Thoughts on our incipient fascism

Hypothesis: The officially empowered extreme right uses violence partly to provoke the left. If people on the left say we hate this fascism, then they can use it against us, by calling us out on hatred.

This has the consequence that since civility has lost all credibility (the political center is dead), its rationale now is less moral than prudential.

To destroy the public sphere in order to create a functioning authoritarian capitalism that is neither democratic nor liberal, except on paper, and in ideologies fewer and fewer people can believe, is the principal work of "conservative" forces in creating fascism.

It helps in the construction of a fully fascist state that American society has long been essentially psychological.

An effect of this is that nothing and no one can be criticized. It will only fall back on you. An absolute state in a society with no functioning public sphere, such that power can never be contested (except maybe by calling your representative, or otherwise making some appeal, after you have been violated by people in authority, which everyone knows is pointless and stupid), has a need of such a notion of ‘karmic’ justice. Injustice in this right-wing imaginary is the very existence of anyone who wants anything contrary to what the people in charge are saying, doing, and ordering you to do. I learned this from living in California. It was called "friendly fascism." This meant that the one unpardonable sin was to ever show any negative emotion. Always be calm.

In this mythology, Hitler was an angry paranoid hater, and that was the cause of the Holocaust. That is a lie. Many Nazis are kind to their neighbors. The cause of the Holocaust, and the war, was not bad attitudes anyway. That is a fascist idea of what fascism was and is. Fascist governments will police the society to see that its people mostly have good attitudes, as workers are supposed to, and not rebel. And the man or woman who pushes a button that causes large numbers of people outside their immediate presence to die or suffer horribly, that man or woman may be a nice, ordinary person, just doing their job. In this context it is better to focus not on the commonality of evil (that all or most of the German people were guilty of causing the Holocaust is a popular myth sold to the citizenry of the conquerors, obviously distinct from the reasons (indeed, of course) justifying the cause) so much as the rarity of good, since a person doing their job is not so much guilty for that as the one who resists this evil is uncommonly to be praised, in, often under great risks, opposing the evil they are (indeed) unwittingly involved in. If evil is banal in some territory, than any force capable of exercising power upon it may as well destroy its residents: a logic of war. The Americans, now with their Israeli allies supported by the dominant American Jewish institutions funded by a class of wealthy donors and aligned with far right elements in our government, have been thinking in such ‘theological’ terms for decades. Social evils are not necessarily caused by personal moral ones. The barbarism of history is ill explained by attributing it to the causal force of an evil will. Religion, all religion, has difficulty recognizing this, and so do American liberals. To treat social evils as crimes is to refuse history and thus affirm as unchangeable and so uncriticizable the present state of affairs accessible to us through the possible actions of our government.

The American form of the hatred of hatred is to attribute social oppression to racism, anti-semitism, and other "hatreds," as if ideas and attitudes drove history in such a way that a government with a good enough police force and system of law and courts could solve history's problems by punishing every appearance of oppressive attitudes. As if slavery were caused by the prejudices of white Europeans, more than greed and the drive for profit. If oppression were caused by prejudice, than it would soon end as the more liberal American organizations would simply insist that all their employees sign an enforceable pledge to always be polite and never say anything that anyone might be offended by. Then poverty would stay as it is, but some lucky people would have legal protection from getting their feelings hurt. This is a wonderful likely consequence of ending all hatred. Who knows what it do for America's endless genocidal wars, including the current one being fought by proxy on the increasingly absurd pretext that it benefits American Jews outside the donor class that supports the synagogue rabbinate. Then again, Christian moralism was always rather thin in the utility of its consequences.

The Holocaust is the central event of recent European history, acknowledged as such since the project of a democratic socialism in Europe linked to global revolts against European colonialism was abandoned, in part because of disenchantment in Eastern Europe with the antidemocratic character of the form of socialism that had triumphed in Russia. It is still not possible to know if that idea is dead, especially since disenchantment with the capitalism that reemerged triumphant has grown. Now the problem is that the state of the world’s forms of (capitalist) governmentality (now increasingly authoritarian, even when ‘liberal’, meaning for markets and capital, not labor power, people, and populations, any of which can be confined, terrified, or massacred, while at the same time there is no clear alternative available, nor means of achieving. This means that the Holocaust is not past but something like it, something of which it must be seen as a part, continues. A conservative normality insists on the exceptionality of the Holocaust and by implication the acceptability of most, perhaps every, sufficiently (and judged so on what grounds?) less horrible form of barbaric practices of involuntary confinement, torture, and state-authorized murder, including genocide. A corollary of this usually is the exceptionality of the destruction of much of the European Jewish world. American narratives of American exceptionality are consistent with this in the popular ideological media-fed imaginary, and in their liberal form they typically combine (often mere) memes of anti-colonial, feminist, and anti-anti-semitic motifs in order to implicit affirm continued American global hegemony on the ideological supposition that what must be (with little thought or care) rejected is the barbaric colonial and patriarchal civilization of Europe that has been in decline since 1914. This narrative is not able to account for the problem of the current (latest) genocidal war and what has made it possible. Now the American government is poised to simply shut up or shut down all criticism, as happened in Germany in the early years of Nazism well before the Holocaust, which historiography’s condition of uncertainty renders it necessarily impossible to judge or know whether or to what extent that eventuality was “destined” or not, though we can infer that it might not have happened from the contingency of all events. But Holocausts continue.

Since the American government is now busily destroying the public sphere and every remnant of liberal democracy attending to the militarized corporate state that fascism is, perhaps we need to get beyond expressing outrage at this and simply think about what is needed to struggle most effectively against it. That that struggle is a probably losing battle at least under this administration does not mean we cannot achieve victories, it only means that the full force of the national government is set against us. Liberals resist believing that, because they are committed to that government and the idea of its justice, often having some professional as well as ideological stake in it. The wise then are forced to trust not the ‘society’ at large and the state (and corporate) institutions that claim to represent it, but just their own friends. I remember a time when people in the middle class, at least, were expected to trust the institutions of our society and the officials within them. Our national government is committed to destroying this as a possibility. Perhaps those who resist can only save some people from being harmed or worse in the general debacle, as doctors and social workers do, at the risk of their own lives, most often fatally, in Gaza? That is the situation for many victims of our government. Ten years ago I was threatened by an obvious undercover police officer with “elimination,” following which “there will be a clean-up operation.” Then I thought it astonishing that agents of our government would use explicit Nazi rhetoric in their menacing behavior while engaging the supposedly normal cooperation of both health care professionals and “friends.” Now I wonder how much more shit I might expect. I remind myself that in this I am not alone.