Subjects Archives: Fascism

  • Ford receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi officials, 1938

    Henry Ford’s dirty history

    Donald Trump’s reluctance to denounce neo-Nazis marching on the streets of the US has shocked many people. But there is a long history of US businessmen flirting with fascism, writes John Newsinger.

  • Oakland Raiders teammates kneel during the national anthem, Sep. 24, 2017

    Take a knee: The revenge of Colin Kaepernick

    After Trump’s deranged demand that ownership purge NFL athletes who fail a loyalty test, it felt a little miraculous when, by a quirk of a game being played in London, Sunday morning dawned on the vision of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Baltimore Ravens arm in arm during the National Anthem. Standing with them was Shahid Khan, the league’s first non-white owner. I’d prefer no owners at all, but for now, it was a vision worth kneeling for.

  • For the sixth year in a row, more than one million people came out for the National Day of Catalonia on September 11.

    Catalonia referendum: Resisting the Spanish government siege

    In 1713-14, it took the troops of Spain’s Borbon monarchy 14 months of siege before taking Barcelona and ending Catalan self-rule. In September 2017, Catalonia is again under siege, this time from the central Spanish People’s Party (PP) government.

  • Counter demonstrators clash with white supremacist's at the entrance to Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, US [Steve Helber/AP]

    No, Antifa is not the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis

    Comparisons between citizens fighting against fascism and tiki-torch wielding anti-Semites are absurd – and dangerous.

  • Riots between anti-Fascists and Blackshirts (British Fascists)

    The left’s long history of militant resistance to fascism

    Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators and educators about how to wage resistance and build a better world.

  • Trump vs. Kim Jong-un

    UN Security Council resolution 2375 on North Korea: Preparation for war?

    There is now a discernible pattern to US manipulation of the UN Security Council when it wants UN endorsement for US-NATO acts of aggression. It is a formula which led to the destruction of Iraq and Libya, and in 1950-1953 led to the destruction of North Korea and most of South Korea. This deadly trajectory is once again becoming visible, and the code is revealed in the three words: “all necessary measures,” which are deciphered to mean US-NATO aggressive war.

  • Carl Schmitt, Donald Trump, and Academic Poltical Theory | jewish philosophy place.

    Politics above law: how Trump channels far right icon Carl Schmitt without knowing it

    It is safe to assume that Trump has not read the writings of the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote his most important books during the Weimar Republic and leading up to the Nazi regime. At the root of these writings was Schmitt’s emphasis on placing politics above law.

  • Nuclear war Picture Alamy

    Dangerous times: John Pilger discusses North Korea, China and the threat of nuclear war and accident

    The US continues to provoke North Korea with military exercises near its borders. It also fails to live up to diplomatic agreements. Western media continue to distort the chronology of cause and effect, inverting reality to claim that North Korea is provoking the West.

  • Activist being handcuffed in Berkley antifa protests

    Thugs and journalists

    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.

  • Sheriff Joe Arpaio standing in front of Arizona inmates at Tent City.

    Freedom rider: Joe Arpaio is no aberration

    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.

  • Joshua Lott/Getty

    There’s no other way to say it: Trump’s Arpaio pardon is fascist

    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.

  • (Photo: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock)

    The alt-right and the 1%

    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.

  • In Charlottesville a "Unite the Right" rally was planned and a march was held ahead of it where alt-righters gathered to march with lit tiki torches.

    Charlottesville: what you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself

    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.

  • Earth Tree

    Rhetoric, fascism and the planetary

    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.

  • Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky on Fascism, Trump, and the state of the union

    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

    Seymour Hersh dishes on new exposé upending the official story about Trump and Syrian chemical attacks

    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

  • Seymour Hersh

    Trump ignored intel before bombing Syria

    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.

  • Comic about Trump in the LA Times

    John Bellamy Foster interviewed on Law and Disorder radio

    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 and ‘post truth’

    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.

  • Don’t Pray for Venezuela: The Struggle Against Contemporary Fascism

    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 […]