.” He spent considerable time in 2020 getting older (often retired) white male historians (including Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, and the truly insufferable Stanley Payne) of 20^th Century European fascism to tell him why Trump and Trumpism aren’t fascist and then reporting his findings in a series of articles on why “the F-word” didn’t apply to Trump era America. He had the chutzpah to persevere in this nauseating endeavor even after the openly fascist Trumpenvolk Attack on the Capitol. Going through and countering Matthews and his informants’ denial narratives and those of numerous other “higher educators” (Corey Robin, Richard Evans, and others) has been a highly unpleasant experience akin to jumping head-first into a giant bucket of steamy human excrement.

The post The Anatomy of Fascism Denial appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Klaus Barbie’s ID card for the Bolivian secret police.

By the time Klaus Barbie went on the payroll of an American intelligence organization in 1947, Klaus Barbie had lived several lifetimes of human vileness. Barbie sought out opponents of the Nazis in Holland, chasing them down with dogs. He had worked for the Nazi mobile death squads on the Eastern Front, massacring Slavs and Jews. He’d put in two years heading the Gestapo in Lyons, France, torturing to death Jews and French Resistance fighters (among them the head of the Resistance, Jean Moulin. ) After the liberation of France, Barbie participated in the final Nazi killing frenzy before Allies moved into Germany.

Yet the career of this heinous war criminal scarcely skipped a beat before he found himself securing entered on the US payroll in postwar Germany. The Barbie was shipped out of Europe by his new paymasters along the “ratline’ to Bolivia. There he began a new life remarkably similar to his old one: working for the secret police, doing the bidding of drug lords and engaging in arms trafficking across South America. Soon, his old skills as a torturer became in high demand.

By the early 1960s, Barbie was once again working with the CIA to put a US-backed thug in power. In the years that followed, the old Nazi became a central player in the US-inspired Condor Program, aimed at suppressing popular insurgencies and keeping US-controlled dictators in power throughout Latin America. Barbie helped organize the so-called “Cocaine Coup” of 1980, when a junta of Bolivian generals seized power, slaughtering their leftist opponents and reaping billions in the cocaine, boom, in which Bolivia was a prime supplier.

All this time, Klaus Barbie was one of the most wanted men on the planet. Even so, Barbie flourished until 1983, when he was finally returned to France to face trial for his crimes. In the whole sordid history of collusion between US intelligence agencies, fascists and criminals, no one more starkly represents the evils of such partnerships than Klaus Barbie.

+++

On August 18, 1947, three men sat over drinks in a café in Memmingen in American-occupied Germany. One was Kurt Merck, a former officer in Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency, the Abwehr. Merck had worked in France during the war and had been scooped up by American intelligence, who debriefed him and who soon put him on the payroll. The second man was Lieutenant Robert Taylor, an American officer in the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). The third man was Klaus Barbie, at that time on the run from the French and the Soviets, and number three on a US/British list of wanted SS men. Barbie had already been roughly interrogated by the British and did not care to repeat the experience.

Merck was an old friend of Barbie’s. Despite interservice rivalries  between the Gestapo and the Abwehr, the two had worked together in France and had gotten along well. Merck was more than willing to vouch for the American officer that Barbie would be a good hire. Merck had been recruited by the Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1946, at a time when US intelligence agencies were trying to recruit Nazi talent. CIC’s cover story for this unwholesome bit of head-hunting was the need to root out and suppress a supposed network of Hitler Youth, whose fanatical detachments had pledged to fight on, no matter what official terms of surrender had been signed.

But CIC’s real interest in Barbie had nothing to do with the so-called Werewolves of the Hitler Youth. Barbie’s hiring as an agent of the CIC was contingent on his willingness to impart information about British techniques of interrogation and about the identities of SS men the British might have tried to recruit as their own agents. Barbie was only too happy to comply, particularly as this enthusiastic torturer had been slightly bruised when he questioned by the British.

For the next four years, the third most wanted SS man in Germany worked for the US Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps. The Americans set up Barbie in a hotel in Memmingen, brought his family from Kassel and partly paid him in commodities–cigarettes, medicines, sugar and gasoline–that he sold for a handsome price on the black market. After initial debriefings about the intentions and techniques of the British, Barbie’s main assignment, as described in a CIC memo, was to file reports on “French intelligence activities in the French Zone and their agents operating in the US Zone.”

By 1948, the French government had received information that Barbie was living under the protection of the US somewhere in Germany. The French were more eager than ever to get their hands on Barbie, who had already been sentenced to death in absentia for his war crimes. Barbie was needed to testify in the upcoming trial of René Hardy, the Resistance man who saved his own skin from Barbie’s torture by turning Jean Moulin. But the CIC had no intention of handing over its prize catch to the French, even on loan for the Hardy trial.

Barbie’s handlers at the CIC, who saw the French as allies of Stalin, had nightmares about Barbie spilling the beans on his American employers. Eugene Kolb, the US Army Intelligence officer who had worked with Barbie for a year, said that the Gestapo man couldn’t be returned to the French because he “knew too much about our agents in Europe and the French intelligence agency was saturated with communists.” Kolb’s opinion is backed up by CIC memos, which suggest that the French Sûretė’s intention was to “kidnap Barbie, reveal his CIC connections and embarrass the US.”

So it transpired that in December 1950, the US decided to trundle Barbie and his family down the ratline, an escape hatch from Europe for Nazi agents created by CIC officers Lt. Colonel James Milano and Paul Lyon. Lyon and Milano had been shuttling Nazis out of Germany, Austria and eastern Europe since 1946, sending them to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. The tour guide for this operation was himself a war criminal, Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian priest who oversaw the relocation of several hundred thousand Jews from Yugoslavia to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. As the fascist government in Croatia began to crumble at the end of the war, the priest made his way to the safety of the Vatican. Then Draganovic, exploited the cover of his position with the Red Cross and with the Vatican, shuttled hundreds of war criminals out of Europe.

Many of Draganovic’s first recruits were members of the Ustashi regime, the deaths squads under the control of Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic, who supervised one of the bloodiest killing sprees of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs–on some estimates more than two million–were slaughtered by Pavelic’s forces to fulfill his insane desire to make Croatia a “100 percent Catholic state.” Pavelic would show his favorite trophy to visitors at his office: a forty-pound jar of human eyeballs extracted from his Serbian victims. After the war, Draganovic helped Pavelic secure safe passage to Argentina, where he became a frequent dining companion of Juan and Eva Peron.

Some of the other notable Nazis who Draganovic helped escape Europe for South America included Colonel Hans Rudel, who went to Argentina, where he headed Peron’s air force and became a leader of the international neo-Nazi movement; Dr. Willi Tank, a chief designer for the Luftwaffe; and Dr. Carl Vaernet, who had overseen surgical experiments on homosexuals at Buchenwald, castrating gay men and replacing their testicles with metal balls. Vaernet was adored by the Perons, who made the Nazi doctor head Buenos Aires’s public health department.

In 1947, the Counter-Intelligence Corps contracted with Father Draganovic to help them dispose of some their own problematic agents and recruits, namely Nazi scientists, doctors, intelligence operatives and engineers. The deal was brokered in Rome by CIC officer Paul Lyon, who noted that Draganovic had established “several clandestine evacuation channels to various South American countries for various types of European refugees.”

This priest Draganovic was not an altruist, even on behalf of his Nazi colleagues. He demanded from the American intelligence agencies $1,400 for each war criminal who passed through his doors, and the US intelligence agencies were glad to pay his price.

A memo from an intelligence officer working at the US State Department explained that “the Vatican justifies its participation by its desire to infiltrate not only European countries, but Latin American countries as well, [with] people of all political beliefs, as long as they are anti-communists and pro-Catholic church.”

Fearing that Barbie might slip through their fingers, the French protested directly to John J. McCloy, the US High Commissioner in Germany. McCloy icily replied that the US would not hand over Barbie to the French for possible execution, “because the allegations of the citizens of Lyons can be disregarded as being hearsay only.”

McCoy knew this to be untrue. In 1944 Barbie’s name was prominently displayed in McCloy’s own office on a list called CROWCASS (the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects), where Barbie was identified as being wanted for “the murder of civilians and the torture and murder of military personnel.”

Barbie was hardly the only SS man whom McCloy and his cohorts endeavored to shield from justice. Another Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man, Baron Otto von Bolschwing. This SS officer was hired by the CIC in 1945, where he quickly became one of the agency’s most productive assets, recruiting, interrogating and hiring former SS officers. Von Bolschwing was later traded to the CIA, where he  plied his tradecraft in East Germany. Like Barbie, von Bolschwing was a top-rank war criminal, having been one of Eichmann’s ideological gurus on Jewish matters, helping to script the plan to “purge Germany of the Jews” and rob them of their wealth. It was von Bolschwing who had directed one of the most vicious slaughters in the war, the murder of hundreds of Jews in Bucharest. The Bucharest pogrom is described in detailed by historian Christopher Simpson in his remarkable book, Blowback. Simpson writes:

“Hundreds of innocent people were rounded up for execution. Some victims were actually butchered in a municipal meat-packing plant, hung on meathooks, and branded as ‘kosher meat’ with red-hot irons. Their throats were cut in an intentional desecration of kosher laws. Some were beheaded. ‘Sixty Jewish corpses [were discovered] on the hooks used for carcasses,’ US ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther wired back to Washington after the pogrom. ‘They were all skinned… [and] the quantity of blood about [was evidence] that they had been skinned alive.’ Among the victims, according to eyewitnesses, was a girl no more than five years old, who was left hanging by her feet like a slaughtered calf, her body bathed in blood.”

In 1954, von Bolschwing was brought to the United States. Richard Helms, who had helped recruit many of these criminals, defended the protection and use of people like von Bolschwing, saying: “We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we would have joined the Boy Scouts”–a typically flippant way of rationalizing his recruiting practices.

Barbie’s Counter-Intelligence Corps handlers went to extraordinary lengths to protect their recruit. Eugene Kolb rejected the idea that Barbie might have physically tortured people on the grounds that he “was such a skilled interrogator, Barbie did not need to torture anyone.” In fact, it’s pretty clear that Klaus Barbie was a sadistic monster whose vocational priorities were the infliction of pain and ultimately death, rather than the subtle extraction of information.

Barbie’s expertise as a torturer relied on the use of bullwhips, needles pushed under fingernails, drugs, and, most uniquely, electricity send by nodes attached to the nipples and testicles. His upward career path at the SS, heralded by games of volleyball with Heinrich Himmler in Berlin in 1940, came to an abrupt end when he beat Jean Moulin to death with getting any information out of him. Even so, a generation later, Barbie and his CIA operatives would happily cooperate in applying his old techniques to left oppositionists in Bolivia and elsewhere.

When it came to Barbie’s anti-Semitism, his American intelligence patrons once again sprang to his defense. Lieutenant Robert Taylor contended that Barbie “was not an anti-Semite. He was just a loyal Nazi.” Another CIC memo held that Barbie “showed no particular enthusiasm towards the idea of killing Jews.” In fact, Klaus Barbie got his start as an officer for the SD, a subunit of the SS charged by Reinhard Heydrich with solving the Jewish “problem” as rapidly as possible.

In an early purge in Holland, Barbie led the infamous raid on the Jewish farm village of Wieringermeer, where Klaus and his men use German shepherd dogs to round up 420 Jews, who were sent to their deaths in the stone quarries and experiment gas chambers of Mauthausen.

From the training grounds of Holland, Barbie was transferred in July 1941 to the Eastern Front, where he joined one of the SS’s so-called “special task forces,” the Einsatzgruppen. These mobile killing units were assigned the task of murdering every communist and Jew they could find in Russia and the Ukraine, without regard–in Heydrich’s phrase–“to age or sex.” In less than a year, these roving death squads under command of men such as Barbie killed more than a million people. Here was the model for the CIA’s death squads in Vietnam–William Colby’s Phoenix Program and cognate operations– and in Latin America, where CIA-sponsored hit teams in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia and Argentina applied similar methods of brutal terror, killing hundreds of thousands. There’s nothing, in terms of ferocity, to separate a Barbie-run slaughter in Russia from later operations at My Lai or El Mozote.

Rewarded with a new promotion for his work on the Eastern Front, Barbie headed to Lyons in 1942. One of his tasks was to help fulfill Himmler’s recent order that the SS in France deport at least 22,000 Jews to concentration camps in the east. Erich Bartlemus took up the task with enthusiasm. Barbie and Bartlemus raided the offices of the Union Générate des Israelites de France in Lyons, seizing records showing the addresses of Jewish orphans and other children hidden In the countryside. Later that day, Barbie arrest one hundred Jews, sending them off to their deaths at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Next Barbie descended upon the Jewish orphans’ home at Izieu, rounding up forty-one children aged three to thirteen, along with ten of their teachers. All were trucked off to the Nazi death camps. Reporting on this raid of the schoolhouse to his supervisor, Barbie noted, “Unfortunately in this operation it was not possible to secure any money or valuables.”

During his time in Lyons, Barbie was excitedly alert to the sufferings of the prisoners he held in Montluc prison. The SS man apparently derived a sadistic pleasure from locking his prisoners in cells for days at a time with the mutilated corpses of their friends. He would reassemble captured members of the French Resistance before mock firing squads, apply hot irons to the soles of their feet and palms of their hands, repeatedly plunge their heads into toilets filled with piss and shit and entice his black Alsatian dog, Wolf, to snap at their genitals.

Klaus Barbie’s torture of Lise Leserve was particularly horrific. He shacked her naked body to a beam and beat her with a spiked chain. But despite his “great skill” as an interrogator, Barbie never got Leserve to talk. She survived her torture and a year in Ravensbrück work camp to testify against him at his trial in 1984.

With the Allies advancing on Lyons, Barbie prepared to flee Lyons in 1944. But before he left, he ordered the remaining 109 Jewish inmates of Montluc machine-gunned to death and had their bodies dumped in bomb crater near the Lyons airport. Barbie also endeavored to wipe out the last of the French Resistance leaders under his control. On August 20, 1944, Barbie’s mean loaded 120 suspected members of the Resistance on covered lorries and drove them to an abandoned warehouse near St. Genis Laval. The prisoners were led into the building, where they were quickly machine-gunned. The mound of corpses was drenched in gasoline and the building was destroyed by phosphorus grenades and dynamite. The explosion sent body parts flying into town 1,000 feet away.

Such were the highlights on the resumé of the man who was dispatched in 1951 along with his family by US military intelligence to a Counter-Intelligence Corps safehouse in Austria. There the Barbie family was given a crash course in Spanish and furnished with $8,000 in cash. Barbie was provided, courtesy of in-house forgers, with his new identity: Klaus Altmann, mechanic. In sinister jest, Barbie picked the name Altmann himself, after the name of the chief rabbi in Barbie’s hometown of Trier. The Rabbi Altmann had been one of the luminaries of the anti-Nazi resistance until 1938, when he went into exile in Holland, where he was tracked down in 1942 and sent to his death at Auschwitz.

From Vienna the Barbies were passed via Draganovic’s ratline to Argentina and then on to Bolivia. A CIC internal memo triumphantly noted about the rescue of this war criminal that “the final disposal of an extremely sensitive individual has been handled.”

To be continued…

Booked Up

What I’m reading this week…

Under a White Sky: the Nature of the Future

Elizabeth Kolbert

(Crown)

Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire

Pankaj Mishra

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America

David Herzberg

(University of Chicago)

Sound Grammar

What I’m listening to this week…

Manhattan Samba

Hendrik Meurkens

(Height Advantage)

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Cassandra Jenkins

(Ba Da Bing Records)

The post How Real Nazis Came to the Americas: the Recruitment of Klaus Barbie appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Let history record that at least half the Republican Party is calling for the overthrow of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Fully 140 U.S. House Representatives and at least 10 U.S. Senators are backing their Dear Leader Donald Trump’s absurdly false, openly Orwellian claim to have been cheated out of his rightful claim to victory. They intend to preposterously challenge Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s 306 Electoral College votes today.

They are backed in this bluntly authoritarian and truth-denying move by Vice President Mike Pence, whose job it is to preside over the certification process. Instead of promising to play his constitutionally appointed role, Pence says he welcomes the blatantly deceitful and seditious challenge to an electoral outcome that has been validated again and again by election officials and judges over weeks of farcical challenge. Never mind that repeated lawsuits and expensive recounts have failed to produce any serious evidence for the openly ridiculous charge that the 2020 election was “stolen” for Biden.

The noxious Republican Congressional challenge comes even after Trump has been caught red-handed in another one of his “perfect calls” – an extraordinary hour-long phone “conversation” in which Trump tried to bully Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State into “recalculating” his state’s vote in Trump’s favor. It is a state and a federal felony to solicit voter fraud on the part of a public election official. Fulton County, Georgia prosecutors are considering charges against Trump.

Consistent with the creepy fascism-appeasement of Barack Obama and the corporate Democratic Party more broadly, Biden didn’t even mention Trump’s remarkable call while campaigning for the two Democratic candidates competing in the Georgia’s run-off Senate elections last Monday. It was one Hell of a deletion, but predictable. Biden, like Obama and the Clintons before him, is all about reaching across the AR-15, I mean across the aisle, to the nation’s ever more apocalyptic right-wing while viciously cracking down on progressives in his own party – that is, on the people who advocate policies that are backed by most Americans and that would inoculate this nation against white nationalist proto-fascism.

The willingness of more than half the Republican Party’s congressional delegation to go down this dictatorial path comes even after Trump has called for the proto-fascist Proud Boys and other armed white nationalist thugs to engage in “wild protests” on the day that Congress is supposed to certify the Electoral College results. Recall that Trump has already twice signaled his approval of fascist street rampages against the election in Washington DC. The havoc inflicted including stabbings and the burning of a Black Lives Matter flag ripped from a historic Black church. Some “Stop the Steal” Proud Boys wore shirts emblazoned with the logo “6MWE,” meaning that six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust “wasn’t enough.”

On one such occasion Trump rode alongside the crowd, cheering them from his limousine on the way to one of his golf courses. The next time he flew overhead in his presidential helicopter. Trump is encouraging blood in the streets in response to his electoral defeat, consistent with his longstanding embrace of political violence against his enemies – this while going to Georgia to absurdly denounce the Democratic Senate candidates there as “radical socialists” who will turn America into a totalitarian nightmare. Republican House member Louie Gohmert (R-TX) has openly embraced violence, saying it’s the people’s only recourse after Trump’s (ludicrous) legal challenges have failed.

Why is half the GOP playing along with this dangerous game? The standard mainstream answer is that Congressional Republicans are just craven opportunists who are captive to the rabid Trump base. By this account, there’s no ideology or actual belief in Trump’s cause involved, just grifting, fear, and holding on for re-election. There’s much to be said for that thesis but my sense is that a more than just tiny number of 150 or more Republican congresspersons signing on with open sedition (the half-joking nickname of the Trump Congressional rump is in fact “the Sedition Caucus”) are genuinely committed white nationalists who honestly believe that Trump deserves a second term because he won the only tally that ought to matter as far as they are concerned: the votes of white people.

But it may not matter all that much what the Republican Congressional election deniers and their allies and supporters really believe. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1962, “we are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” The congressional and other Republicans who are participating in this “performative fascism” out of fear, self-interest, and/or cynicism will not be forgiven by history. They should not be forgiven by the present. Along with their maniacal Dear Leader, who plays golf and spends his time Tweeting hate, planning pardons for his cronies, and trying to de-legitimize an election he clearly lost while the death count rises from the pandemic he spread (and does nothing to oppose), they all deserve to be removed from office and, well, locked up.

Which raises an interesting question: is the racist Wall Street plaything Joe Biden (who can’t even mention Trump’s openly criminal phone call to Georgia while campaigning in Georgia) really going to let this monster and his fascist mobs run free in 2021? Probably so, yes. Trump and his backers are too useful a foil for Biden and the dollar Democrats to crack down on. Trump and Trumpism work for them, as far as they are concerned. For one thing, they get to look like (and be) the nice cops, the lesser evil, in comparison to “the alternative.” For another thing, they get to use the threat of the right to discipline the troublesome left (both within and beyond their ranks), which must never be allowed to become a viable alternative. I’m guessing I’m not the only American lefty to notice that not a single high-profile Democrat has spoken up to defend Americans’ right to be socialists and even, good Lord, communists and left anarchists, while the Trump Republicans went on a neo- McCarthyite rampage for the ages last year.

The post “Performative” Republican Fascism Gets a Free Pass appeared first on CounterPunch.org.