99 - The Fascist Upsurge: Feeling Victimized Drives It
Fascism is a continuing, dangerous, threat to everything democrats and freedom lovers hold dear. Giorgia Meloni’s smashing victory at the head of the Brothers of Italy’s triumph in this week’s election adds to the growing victories and near-victories in the globe’s cascading roll back of liberty, with Putin’s assault on Ukraine only the most forceful and dangerous example of the rise of fascism across the planet. Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill united the free world to oppose Hitler and Hirohito, so President Biden has mobilized much of the free world today to counter revived fascism and protect humanity from its destroyers. But the threat still is ominous.
Meloni’s triumph joins the ascent of the neo-fascist Swedish Democrats (so-called) in that Nordic country (led by a rabid anti-immigrant, homophobe, tolerance denier Jimmie Akesson), the growing electoral power of Vox in Spain, the proven appeal to angry Frenchpersons of Marine Le Pen, the continued influence of President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (on the eve of next week’s critical vote in his massive country), the determined assault on Muslims and other non-Hindu fervent believers in India by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and – not least – the anger and retreat from civility in the United States.
Trump has morphed over the years from 2016 into a crypto fascist, with a handful of elected members of the House of Representatives and a few Senators following, but with many more candidates for Congress in this year’s mid-term contests parroting some of the same themes and memes that Meloni, Akesson, Bolsonaro, Modi, Putin, and Trump espouse. Hate abounds. Sen. Huey (Kingfish) Long of Louisiana, Father Charles Coughlin of Michigan, and transatlantic flier Charles Lindbergh would see their rantings very much endorsed by today’s drive not only to the right, but back to validating Benito Mussolini’s fascism.
Mussolini, a young soldier, emerged from World War I with many grievances against Italy and the performance of the Italian fighting forces in what had been an all-engulfing combat. A powerful orator, he invented the word fascism from the “fasces,” a bundle of rods enclosing an axe – the symbol of magisterial authority in the Etruscan era and and in ancient Rome.
Mussolini, at the head of masses of Italian believers, marched on Rome and coerced King Victor Emmanuel to give him political power in 1922, even before winning a questionable popular vote in 1924. Mussolini, and at least many of his adherents, believed that “Far from crushing the individual, the fascist state multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is . . . multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers.”
That was the root of Mussolini’s approach, as he enunciated it. He and his close associates also claimed the peoples of the world were engaged in a struggle in which only the fittest should survive. It was the “natural right” of stronger peoples to conquer and rule weaker peoples. Winning wars demonstrates a people’s superiority as a nation and proves their fitness – another example of circular reasoning. It is exactly the kind of thinking that even today allows right-wing Republican candidates for Congress – like Joe Kent in Washington’s third district – to argue preposterously about how these United States needs to be governed.
Mussolini’s fascism rapidly morphed into totalitarianism, another new descriptive term that accurately portrayed to what complete control Mussolini aspired, and for twenty-one years imposed on the people of Italy. Fascism was premised on the state having absolute, heavily centralized, power over all major parts of society. That means that individuals no longer could exercise their personal wants or preferences. They had no rights, for persons were obligated to serve the needs of the entire society as determined by the state or the dictator. Hence totalitarianism, intrinsic to fascism and, today, to the kinds of populism (a misnomer, really) that Viktor Orban dictates in Hungary, Putin practices in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Modi moves toward with his emphasis on Hindutva, or Hindu (supposed values and ethos) hegemony imposing particular Hindu preferences of rights and liberties.
It was fundamental to Mussolini’s fascist state that a dictator ruled it and made all key decisions. He tamed capitalism by giving orders to both industrialists and labor leaders. He banned the press and all free expression. He banned free assembly. The dictator decreed how the economy ran and was organized, as in Min Aung Hlaing’s Myanmar, Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador, Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Zimbabwe, and Putin’s Russia (acting through his oligarchical satraps) . Strikes were illegal. The state exerted corporate control over a country’s place in the world economy.
In fascist Italy as in Nazi Germany, Mussolini and Hitler came to prominence and then to full power by promising to erase their people’s victimization at the hands of the victors of World War I – especially France and Britain. Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia had to hark back to the losing battle of Kosovo in 1389 between defending Orthodox Christians and invading Ottoman Muslims to remind his fellow Southern Slavs that they had long been victims. Trump and his followers are mythical victims, too, being “disenfranchised” by privileges “usurped” by African Americans, Latinos, and illicit free-loaders of all kinds, non-binary persons who seek to express their individuality, same-sex marriage proponents, and anyone who opposes the accustomed order, and thus threatens the status quo and the privileges to which white supremacists and white gun-shooters have long felt themselves entitled.
Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s, and now, stifle dissent as a matter of course, persecute minorities and minority rights, ostracize and harass persons who think for themselves and oppose group think (remember Animal Farm), and – as is in our faces now – strongly believe that strong states should demonstrate their strength by ruling weaker nations. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and watched the League of Nations and Western powers do nothing. Putin is trying to achieve a similar result in Ukraine – turning everything on its head by calling the courageous defenders Nazis.
We do not yet know how the war in Ukraine will end. We do not yet know how many crypto fascists will be elected to Congress in November, and to governorships and secretary of stateships across the American nation. But as the sharp rise of the right in Europe, and its analogies in South Asia and South America suggest, the calamitous contest between freedom and dictatorship that we naively believed that we had won in 1789, and again in 1945, still must be battled once again.
Meloni somehow sees John Ronald Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings three-volume saga as a paean to fascism. But it really is about the titanic effort to free individuals from arbitrary and unchecked total control by a centralized state, and dictatorship.
The all-out struggle to prevent fascism from overtaking these United States in November is on-going, and victory more critical than ever.