Op-Ed: First They Came - who's a Fascist?
By Captain_Plat_2258
In 1929, few non-Jewish, non-minority people thought Adolf Hitler was a threat. Outside of the ranks of the SPD and the KPD, small circles of political influence with their own issues, support for the then-Presidential Candidate and party leader was massively surging to get them a plurality of votes in the last democratic election held in Weimar Germany - enough for a win under a First Past The Post voting system and a Coalition in Germany's system. Nor did they think Mussolini was a threat, as he took control of the Italian Government years earlier after a Fascist rally held in Rome.
We remember them now as two monstrous men who committed atrocities in the name of the white race, in their twisted and sick fight against a falsely constructed 'cultural marxism' and 'international jewry' - but at the time many people could have done something and few did. Because sometimes, when Fascism arrives, those in positions of privilege may not smell the smoke. It's easy for people who may not be intially effected by something to not speak up about it, or make excuses.
So who is a Fascist, how does it get into our mainstream discource, and why is it that so people from so many minority-ethnic, gender, and sexual groups are so outraged by the Government's plans to allow Trump to speak in Parliament?
President Trump rose to power in one of the most closely watched elections in years. It was the election that got me into politics, watching in horror as a man who had been in and out of racist scandals since the 70's surged due to support from the far right. I watched in horror as, during his campaign; Trump compared people fleeing persecution from gang violence and discrimination to 'rapists' and 'drug dealers'. As men like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes fell behind him, saying that he was protecting the "white race" from "ethnic replacement". As fascists organising on right-wing message boards praised Trump for "shifting the Overton window" and "giving (them) the chance to make real change". As the people on these message boards posted strategy outlining how it was necessary to seem more marketable, to pretend to not be fascist, and take advantage of Trump's popularity to enact their real goals.
I already went over the actions of the American President in regards to multiple ethnic, sexual, and gender minority groups and I believe they are utterly unacceptable and anybody willing to defend them is at the very least enagaging in racist apologia. That may be a controversial thing to say, but I'm not sure there's any other way of describing the defense of the construction of literal concentration camps and the advocation of labelling Muslim people in a German Reich-style campaign to ensure all people of a certain religion are tracked by the state. Some people on the alt-right will decry Fascism, including Trump himself, but it is incredibly important that we are able to pick up on dogwhistles because 99 times out of 100 a Fascist won't want to be seen as a Fascist, because it conflicts with their ability to enact their goal (though even then, they seem to fall into defending their more obvious counterparts and saying of antifa/fascist clashes and hate crimes 'there were very fine people on both sides'. Because I'm sure there's nothing Fascist about the President of the United States defending a crowd of people who, the night before, were recreating the 1933 tiki-torch rallies and chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "blood and soil".
For people who are not white, cishet, and male; the bigotry underpinning Trump's coded language is obvious. We all know what he means when he says he wants to 'increase immigration from Europe and decrease it from muslim countries'. And we know what his rhetoric is doing. It empowers these people, people who are driven to extremes due to issues within their own lives (particularly, healthcare and economic troubles in America). Fascism says to these people 'this is because of migrants. This is because of people who are not like you'. In the words of Michael Rosen,
"Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, cleans up the neighbourhood, reminds you of how great you once were, clears out the venal and the corrupt, removes anything that you feel is unlike you...".
Can Trump be called Fascist due to passages written in The Daily Stormer about him, particularly articles by neo-nazi Andrew Anglin saying "Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it's time to deport these people. He's also willing to call them out as criminal rapists, murderers, and drug dealers"? Can he be called Fascist when David Duke of the KKK praises him on his antisemitic radio show, and encourages votes his way? Can he be called Fascist when, even when refusing to associate with such people, he uses the exact same language as people at the Unite the Right rally ("I disavow him, I disavow") did to describe other members of their movement? When he actively defended their attitudes by saying "I understand there's a lot of anger in America. It doesn't surprise me"? When people on the self-proclaimed 'pro-white' radio show The Political Cesspool praise Trump for 'disavowing us but still explaining why we think what we do'. Can he be called a Fascist when he praises Henry Ford, a man who inspired Hitler's antisemitism, for having 'good blood'? To all of these things I would say absolutely. Fascism does not have a tendency to market itself as Fascism once it hits the mainstream, but for those who it will burn first the smoke is all too easy to smell. Because every time a white person complains about the 'PC brigade', the fire is given another breath of life. You cannot automatically become not a racist by saying 'I'm not racist' and then immediately defending an alt-right organisation's viewpoint.
But it could be argued that the alt-right people who vocally support and idolise Trump are just on the fringe. When Richard Spencer says "Trump is bringing identity politics for white people into the public sphere in a way no one has" - he could just be on the fringe. So what about academics, what have they do say?
Recently an essay in the New York Review of Books pointed out 'troubling similarities' between the 1930's Weimar Republic and the 2016-20 United States. Now I suppose you could say 'what do they know', but the essay just so happens to be written by one of America's most respected historians of the Holocaust, Christopher Browning. He warns in the essay that "democracy (in America) is under serious threat, in the way that German Democracy was prior to Hitler's rise - and really could topple altogether". This isn't some 'SJW' or politician, this is one of America's single most well known historians on the event. His essay covers many topics, ranging from Trump's 'America First' style of foreign policy - a phrase in and of itself associated with pre-WWII American Nazi sypathisers. In his essay he even draws comparisons between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel and Paul von Hindenburg, the man who eventually allowed Hitler to gain absolute power.
"Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril."
"Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions."
And his comparison to Mitch McConnel;
"Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump."
But he isn't the only one with concerns. 250 Jewish professors and scholars of the holocaust signed a statement in 2016 warning against the "hateful and discriminatory language and threats" against minorities used during Trump's campaign. It opens with the message "As scholars of Jewish History, we are acutely attuned to the fragility of democracies and the consequences for minorities when democracies fail to live up to their highest principles". It points out the fragile history of race relations in America and notes the heightened tension and increase in hate crimes during/since Trump's campaign, along the 'numerous attacks on immigrant groups' by Trump and his supporters.
The statement goes on to point out that "(Trump) himself refused to denounce, and even retweeted, language and images that struck us as manifestly antisemitic. By not (denouncing them), his campaign gave liscence to haters of Jews, who truck in conspiracy theories about Jewish domination". The statement concludes with a call to arms for solidarity in contempt of the President.
"We call on all fair minded Americans to condemn unequivocally the hateful and discriminatory language and threats that have been directed by him and his supporters against Muslims, women, Latinos, African-Americans, disabled people, LGBT+ people, and others."
The statement even talks about how he appointed Steve Bannon, someone they believe is antisemitic, to the White House staff. We'll get into that later. So you know I could just stop as scholars, but many of them may not actually know what it was like in the German Reich and the Weimar Republic before the fall. How about people who do?
Recently a Holocaust survivor named Stephen B. Jacobs, one of the youngest living people born under Hitler's reign, made a statement to Newsweek along with a number of other people with similar stories about Trump's America. He says he worries about that's happening in America at the moment, where he has lived ever since arriving in America after the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp where he spent his early years.
Jacobs, the man who designed the Holocaust memorial currently at the site of Buchenwald, told the outlet Newsweek that he believes there is a real problem growing, and that he believes there is a direct parallel between the regime he lived under and the America that Trump is building.
"Things that couldn't be said five years ago, four years ago, three years ago - couldn't be said in public - are now normal discourse. It's totally unacceptable. We thought our country has changed. In fact, it didn't. We are operating on a misconceptions. 'My god, we elected a black president in the USA! Look how far we've come!' we haven't."
Jacobs says that New York, where he lives, is an island of resistance. But he says Washington too will soon realise that "Fascism must be resisted". Along with his story, a video in the article from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum features a number of other Holocaust survivors warning about Trump. One man says "never take your freedom, your liberty, for granted. Guard it. You can stand up to hate." and a woman following him warns to "never become collaborators, or bystanders, or onlookers. Confront hate when you see hate".
So people who have lived through, studied, and seen the effects of Fascism are all saying that we should be wary of Trump. Some very specifically say it is a necessity that we resist, that we make a stand against such things. The people who collaborate with Trump, and who he collaborates with, matter. One has to wonder why our Government has decided to give the man special privileges and honours upon coming to the UK. Could that be labelled collaboration? Yes... but this isn't necessarily meant as an attack on the Tory Government. I genuinely do not believe they intend to endorse Fascism, and I do not believe that they are Fascists. But it's important that they are willing to listen to the concerns of people who know first hand the effects of enabling Fascism.
As mentioned earlier; President Trump had the Breitbart reporter Steve Bannon as a white house advisor for a very long time, a man who drove infamous neo-conservative Ben Shapiro away from his organisation with his antisemitic headlines. When defending Trump, Bannon said that Trump's policies don't care about your race; but whether or not you're a citizen. The issue here is of course for a very long time only white people could be full citizens of nations like the UK and US, and our modern ideas of citizenship are very much affected by the history of those nations. (Eddo-Lodge, 'Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race'). The same man said to a group of French National Front members "let them call you a racist, wear it as a badge".
The tendency for particularly white people to speak against affirmative action against racism, as some Tories have, by saying 'well we live in a colourless society, race doesn't effect anything' is not at all a new thing, and it has a very similar rhetoric to Steve Bannon's attempt to justify Trump's policies as 'based on citizenship, not race'. Professor of Constitutional Law, Barbara Flag, described this as 'The Transparency Phenomenon' (Flagg, 'Was Blind but Now I See'); the tendency for white people to consider society to be race neutral, and to consider things like 'citizen and immigrant' to be race neutral terms because nobody has ever used those terms and ideas against white people in a racialised was, not at least in the UK or US. A white person cannot understand why BAME people may take issue with being asked "where are you from? No really, where are you from?". A white person will often sooner try to dictate to Jewish people what antisemitism is, to brown people what racism is, and to LGBT+ people what queerphobia is than actually put consideration into the implications of a man like Trump. Further to the point, a white person will often be the one to preach decorum, niceties, diplomacy... but for those watching their rights be clawed back, diplomacy isn't going to mean much.
When Fascism comes, we see that it will at least initially not really effect white people, because of things like the transparency phenomenon. Because of this, it is a tendency of those in positions of privilege to shrug off accusations of Fascism. Because Fascism is a bit like a fire. It starts out small, innocuous... but you can't engage in diplomacy with a fire. And it's vital that you listen to those who can smell the smoke.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak about because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak for me." ~ Pastor Martin Niemoller
I will be attending the rally against Trump, and I urge the Government to call off his speech to Westminster regardless of whether he comes to the UK to discuss trade. Because we cannot become complicit, we cannot become collaborators, and because we must make a stand against Fascism. Because if we do not speak out for those who Fascism comes for first... who will?
Captain_Plat_2258 is a Member of Parliament for North East (List), and a Labour Frontbencher, writing on social and economic issues. Her views do not necessarily represent those of The Independent.