Another Raving Outburst from Trump Against Moslems Highlights Issue of Fascism and Nazism in GOP Presidential Field; Trump and Cruz Qualify Based on Violence; Most Others Fascist in Terms of Union Busting and Austerity, with Rand Paul the Most Extreme; Golden Opportunity Looms to Destroy Republican Party of Bigots, Warmongers, and Austerity Ghouls as National Force; Libertarians Act Out Their Logic and Prepare Way for Nazi Mogul
For many decades, most Americans had completely
forgotten about the main political issue of the middle decades of the
20th century. This was the issue of fascism and Nazism, understood as
variations in the intensity of the same fundamental phenomenon. By the
time of Fukuyama and the End of History in the early 1990s, Fascism had
been swept away into the historical garbage can, along with all other
ideologies other than the dominant institutions of the Anglo-American
world. But now, in the latter months of 2015, fascism is back with a
vengeance. On December 8, NPR listeners heard Trump condemned as a Nazi
and fascist – an altogether accurate remark. People who have never heard
of fascism, or who heard of it last many decades ago, are now hearing
this issue loudly debated in the mass media every day.
The publication you are currently reading was in the vanguard when it came to denouncing Donald Trump as a fascist and a Nazi, with special reference to his doctrine of the “Triumph of the Will,” meaning his constant mantra that problems which other politicians find insuperable can be easily overcome by The Donald through his charismatic determination, the force of his magnetic personality and his ability to make deals.
In terms of actual mass forces, the Republican Party is little more than an ongoing color revolution against the United States. Even this color revolution could not continue without the billions of dollars pumped into the party by the Koch brothers and other GOP donor-class oppressors and exploiters of the American people. The Tax Wall Street Party has long advocated the strategic perspective of seeking the destruction of the Republican Party as a national political force, and thanks to Trump, this goal is now in sight. The Republicans could easily go the way of the Federalists, the Knownothings, and the Whigs. The Republican party has something of a mass base even today in the evangelical churches of the South and rural America, and in the country clubs. It has some Washington think tanks. But the contradictions among the Republican warmongers, holy rollers, and legions of greed could easily be used to tear this party to pieces.
The stage is now set for various conflict scenarios in which the GOP will be broken apart, or just simply made permanently noncompetitive in national elections because of Trump’s gratuitous insults to Latinos and Moslems, which many independents tend to take seriously. Former Bush administration Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Pennsylvania announced that he will not support Trump for the presidency under any circumstances.
By rights, the Republican Party ought to be a regional party in the deep South, rural America, and the sparsely populated intermountain West. The GOP must never, but never, be allowed to elect another president again, since this would lead almost automatically to an attempt to pack the Supreme Court, bust all the unions, impose killer budget cuts, and set up a permanent austerity dictatorship in which the right to vote of Democratic Party constituencies would be severely limited. In an increasingly diverse America, this is the golden promise held out by Trump’s outrageous demagogy. The Republican Party today stands as a roadblock on every avenue of American national progress. The existence of this party is intolerable, and a threat to everyone’s lives, and those of their children and grandchildren. If the Republican Party could undergo even a partial collapse, the political climate of the United States could revert to a more normal ideological pattern.
In particular, if the Republican Party were to dwindle into a gaggle of regional racists and bigots, the Wall Street faction of the Democratic Party would soon find itself in increasing conflict with the residual but still present New Deal or pro-labor Democrats. If the two factions which are latent but observable inside the Democratic Party today were to break apart, this would be the neatest and most elegant way to get the United States back on the track. We of the Tax Wall Street Party are determined to play the role of catalysts in making precisely this happen.
The first wave of interest in Trump’s fascist policies came after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13. At that time, Trump began saying that he wanted to shut down mosques and other Moslem religious centers, and that he would create a registry of all Moslems in the United States. In the weeks that followed, Trump’s proposed treatment of the Moslems was widely compared to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, with reference to the Krystalnacht of 1938 and the Nuremberg racist laws.
Today, we heard Trump’s lunatic demand to bar entry to all Moslems. How could this ever be enforced? By a new Spanish Inquisition? Trumps program could only be enforced by a suffocating fascist police state that would oppress all all Americans.
The understanding that most Americans have of Hitler and Nazism tends to be reductionist, in the sense that it focuses almost exclusively on Hitler’s genocidal policies against Jews, while paying somewhat less attention to his other victims (Russian prisoners of war, communists and social democrats, trade unionists, Gypsies, and political opponents in general). In reality, fascism and Nazism represent a total world outlook, with terrible implications for virtually every sphere of human activity, as we will try to show. In any case, shortly after the middle of November, many Americans were beginning to figure out that Trump actually was at least a fascist, and most probably a Nazi.
It is important to stress that the American people, despite their many flaws, have one of the best anti-fascist records in the world. During the 1930s, most countries in Europe, from Portugal to Romania, fell under fascist governments. The British and the French were secretly allied with Hitler in the form of the infamous policy of appeasement. Even the Soviet Union, which did the lion’s share of the fighting against Hitler, had originally allied with him, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 to June 1941. The British also appeased the Japanese in the Far East. Compared to all this, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt emerges as the leading anti-fascist of the world. Be proud of being an American and not a Nazi or a fascist.
Other aspects of fascism which it is important to bear in mind include the following:
- Fascism and Nazism represent the terrorist dictatorship of bankers and financiers. Under conditions of liberal democracy where there is a Congress or Parliament, the question of fascism has commonly arisen when the demands by the bankers for genocidal austerity against working people have become unbearable and intolerable, leading to forms of political resistance like mass strikes. In Italy, the financiers of the bourgeoisie, were terrified that the Italian Army had gone on strike and refused to fight at Caporetto in 1917, and became even more frightened when Italian workers occupied most of the industrial factories in the country in 1920, leading to a two-year working-class upsurge. In 1919, the bankers and factory owners recruited desperate and demoralized war veterans (the squadristi) to work as scabs and strikebreakers, and also to attack the party offices and the publications of political rivals. In Germany the Nazis recruited similar goons, calling them the brownshirts, storm troopers, or Sturmabteilungen. In today’s Trump campaign, we have had at least two documented instances of protesters at his rallies getting beaten up by Trump’s fanatical backers. One was Hispanic, and one was black, and Trump explicitly endorsed the violence from his bombastic podium. In the case of Ted Cruz, we have a candidate who eagerly accepts endorsements and support from anti-abortion groups with track records of violence and even murder against physicians working at women’s health clinics, in particular Planned Parenthood. If Trump stays in the race, look for the summer of 2016 to be an unprecedented donnybrook of political violence.
- At the same time, fascism and Nazism are acutely aware of the advantages of seeming to operate under the color of law. Mussolini became Prime Minister with a March on Rome in October 1922, which had undeniable terrorist potential. It took the Duce several years to consolidate his dictatorship, a time punctuated by numerous political murders like that of the socialist politician Matteotti. It is often said that Hitler became Chancellor and was given dictatorial power by legal means. This is not accurate, since the vote on setting up a dictatorship had been preceded by the expulsion of the communist (KPD) members of the parliament. In France, the fascist Marshal Petain was elected dictator and the French Republic abolished by the vote of a few hundred senators and deputies in a theater in the resort town of Vichy in the summer of 1941, but there was never the necessary quorum. Mainly, Petain could lean on the German Army which had conquered France in six weeks.
- Schachtian economics – Mussolini and Hitler both did everything possible to drive down the real wages of workers and of the middle class in general. This corresponds to a policy of primitive accumulation or extreme austerity which loots and asset strips living standards and the real economy in order to generate monetary profits to prop up masses of insolvent debt, meaning today above all, toxic, kited derivatives.
- In tandem with the reduction in real wages, fascism of all kinds attempts to wipe out labor unions, trade unions, craft unions, industrial unions, and any other self-defense organizations of working people. The early Italian fascists sought to wipe out every existing organization, including sports clubs, book clubs, ladies’ sewing circles, and all others, forcing their members into a gigantic fascist corporation. (Corporation in this sense does not mean the modern American concept of a joint stock company, but rather a medieval guild with master, journeyman, and apprentices all locked together in organic unity, and denying the underlying class tensions.) We can say that just about all the Republican candidates are fascists in terms of their intention of driving down real wages and destroying the labor movement. The most aggressive in this regard are the fanatics of the Libertarian Austrian school, represented at the moment by the moribund candidacy of the Southern Jurisdiction Scottish Rite Freemason Rand Paul.
- Fascism promotes xenophobia, the hatred of foreigners, and irredentism or territorial claims against other countries. Fascism is generally although not always bellicose, especially when the dictators’ promises of economic success do not pan out, and enthusiasm must be generated through war hysteria. In today’s world, fascism anywhere risks becoming a path to World War III.
- Irrationalism and the rejection of reason – Nazism descends directly from the irrationalism of Friedrich Nietzsche, and is also represented by the existentialism of Martin Heidegger, whom the Nazis promoted to be the head of a major university. Nietzsche taught that a race of supermen needed to exterminate competing races of subhuman individuals bent on the destruction of the superior species. Hitler told Germans to turn away from reason and think with their blood. Demagogy and hysteria based on these themes are found everywhere in fascism.
- Closely related to this is the fascist penchant for scapegoating ethnic groups in the wake of national disasters. Hitler’s original agitation at the beginning of his political career was focused on the legend of the stab in the back, meaning that the German army had never been militarily defeated on the field of battle, but rather only betrayed by cliques of liberals, communists, Jews, socialists, and defeatists in Berlin. This was the Dolchstoßlegende, the staple Nazi argument of the 1920s. Of course, just after the war, the German supreme commander Field Marshal Von Hindenburg had told the American journalist George Seldes that the German army had indeed been defeated in the field, specifically by the American Expeditionary Force in the battles of St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. That was before von Hindenburg was still stunned by the defeat and had not gotten his cover story together, (The young American general Douglas MacArthur had scouted the German transportation hub in Metz, France, which was undefended for some days. MacArthur wanted to take Metz, which would have led to the collapse of German logistics and thus to the collapse of the entire Western front, but his proposal was rejected by the Wall Street general Pershing. If the German army had been visibly defeated in this way, Hitler would have been deprived of his main demagogic theme, and might well have never gained political traction.) Trump’s stab in the back story is based on his invented account of Moslems in Jersey City cheering when the twin towers came down. In reality, this seems to go back to the Fox News reports of Carl Cameron , describing the rooftop antics of an Israeli film crew – a story subsequently confirmed. But this pseudo-incident allows Trump to argue that Moslems have received American largesse and responded with treachery. This thought process is identical to that of Hitler.
- Fascists tend to be superstitious, obsessed by mythological ideas, ghosts, and spirits, and inclined towards mysticism. (Simply mentioning these aspects of fascist irrationalism should make us see how receptive the outlook of the average American might quickly become for fascist modes of thought.)
- Fascism overall has a decidedly anti-intellectual tendency. Mussolini once told a journalist that he held political programs in contempt, and did not want to have one, since the only guarantee of effective government was the power and determination of the individuals involved. Hitler made sure that the Nazi party program remained a neglected relic, and always tried to prevent it from being updated. For the Nazis, there was no difference between propaganda and university teaching.
- Misogyny – fascists of all kinds hate and fear women. Trump is the worst kind of bully – the bully who picks on women. His denigration of female politicians and entertainment figures, as well as his cad-like behavior towards women in his personal life, leave no doubt about his status as a fascist bully. Themes of misogyny are of course pervasive in the US popular culture. His supporters are undoubtedly drawn from the degenerate, woman-hating ranks of the defunct Opie and Anthony show.
- Fascism appears as the negation of parliaments and legislative processes. You never hear Trump mention Congress, since for him it does not exist. The world should know that Trump currently has a grand total of zero votes in the House and and Senate and among Republicans and Democrats for his racist atrocities. When it is said that Trump comes on the scene as an outsider, it means that he holds the constitutional democratic process in utmost contempt. Mussolini called the Italian Parliament a cattle pen and pigsty. This is once again like Hitler, who never accepted the Constitution of the Weimar Republic, and got himself appointed dictator as soon as he seized power in January 1933.
- Fascism had strong roots in the crazed and disappointed German and Italian middle classes of the interwar period. Sociologists have not yet told us what the class composition of the Trump movement is, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie are heavily represented.
Libertarians
Libertarianism was invented by the decadent Viennese von Hayek and von Mises in the service of greedy landlords and other bloodsucking exploiters. Libertarianism was developed at the London School of Economics by Sir Lionel Robinson. This pernicious and toxic doctrine was brought to the United States under the auspices of David Rockefeller, who was so stupid that he needed von Hayek to pass at the LSE. Von Mises was brought over later.The peculiarity of libertarianism is that, while it is formally distinct from fascism and Nazism, libertarianism, if practiced on a sufficient scale frequently destroys a society to such a point that Fascism and Nazism become much easier to impose. The classic example is the German Chancellor Heinrich Bruening, whose killer austerity policies destroyed the German economic and political system between 1930 and 1932, leaving the country just a few months away from Hitler’s seizure of power when Bruening left office. There is unquestionably an affinity between fascism and libertarianism as seen in this example.
The last several days have witnessed an appalling capitulation to Trump by leading members of the so-called libertarian movement. More than one prominent libertarian has essentially thrown overboard everything they have ever professed about the nature of terrorism, the surveillance state, the internal dynamics of September 11, 2001, and the status of someone like Trump as a “globalist.” This unfortunate spectacle was accompanied by excesses of bowing, scraping, and toadying. This degrading display undoubtedly freed up many valid political activists who, having seen the fiasco of the Ron Paul-Rand Paul faction, are now looking for a viable political alternative. Trump will not fill the bill.
Republican operatives like Matt Drudge and Roger Stone are evidently attempting to incorporate large parts of the libertarian/conspiracy/fear porn/paranoia alternative media community into a kind of a cheering section for the fascist Trump. But many of that audience have been duped a number of times already, and might now decide to assert a different perspective.
Is Trump a statesman? Is he the George Washington of our time? Certainly not. Is Ronald Reagan our greatest president? In no way. One would have thought that a libertarian might have come up with somebody like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, flawed though they both were. But no. It had to be the Gipper. Interviews have more credibility if they are tough but fair, and adulation convinces nobody and even excites suspicion. In any case, the political landscape is now filled with libertarian orphans who don’t want to go down with Rand Paul, and who may be eyeing the demagogue Trump. We urge them to turn away from both, and subscribe to the Tax Wall Street Party at twsp.us for the best election coverage in the U.S..
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