Archive for category: COUNTERPUNCH

Geopolitics is the linking of political power to geographic space. Perhaps Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard remains one of its best abstract representations. It’s not only the USA that has geopolitical goals; many other countries, like the UK, France, Russia and Germany, also developed distinct geopolitical ideas. In nineteenth century Germany, geopolitics included imperialist expansion based More

The post The Nazi Past of US Geopolitics appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The revolutionary nature of capitalism goes far in explaining the political turmoil of recent years. Neoliberalism destroys social networks when it destroys economic relationships. Decades ago, autoworkers in Michigan and peasant farmers in Chiapas were faced with figuring out how to get by after their livelihoods were taken away. A fundamental question emerged: how was having these changes forced on them not political? Low and behold, several decades later these are battle lines in renewed political struggle. On one side the motivating logic is economic self-interest. The other is reactive, the loss of community, and with it place, from a position of relative powerlessness.

The purpose in going down this path is to suggest that the current liberal insight that getting the rich and powerful to give a little back and to do a better job of at least pretending to give a shit about the rest of us would go a long way toward reducing political tensions. However, it isn’t the attitude that is the problem. Three or four decades have passed since Michigan autoworkers and Chiapas farmers were left to their own devices. Every year and decade since have seen social and economic degradation rise on the part of the powerless, as it falls on the part of the architects and engineers of this process.

The ‘American’ insight currently on display— that history has been one long cobbling together of short-term fixes, faces the challenge back that the last five decades of neoliberalism were planned and systematically implemented, not a cobbling together of short-term fixes. The short-term fixes were to smooth the path for more neoliberalism. The creators of neoliberalism understood that their project was political. It is a politics that one group of people— the rich and their agents, have unilaterally imposed on the West.

The politicians who serve this power are the salespeople of empire. As salespeople, they work with what they have to work with. If bullshit is what they have to sell, they sell bullshit. In the world where one group has almost everything as the others scramble for crumbs, politicians are selling crumbs. The distance between what is being proposed and what is likely to be enacted represents the size of the crumbs. The problem is, as it has been for a long while now, that the crumbs aren’t enough to sustain the lesser two-thirds of the nation.

The coitus interruptus represented by the SALT Tax ‘debate’ has the proud soldiers of empire in Congress going to the mat for a tax cut for billionaires while they can’t be bothered to set a floor under wages with a minimum wage. The point here isn’t policies, but the distribution of power. Depending on how you count them, the U.S. is currently down 11,000,000 – 18,000,000 jobs compared with pre-Covid-19. Employers are back to where they were 2009 – 2017, complaining that unemployment benefits are too rich and that workers lack skills. The minute that labor market conditions tightened in 2017, they shut up and started raising wages.

Rainbow economist John Maynard Keynes made the point many years ago that if the prescriptions of capitalist economists were ever implemented, the result would be profoundly anti-democratic. In fact, the only way that neoliberalism can be claimed to have been democratically chosen is through the improbability that American representative democracy somehow represents the interests of the people. The answer back is that the current heroes in Congress care more about tax breaks for the rich than about the minimum wage.

In many of the ways that matter, the U.S. is an oligarchy / corporatocracy managed by the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) that is cobbled to a ‘shithole country.’ Depending on where you fit in this schema, this means either 1) that the U.S. is a great nation being dragged down by a wasteland of marginally literate hicks or 2) five decades of neoliberalism have hollowed out the economic heart of a once thriving nation for the benefit of a wastrel class that is incapable of governing. As fate would have it, there has been only one governing class over these many years.

The American conception of authoritarianism, garnered from the liberal conception of society as an unfortunate gathering of individuals who only want to rob one another, is based on the idea of a strong leader. In fact, an alternative conception is that authoritarianism is a system of political economy that sometimes features a strong leader. The claim has been made by the very Americans who built the largest carceral system in the world that Russia, with Putin!, and China with a centralized people’s congress, are both authoritarian.

In fact, the U.S. has a much larger prison population in both absolute and relative terms than either Russia or China. In terms of police killing of citizens, the U.S. is far ahead of these nations plus Nigeria, El Salvador, South Africa, Mexico, and a long list of ‘suspect’ nations from the official perspective. The U.S. is the most militaristic nation on the planet. In terms of psychopathy, American militarism is a business— vacation homes are paid for every time an Afghan wedding party is slaughtered. And lest confusion be sown, the reference year is 2021, not some distant past.

Graph: the (neo)liberal contention that Americans have higher propensity toward criminality than do the citizens of other nations must be true. The U.S. has the largest absolute and relative prison populations in the world. The view must be that the U.S. is so free that even people whose lives are constrained down to the minutest detail live lives that aren’t constrained down to the minutest detail. Source: https://www.prisonstudies.org

The rationale for attaching pensions and health insurance to employment was to monopolize labor. If employers control your ability to retire and get healthcare, your ability to quit your job is limited. Neoliberalism revived the explicitly economic function of policing as a way of funding public services so that property taxes could be cut. And warehousing politically inconvenient populations in prison is both a cautionary tale for would be revolutionaries and a form of social landscaping for the more docile populations.

The point here is that as plausible an explanation for all of this as ordinary human folly is, the build out of the American carceral system and the militarization of the police were, and still are, tied to the implementation of neoliberal economic reforms. The conceptual challenge of considering the politics of policing and incarceration in economic terms, as well as the economics of policing and incarceration in political terms, proved to be too much for the technocratic class. While ‘super-predators’ reads like a meeting of business leaders it in fact references children as described by a professional psychologist.

Graph: in the statistical distribution thought up by an actual guy named ‘Normal,’ average family income would be the same as median family income. Illustrated above is average family income divided by median family income. This is a measure of how rich the rich are relative to what the median family earns. Interpretation is that the rich have gotten richer relative to the typical family since neoliberalism was launched four plus decades ago. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The term ‘woke imperialism’ is entering the usage to apply the concept of diversity to the ordinary workings of empire. The insistence that diversity will vanquish White Supremacy from American institutions will more probably follow the model of racially integrating the Los Angeles Police Department. The basic insight is that not-White cops didn’t change the institutional mandate of the LAPD. The LAPD changed them. Now you can have your head cracked open by a virtual Rainbow Coalition of cops.

To be clear, the problem here isn’t with diversity, but rather with the dubious premise that institutions like corporations, colleges and universities, and NGOs will have their mandates redirected from below. One might imagine that PoC would want to work for Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil— or not, for the same reasons that White people— whatever that means, would— or not. The mandate of both corporations is to use the corporations’ political and economic power to earn profits and make those at the top rich. If this is the motive for wanting to join these organizations— or not, why would diversity be imagined to change it?

The relevance for current purposes is that ‘woke fascism’ may not be the contradiction that it seems. Progressive writer Thom Hartmann recently took a whack at explaining what he calls American fascism, as corporatism. Mr. Hartmann didn’t reference woke ideology in the piece, and I don’t want to give the impression that he did. In class terms, corporatism has autocratic leadership, a managerial layer, and a working class that while employed by the predator corporation, itself is the prey. The predator class are the owners / oligarchs who use the managerial class to prey on workers.

This frame describes the political structure of corporations outside of the mediating power of organized labor. The first major project of neoliberals was to destroy organized labor. And neoliberalism is the merging of corporate with state interests. Outside of the racialization that motivated the Nazis, neoliberalism shares its primary characteristics with fascism. Of relevance is that fascism is political economy, not a transhistorical belief system. Communists were the first to be put into Nazi Concentration Camps. And those who survived were the last to get out.

Neoliberalism was conceived shortly after WWII as integrated state support for business and markets. Through this view, the perceived moral problem with fascism was that it was militaristic and racialized. However, as economic historian Adam Tooze argued, Nazi militarism was American-style resource imperialism run amok. And as argued elsewhere, the Nazi’s racial theories were based in American eugenics and Jim Crow. Core aspects of fascism were, and still are, present in American political economy.

To consider the question of fascism without racialization, the U.S. provides a useful backdrop. The myth of liberalism is of social openness, tolerance and an amorphous sense of freedom that becomes more incoherent the harder one looks. From this sensibility, it doesn’t follow that the U.S. would have the largest carceral system on the planet, that the police can—and do, kill citizens with near impunity, that the police are militarized to act as an army to protect the rich from the poor, or that U.S. militarism has been used to violently crush every democratic movement it has encountered.

This distance between theory and fact is only partly explained by ignorance and hypocrisy. As described above, the U.S. is an oligarchy / corporatocracy managed by the PMC, cobbled to a ‘shithole country.’ The temporal passage from past to the present was of neoliberalism being applied by the PMC at the behest of the rich to turn the U.S. into a ‘shithole country.’ Woke is the corporate ideology needed to proclaim that capitalism produces just economic distribution. As long as there is equality of opportunity, defined through diversity, capitalism is just political economy, goes the logic.

The conspicuously missing axis from this formulation is economic class. The poor are unwaveringly poor and the rich are unwaveringly rich. How can a society be just when a few people have great wealth and the majority have little to none? The second-order question is how did this state of affairs come to be? The rich have been serially bailed out by the Federal government over the entirety of the neoliberal epoch. Not only did the rich begin this epoch with state power in their pockets through their economic control of government, it was used to build their own power while crushing competitors.

If those pushing the liberal view that woke reforms make capitalism fair believed their own bullshit, they would redistribute power, not ‘access.’ As long as power is concentrated, and concentrated economic power serves to concentrate political power, capitalists will do what they have done for centuries— use their power to eliminate their competitors and lower wages. Again, this is what ties capitalism to fascism, the use of state power merged with corporate power to control economic outcomes. If woke capitalism is just, so is fascism as described by Mr. Hartmann.

To tie this together, five decades of neoliberal reforms created the social and material conditions that explain the political unrest of the last fifteen years. On one side are the rich and their agents who promoted neoliberalism and have been its primary beneficiaries. On the other are the poor and working-class populations of the West who have seen their lives upended in a never-ending process that has shifted the power of self-determination away from them. The managerial class, which sees its lot tied to the fortunes of the rich, has produced a simulacrum of social justice through woke ideology that is itself a restatement of the base precepts of capitalism.

Great effort on the part of establishment interests was put into elevating neoliberal political managers to negotiate a social and political truce. However, the operating premise is that racists and malcontents were combined with the Covid-19 pandemic to create temporary political turmoil that will dissipate without having to give very much away. In fact, five decades of neoliberalism have left tens of millions of people with very little to lose and the promise of a perpetual low-wage, neoliberal, dystopia won’t quell public disaffection. The current liberal government has already delivered most of what it is capable of delivering, and it isn’t enough.

The post Capitalism and Fascism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Dan Kovalik, professor of human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh, is the accomplished author of books skewering US foreign policy on Venezuela, Russia, Iran, international human rights, and interference in elections abroad. His latest, Cancel This Book, takes aim at the domestic progressive scene and its “cancel culture” aberration.

His is a from-the-ground view based on 26 years as a lawyer for the United Steelworkers union and from other personal experiences, including demonstrating for Black Lives Matter and his friendship with anti-war activist Molly Rush, to whom the book is dedicated.

After a courageous lifetime of service to peace and justice causes, the octogenarian Molly Rush tweeted a statement in favor of non-violent protest, which was unfairly construed as racist. For this supposed transgression, she was “canceled” by former comrades, devastating her and the peace movement in Pittsburgh.

Being canceled entails anything from public shaming to losing one’s means of livelihood for expressing an unpopular opinion. “Cancelling,” Kovalik describes, “is not to educate or to advance the cause of social justice, but to punish and ostracize.”

Cancel culture is a form of intolerance that privileges form over substance and often substitutes a narrow identity politics to the detriment of the underlying issue of class. Kovalik argues that it is on the basis of class that working people of all races can unite in common struggle. This element is “conspicuously missing” from the cancel culture discourse.

The main victims of cancel culture are the genuine left, and the main beneficiaries are the establishment powers. Kovalik comments: “the left of the political spectrum are excited about the new round of censorship being imposed by corporate giants such as Facebook and Twitter” against Trump and his supporters. “This type of censorship,” he adds, “will be mostly turned against the left…. But sadly, many on the left in this country have not learned this lesson and are calling for measures that will ultimately lead to their own suppression.”

“The biggest danger,” Kovalik admonishes, “is that people will simply self-censor rather than discuss issues, though of critical importance, for fear of getting themselves into trouble.”

Not one to be intimidated for expressing dissident views, Kovalik is critical of the efficacy of diversity training and how the pandemic lockdowns were implemented. “Conservatives tend to be more open-minded,” based on his experience, “than liberals.” The BLM protests initially showed “great promise” but ultimately “represented a huge lost opportunity.” And anarchists are often part of the problem when they individualistically engage in adventurist activities that may endanger the larger movement.

In his personable and anecdotal style, Kovalik compellingly revisits some of the better-known excesses of cancel culture. High school senior Mimi Groves, for instance, posted a 3-second Snapchat using a taboo word four years ago. For that youthful mistake, she has now been publicly humiliated, physically threatened, and forced to withdraw her application to college.

Cancel is full of gems unearthed by Kovalik, such as his exegesis on Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain is among the most canceled books, because of its use of the contemporary idiom of the pre-Civil War period in which it is set. Quite notably, Twain, in his essay Complexions, wrote: “Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare…. Where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out, unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly.”

Kovalik is a dedicated leftist critical of the Democratic Party. “We as the American electorate,” he observes, “are never given anything but the choice between sociopaths for President.” Kovalik comments further: “I for one am quite alarmed to think of what a Biden policy of ‘getting tougher’ with Russia would look like, and what kind of catastrophe it could bring about…. It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain.”

Kovalik takes particular umbrage about the tendency epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s comment about the “deplorables,” which renders the entire white working class in the US as dumb and racist. The dismissive condescension by more affluent and better educated whites – associated with the Democratic Party by Kovalik – explains a large part of the blowback of the white working class and its attraction to right populism.

He favorably quotes historian Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: “liberalism has become a politics of upper-class bullying and of character assassination.”  Kovalik documents how the liberalism of the Democratic Party has drifted into a full-throated support of imperialist war. The promotion of Russiagate by the Democrats has “captivated liberals for years and won over their hearts and minds to the idea that the CIA and the FBI were the defenders of democracy and liberty in our country.”

Cancel This Book describes the lamentable rise of the cancel culture and the degeneration of liberalism. I look forward to the next book from the perceptive and prolific Dan Kovalik, which could go further and illuminate the dynamics of the underlying forces rising at this historical junction associated with the bankruptcy of liberalism and the failure of neoliberalism to serve its constituents. The first step in addressing the problem of cancel culture is understanding why it came about at this time.

The post Cancel Culture and the Bankruptcy of Liberalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

German Schutztruppe in combat with the Herero in a painting by Richard Knötel – Public Domain

In recent years, right-wing terrorism has been on the increase in Germany. The worst case of right-wing terrorism was perpetrated by the National-Socialist Underground or NSU. The NSU murdered ten people, including a police officer, while also committing forty-three attempted murders, three bombings and several robberies between 2000 and 2007. Today Germany’s radical right has created a follow-up organisation called NSU 2.0. Despite a court case against the NSU, right-wing terrorism continues unabated. In 2019, a Neo-Nazi tried to kill fifty Jewish worshipers in a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle. Though this extremist failed to kill Jews but he still managed to murder two other people.

In 2020, another German Neo-Nazi killed nine people, as well as his mother and himself in the western German city of Hanau. One of the more infamous political assassination by Germany’s right-wing extremists was of Regierungspräsident (region district president) Walter Lübcke in 2019. The worst excess of right-wing terrorism, however, occurred more than forty years ago in Munch in 1980. It became known as the “Octoberfest bombing” when Neo-Nazi Gundolf Köhler murdered thirteen people.

Right-wing terrorism in Germany has a one-hundred year old history. Dating back to the end of the Great War (World War I), argues Florian Huber in his book Revenge of the Losers. The beginnings of right-wing terrorism in Germany date to the tumultuous years of what one of Germany’s most astute observers, Sebastian Haffner, once called “a failed revolution” in his seminal book, Failure of a Revolution. This was an era of private militias, militant gangs of trade unionists and communists, and various nationalist groups fighting during the anarchy that followed the end of the First Reich’s monarchy.

While many historians see German Nazism as the height of right-wing terror – which it undoubtedly was – one might like to maintain that right-wing extremism and terrorism existed before national-socialism. During the Weimar years (1919-1933), nationalists organised two of the most notorious right-wing militant groups, the Free Corps Brigade Ehrhardt and the organisation known as Consul.

The leader of the Ehrhardt Brigade who eventually was to play a leading role in later right-wing terrorism, Hermann Ehrhardt, grew up in a deeply Protestant household, with both his father and a grandfather being ministers. Despite this, young Ehrhardt managed to be expelled from the local high-school and joined the Kaiser’s Navy to fight for Germany’s imperialist ambitions or Weltgeltung. He quickly learned to show strength and contempt for death. Ehrhardt’s first military crime was what is known as the Herero Genocide in German South-West Africa in 1904. The massacre infected Ehrhardt with the virus of brutality.

Participation in this mass killing of Africans turbo-charged Ehrhardt’s subsequent naval career. He was quickly promoted to captain. By the closing days of the 1914-1918 war, he still believed the in final victory of Germany and not the capitulation to the British, French and Americans. Ehrhardt, like most patriotic Germans, did not expect military defeat nor did he anticipate the mutiny of German sailors refusing to carry out a hopeless suicide mission issued by their commanding officers. These sailors were ready to fight the overwhelming force of the British navy during the dying days of the Great War. With defeat, a mutiny and a looming revolution, Ehrhardt’s beloved monarchy and its strict class hierarchy disintegrated.

Ehrhardt came to believe in the myth of an undefeated German military – army that was betrayed from achieving final victory. The stab in the back mythology blamed from Socialists, Jews, intellectuals and pacifists. By January 1919, Ehrhardt (aged thirty-seven) exchanged an external enemy for an internal foe. The new enemy became mutineers and revolutionaries who had betrayed his fatherland. Demilitarisation at end of World War One meant that Ehrhardt sought ideological refuge in ex-soldier organizations and men’s clubs – the Männerbünde.

Like the radicals Friedrich Heinz and Ernst von Salomon, Ehrhardt belonged to the generation of men born between 1900 and 1910. All three went through Prussia’s harsh and dehumanising military training. By the end of the Great War these right-wing men thought they had been made obsolete’ by the new democratic Weimar state – and thus their pride injured. Full of frustration and bitterness, they started to organise and arm themselves by collecting guns, while developing secret plans to re-establish order. At first, they fought against the “red” revolution of Rosa Luxemburg. After that, they organized against democracy.

Crucial to the rise of right-wing terrorism is what happened at the end of the failed revolution of 1918/19. A class compromise between the old regime and revolutionary councils moved the Social-Democratic party into the centre. Social-Democracy offered three things: firstly, it offered capitalist stability, secondly, it offered the old guard survival in the administrative body of Germany; and finally, the people got a democratic parliamentarian system.

In exchange for preventing a revolution, big capital and the right-wing establishment tolerated the Social-Democrat rise to power. In exchange, the mighty Social-Democrats promised to keep the revolutionaries at bay. To fight huge numbers of revolutionary workers fed-up with a senseless war, the Kaiser and capitalism, Germany’s Social-Democratic state needed a capable fighting force – more efficient than the German police. It re-hired ex-soldiers now and organised them into a free corps.

Between early 1919 and until the early 1920s this was the time when ex-soldiers became members of the right-wing free corps. For men like the Ehrhardt Brigade and militarists like Friedrich Heinz and Ernst von Salomon, these free corps were highly useful. They themselves were able to return to the life of a soldier. With the German economy in bad shape, the pay was still bad but with a range of salary add-ons it was a lucrative enterprise.

The key to understanding the German free corps is this: these ex-officio militia groups fought “for” a democratic government against a Bolshevik revolution but it did “not” fight for democracy and the rule of law. Tasked to destroy the revolution by killing, torturing and bashing countless workers along the way, Germany’s free corps became the playground for right-wing terrorism now armed and organised as Brigade Ehrhardt, Freikorps Wesel, Traditionsverbänden, Garde Kavallerie Schützenkorps, Eiserne Division [division iron], Schwarze Jäger [black hunter], etc.

One of the leading engineers of the rise to dominance of the free corps was Weimar-President Friedrich Ebert’s right-hand man and fellow social-democrat, Gustav Noske. Noske catapulted himself into eternity through his ruthless principle, “Someone must become the bloodhound – Einer muß der Bluthund werden”. The free corps not only bludgeoned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg before shooting them both and then dumping their bodies in Berlin’s Landwehrkanal, but Noske’s 35,000 strong free corps marched on Munich in April 1919 literally to kill the democratic council republic.

On 7 May 1919, Germany formally surrendered, signing a treaty at Versailles that further enraged German’s free corps into featuring an extremist esprit de corps of anti-democratic, ultra-nationalist, antisemitism, along with untamed manhood and chauvinism, and as free corps Führer Ernst von Salomom proclaimed, according to the highest level of brutality. As a symbol of their counterrevolution, these men painted a white swastika on their steel helmets. Joining them was Erich Ludendorff, Walther von Lüttwitz and Wolfgang Kapp. Kapp was set to became the leader of a military coup d’état against the democratic Weimar Republic.

All of the men of Germany’s right-wing terrorism believed in the stab in the back ideology – the myth that a civilian government and a secret cabal of Jews had prevented Germany’s army from winning the war. Their ideology found expression in the right-wing rhetoric that included une idée fixe of fighting against “the system” meaning the political system of democracy. The idea of “the system” as a synonym for democracy had set up a radical right rhetoric that is still around today. The ideology of right-wing terrorism also includes the doctrine that the introduction of democracy weakened Germany when faced with the Allies and forced the old Kaiser and his cabinet to accept the terms of an unconditional and shameful surrender.

Armed with such right-wing fantasies, Kapp and the free crops marched on Berlin in 1920. But their putsch against the democratic Weimar Republic failed when twelve million workers went on strike, halting traffic in the capital. Kapp and his right-wing extremists who had occupied Germany’s Reichhauptstadt were without water, heating and electricity. The coup d’état imploded.

Yet, for the first time Germans saw a new symbol: the swastika. There are three possible explanations for the use of the Hackenkreuz. Firstly, some free corps solders thought of it as the monogram of Heinrich Ehrhardt; a second group believed it to be some kind of Balitic insignia; while a third group sensed the Nazism behind it. We know that it is derived from the Hindu “卐” symbolising surya, the sun implying prosperity and good luck. No matter its origins, Today it is the sign of ultimate evil.

The “卐” might have been taken up by these racist free corps as a symbol of an Aryan identity and of nationalist pride. Their obsession with an Aryan descent of the German people is likely to be the main reasons why Hitler’s National Socialist Party used the swastika or Hakenkreuz. With their swastika painted onto their uniforms, the retreating free corps left twelve dead victims behind at the end of Kapp’s failed coup.

Beyond the aforementioned free corps, e.g., the Ehrhardt Brigade, there were many more such as, for example, the Wehrverband Stahlhelm and the deeply antisemitic Deutschvölkische Schutz- und Trutzbund with its hundred thousand members. They hated Jews, the left and democrats. Together with brigade Ehrhardt, their fight was directed against parliamentary democracy, social-democracy and the Jews. In this fight, one of their foremost methods used became the medieval “Feme-killing” – a kind of vigilante revenge killing designed to keep members of a secret organisation from talking to outsiders.

By the summer of 1922, the free corps, death squads and right-wing terrorists started to compile death lists of those to be murdered. Most lists included representatives of the democratic republican elite. Overall, however, and up until the post-WWI years all of this was new to Germany. Before WWI, Germany had not been a country of political assassinations. It had about one political killing every century. By contrast, more than a hundred people died in the first six months after the founding of the Weimar Republic. By the summer of 1922, more than 370 people had fallen victim to politically motivated attacks.

Even more astonishing are the facts collected by Berlin crime expert Berhard Weiß, a police officer at Department I A: Political Police. Writing in 1920, Weiß noted a striking circumstance in post-1918 Germany. The peculiar fact that the majority of the politically murdered did not belong to the circle of the old rulers, as was the case with all previous revolutions. The murdered were for the most part supporters of the new state power. Not a single representative of the monarchy, which had led the country in war and defeat, was among the killed.

In every other revolution from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, etc., it is the representatives of the old regime that suffer the most. However, in Germany it was vastly different. Germany’s failed revolution of 1918/19 was truly a failed nationalist uprising. It was exclusively the counter-revolution that resorted to terrorism and killing – a fact even the police noticed. Worse, the Weimar statistician Emil Gumbel noted that the victims of right-wing terrorism were, crushed, beaten to death, shot from behind, stoned, thrown into the water and killed by shooting. There were 314 killings in 1919 and 1920. In contrast to this, there are 14 killings done by communists over the course of the same two years.

On average, the statistician Gumbel pointed out, for the years 1919 and 1920, almost every other day a political murder was committed by the right. In short, in just two years after the so-called revolution and under the guidance of Germany’s new democratic state, three-hundred right-wing killings took place. The stark asymmetry between the so-called evil revolutionaries and right-wing terrorism is more than telling. For their successful removal of the authoritarian regime of the Kaiser and for introducing democracy to Germany, many paid a bitter price.

One of the more prominent victims of right-wing terrorism was Reichsministerpräsidenten (Chancellor) Philipp Scheidemann. On 4 June 1922, two right-wing assassins threw acid into Scheidemann’s face. This assassination attempt and the subsequent investigation set yet another precedent that carries on until to today – the myth of the “individual perpetrator”. Only recently this myth was dished out again during the NSU court proceedings.

Yet, the most prominent terrorist attack wasn’t that of Scheidemann. It was the assassination of a German-Jewish industrialist, writer and liberal politician in 1922. For years, Germany’s right-wing extremists had been mobilising against Walther Rathenau, abusing him with antisemitic lyrics like these, Schlagt tot den Walther Rathenau – die gottverdammte Judensau!

In German language the endings “nau” and “sau” creates the targeted effect when saying bash him to death, the Walter Rathenau – the God-dammed Jewish sow. In June 1922, a small team of right-wing extremists shot Rathenau with a machinegun and exploded a grenade in his car. Rathenau was 54 years old. Yet, the assassins plan was to create an overwhelming reaction against the state coming from the radical left to which, then, the radical right would then respond by “saving” Germany through a dictatorship. The expectation failed to materialise. Rathenau’s assassination was carried out with logistic, material and ideological support by a substantial right-wing “network”. Yet, the radical right’s grand vision ultimately failed. In the wake of the Rathenau murder and supported by trade unions, hundreds of thousands of people marched against the radical right in Berlin and throughout Germany. The state funeral was one of the largest seen since the death of Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.

In the 1930s, Sebastian Haffner noted, We called them reactionaries but in truth they were already Nazis. Instead of provoking a Bolshevik revolution, during which time the radical right thought they could use an excuse to install their own dictatorship, Rathenau’s assassination roused the German state police to start rounding up his murderers. It arrested many of those responsible for the actual killing. Although the military mastermind of the “Organisation Consul”, Manfred von Killinger, was set free, despite his organisation having a special platoon called “Bomb and Killing Commando”. The wave of arrests continued and weakened the Organisation Consul. With no more support from the right-wing network, one of remaining killers of Rathenau was shot by police, while the second committed suicide, positioning himself next to the corpse of his right-wing comrade.

That left the two ideological and logistical masterminds of the Rathenau killing – Manfred von Killinger and Hermann Ehrhardt – untouched. Nevertheless, the state had still shown that its modern police force was able to arrest right-wing terrorists. The judiciary in the Weimar Republic quickly acquired the reputation of treating political offenders from the left with harshness, while those from the right received benevolence, if not open support. The murderers of communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919 never faced court. A court martial acquitted the Freikorps officers involved.

When Oltwig von Hirschfeld was tried in 1920 for his attempted murder of Reich Finance Minister Erzberger, the judges approved mitigating circumstances for him in view of his honourable motives for the good of Germany. Of the more than thirty members of the secretive “Organization Consul” who had been arrested in the course of the investigation into the Erzberger murder in 1921, only their military leader Manfred von Killinger had to face court and only for aiding and abetting. The fact that he was acquitted in view of a mountain of evidence in June 1922, a few days before the Rathenau murder, went through the German public as a judicial scandal. These were the most prominent examples of a long series of politically motivated crimes. The legal process followed the pattern of prosecuting left-wing perpetrators while letting the radical right run free.

Finally, the murder of Walter Rathenau established a pattern of intimidation and attacks by right-wing terrorists. While the state prosecuted individual revolutionaries and opposition leaders on the left harshly, they let their right-wing opponents off virtually scot-free. Yet it became also clear that Walter Rathenau’s assassins – consisting of young thirteen terrorists – weren’t disconnected “individuals”! Unlike une idée fixe of apologists for right-wing terrorists that such assassinations were always committed by individual madmen, the reality it was an organized conspiracy. To deny this belittles their crimes.

The same pattern emerged just one year later when an unknown figure – Adolf Hitler – failed in his own mini putsch in Munich in 1923. After he was found guilty, Hitler was sent to a comfortable prison. The ideological mastermind for this attempted coup d’état, Ludendorff, was let off the hook. Like the mastermind in the Rathenau murder case, Hermann Ehrhardt, Ludendorff never faced court.

In the end, there is a link between the right-wing villains of today and the terrorists in the post-World War One period. The most striking similarities between 1920s and the NSU trial ninety years later may be listed as follows:

+ in both cases right-wing ideology was instrumental;

+ in the Rathenau and in the NSU case, right-wing terrorists committed suicide;

+ in both cases, very few right-wing terrorists received prison sentences;

+ in both cases, their right-wing terror network remained largely intact;

+ in the Rathenau case and in the NSU case (NSU’s Ralf Wohlleben), the masterminds left the court room smiling;

+ in both cases, terrorists that were set free were cheered on by the attending radical right (Rathenau) and attending Neo-Nazis (NSU).

In 2018, one of Germany’s foremosta weekly newspapers – Die Zeit – noted on the ideological and logistics mastermind of the NSU who oversaw a Neo-Nazi network that had just killed ten people, NSU supporter Ralf Wohlleben, after his release from custody, Ralf Wohlleben has a new home: the village of Bornitz in Saxony-Anhalt where the far right scene flourishes and locals worship the terrorist supporter as their hero.

Unwillingly or unwittingly, Germany’s institutions to fight right-wing terrorism set up during the 1920s has established a dangerous precedent. By prosecuting only individual right-wing terrorists, while leaving their organizational network of supporters largely untouched, as Florian Huber shows, will at best serve individual justice, but fails utterly when seeking to end right-wing terrorism. As a consequence, right-wing terrorism in Germany and elsewhere will continue.

The post The Origins of Nazi Violence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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.