Subjects Archives: Fascism

The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.

Even most leftish white Americans like to think that their country is good and its institutions are fair and equitable. According to this wishful thinking human rights abuses only happen in faraway places and injustices here are resolved by reining in a few bad apples. The facts say otherwise and prove that the United States is consistently one of the worst human rights violators in the world.

This is a dark moment in American history, perhaps one of the darkest, illuminated only by the broad swath of conservatives, moderates, and liberals who have rejected what Trump and Arpaio stand for. Let us pray that they—we—prevail.

When President Donald Trump let loose at his Tuesday press conference, equating anti-racism protesters with neo-Nazis, it was a big hit with the men who’d taken part in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

To claim, as “liberals” do now, that such marches as in Charlottesville, “is not what and who we are”, is a lie. Ask people from outside the U.S. how the empire appears and acts towards them.

The neoliberal right has succeeded in pushing concentrations of wealth and income to an ever smaller group of tycoons at the top, while the pluralizing Left…has had precarious (and highly variable) success in its efforts to advance the standing of African Americans, Hispanics, women, diverse sexualities, and several religious faiths.… One minority placed in a bind between these two opposing drives…has been the white working and lower middle class. Portions of it have taken revenge for this neglect…. That has created happy hunting grounds for a new kind of neo-fascist movement, one that would extend white triumphalism, intimidate the media, attack Muslims, Mexicans, and independent women, perfect the use of Big Lies, suppress minority voting, allow refugee pressures to grow as the effects of the Anthropocene accelerate, sacrifice diplomacy to dangerous military excursions, and displace science and the professoriate as independent centers of knowledge and pubic authority.

Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges over the past two months. Although Professor Chomsky was extremely busy, because of our past intellectual exchange, he graciously provided time for this interview.

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who famously exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and more recently, the U.S. military’s abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. This weekend, Hersh reported that the alleged chemical attack in Idlib, Syria, this March was not perpetrated by the Syrian military, as the Trump administration has claimed

When the US bombed a Syrian military airfield in April, the White House said US intelligence had confirmed the Assad regime used chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhun.… Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reports US intelligence actually warned president Trump it had no evidence that the Syrian military had used sarin gas.

Is Trump a neofascist? Thoughtful analysts on the left like Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism. They call him a right wing populist. What is neofascism? Right wing Populism? Does it really matter what Trump is called? The great German playwright and political thinker who lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, Berthold Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it fourth?” We speak today with John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable magazine “Monthly Review”. He wrote the lead article in the current June 2017 issue titled “This Is Not Populism.”

Populism has emerged as the latest bad word in the liberal commentary on current politics in the West. The understanding is simple. Populist politicians are supposed to appeal to the ‘people’ and stoke their jealousy against those who are economically, socially and politically successful. Another word used in liberal discourse to identify extreme right wing is ‘post truth’, designated as the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. The implication is that popular opinion now is easily swayed by emotionally charged rhetoric and fake news having no factual basis. The claim that this is happening only now is odd.

The progressivist view of history often goes hand in hand with the faith that a new class — sometimes the proletariat, at other times “the people” — has a privileged perspective or consciousness.  If scientific (as opposed to vulgar) Marxism debunks this idea on a theoretical level — showing how commodity and money fetishism’s inversions […]

  Let’s begin with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s version.  One can think what one likes about deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, but his election in 2012 was recognized as legitimate by international observers and, after a certain hesitation, by the defeated candidate, Yulia Timoshenko.  In fact, relatively honest elections were just about the only positive […]

  Samir Amin in “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative” in our issue of October 2011 sets out the fundamental process of the “democratic” fraud: [A]ll hitherto existing societies have been based on a dual system of exploitation of labor (in various forms) and of concentration of the state’s powers on behalf of the […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  The text below is based on the editorial in its September 2013 issue. — Ed. The parliamentary elections of 2014 are now casting their shadow ahead.  The nationwide elections on a five-year schedule have become a festival, with […]

Public memory of how (the) fascists “use[d] and abuse[d] democratic freedoms in order to abolish them” (Hannah Arendt) was strong when, more than 60 years ago, India’s Constituent Assembly rejected the option of a presidential type of executive.  But now, the coming general elections are being framed as a presidential-style contest between the Bharatiya Janata […]

As was the case in 1930s Germany, Greek liberalism has revealed itself to be politically spent.  In dealing with the austerity measures imposed upon the country from outside by an international troika consisting of the IMF, European Commission, and European Central Bank, the government has failed comprehensively in the eyes of its electorate. When the […]

  Candlelit Vigil to Honor Martyrs of the Maspero Massacre Friday, 12th October 2012, 7:00 PM Union Square, Manhattan October 9, 2012 marked the one year anniversary of what has come to be known as the Maspero massacre, one of the numerous bloody attacks deliberately orchestrated and executed by counterrevolutionary forces under the direction of […]

No political action can be judged outside its epoch and circumstances.  No one knows even one percent of the fabulous history of man; yet, thanks to that history, we know events that exceed the limits of the imaginable. The privilege of having known some of the people involved, including the places where some of the […]

The rebel leaders tipped their hand too early.  Now the whole of Libya, including the rebels, understand what they are: traitors dependent on invaders.  The rebels thus now lack motive force as well as military training: “Libyan Rebels Flee as Kadafi’s Forces Defend Surt” (Los Angeles Times, 29 March 2011).  The only way they can […]